Using scalable digital library platforms and innovations in approaches to content  

This project aims to develop new digitized resources for the teaching of anthropology and to bring about meaningful and sustainable transformation of undergraduate education and professional practices in the field. Achieving this goal requires the examination of course elements that can be significantly enhanced by digital technologies; it also requires focusing on how students learn and how anthropologists teach.  

The project will attempt to address a key problem of anthropology as an undergraduate discipline. Students are exposed to anthropological knowledge primarily through the reading of ethnographies; they generally do not conduct ethnographic fieldwork, and therefore have little opportunity to explore the process through which anthropologists arrive at their conclusions. Versions of this problem—the distancing of learning from the process of knowledge production—are found across a wide range of disciplines, and it is our intention that this project should reach conclusions and develop models and tools that will be relevant to scholars and students in other disciplines.  

The lead institution is the London School of Economics, and the U.S. partner is Columbia University. The partners bring to the project expertise in the development, use, and evaluation of innovative teaching methodologies and technologies; in the development and uses of digital libraries; in electronic publishing; and in anthropological approaches to human cognition and learning. With a view toward encouraging gradual but significant institutional and professional change, the project is built around the work of four postdoctoral fellows, two at the LSE and two at Columbia. They will collaborate with anthropology faculty and with specialists in learning technology and digital libraries to develop new models and resources for teaching, which they will then test in the classroom. The models and resources that emerge from this exercise will be evaluated with regard to learning outcomes and sustainability, and those that are viable will be embedded in a digital learning environment for wider use. The aim is to create a highly stable, flexible, and scalable digital library infrastructure that will allow for customized use across a range of academic fields, especially in the humanities and social sciences. 

Supporting information

• What's Going On?
• Betsileo Rice Challenge

Project progress

May 2007

The DART video was an opportunity for the project team to describe our work and experiences. It highlights some key issues and illustrates some of the tools and approaches taken. 

August 2004

• To develop resources and methods which have the potential to improve significantly the teaching and learning of undergraduates in anthropology

The digital resources and teaching methods developed during the first phases of our project were used in undergraduate anthropology teaching at the LSE during the Michaelmas Term 2004, and the impact of these was evaluated in a number of different ways (see evaluation below). The key conclusion has been that such resources/methods can have positive pedagogical effects, and that they are strongly welcomed by students. However their development and use involves significant opportunity costs, against which our successes must be measured.

At Columbia, the teaching of the first anthropology course using digital resources developed during the early phases of our project will begin in September.

• To provide a new model of professional development for young scholars in the discipline of anthropology, one that encourages the meaningful integration of digital teaching and learning into career paths and objectives

The research fellows at LSE and Columbia are enthusiastic about the opportunities offered by this project, and in particular by the opportunity to genuinely combine teaching and research interests. During 2004-5 we will disseminate the project results more widely to young anthropologists working outside the project. The project at LSE is actively supporting the use of the RFs own research in their teaching in novel and innovative ways using ICT

• To facilitate a gradual but significant process of institutional change at Columbia and the LSE, encouraging the faculty at both institutions – and elsewhere – to develop models for appropriate use of new teaching methodologies;

During this reporting period, two permanent members of staff in the LSE anthropology department have become directly involved in the project work, and will be using its methods in their teaching for 2004-5. More widely, through the LSE Centre for Learning Technology, the project lessons are beginning to have an impact throughout the School.

During the upcoming academic year, the digital resources and new teaching methodologies to be utilized by the Columbia Fellows in fall and spring courses will be shared with the Department of Anthropology and members of other departments.

• To develop technology platforms which allow for flexible, stable and effective delivery of resources and tools for teaching; and to disseminate widely the lessons learned in the development of these platforms

In the Department of Anthropology at the LSE two digital tools have been developed. The first, using video footage, stimulates thinking about how to use sources of linguistic and non-linguistic information in formulating ethnographic knowledge. The tool emphasises the way understanding and analysis build up over time, that there are many ways of interpreting the same events, and the facility with which an ethnographer can be misled. By exploring the process of knowledge development it is intended that students will find it easier to engage critically with ethnography.

The second tool enables students to experience for themselves the complex series of decisions made by Betsileo rice farmers. It gives them a sense of the repercussions of decisions over the long and short term. For example, sending children to school has short-term costs in terms of lost labour but may bring in knowledge of new, more productive techniques. New techniques may be attractive to living people, but they might displease the ancestors. The interface leads students into the ethnography: the more they read, the better they will appreciate the complexity of the decisions they are making. By doing this they will learn the overlapping nature of categories such as technology, economics, social status or religion.

These tools are designed for re-use and following further development they will be able to be 'loaded' with different content and used in different contexts. Work is progressing on further tools to be used in the coming academic year.

Other uses of technology and ways of developing experiential learning were also experimented with in class.

At Columbia, the digital assets created locally and assembled from external sites are being acquired and annotated with standard and project-specific metadata. The sites for teaching "Introduction to South Asian History and Culture" and "The Ethnographic Imagination" are being organized and presented in terms of the syllabi for these two specific courses, automatically generated using this metadata. This method will allow the components to be readily reorganized and reused in other courses and contexts. The platforms that support this flexible deployment will be tested in upcoming months when digital assets currently organized around a Columbia course syllabus are used in a course at the LSE.

Among the external resources are assets and metadata from digital libraries at Glasgow Caledonian University (a participant in The Spoken Word project) and the University of Chicago. We are also in discussion with Cambridge University, Cornell University, and the University of Virginia to explore reusing relevant materials from their digital collections.

These institutions represent a variety of media types, object structures, metadata practices, repository software (including DSpace and Fedora), access control and intellectual property restrictions. Through our work with these distributed collections we hope to learn from practical experience and to further best practices in federated digital library development.

• To develop a greater understanding of the pedagogical issues involved where the process of knowledge production is detached from the process of knowledge acquisition, enabling insight not only into anthropology teaching and learning, but also into key pedagogical issues across a wide range of academic disciplines.

We are still focussed on allowing pedagogy to lead the technological developments undertaken by the project staff. Regular consultation with members of staff in both Columbia and LSE Anthropology departments, and their involvement in the project continue to ensure the development addresses pedagogical issues that are core to the discipline. Our view is that the project has been going very well. At a simple level, prototype tools have been created and integrated into teaching. Student take-up and interest in DART-related teaching at the LSE has been excellent. Now the lessons of this phase at the LSE have to be assessed and shared with Columbia; what has been learned from the use of these tools may be useful for the Columbia Fellows' teaching in the coming academic year. After initial use of digital resources in teaching at Columbia, findings at the LSE and Columbia will be compared and consolidated. At this stage, the basic aims of the project, and our basic plan for carrying it out, remain unchanged.

What lessons have been learned that could be passed on to other projects or applied elsewhere?

Technical developments must be grounded in the real needs and concerns of academic staff and students. The importance of good close working relationships with academic departments cannot be overstated.