We delivered a short informal session for Library staff today at Glasgow Caledonian University, at the invite of Marion Kelt, Senior Librarian. We sat around a terminal and I did a shortened version of our longer workshop, with me doing the demo rather than Will.
Here are the slides in slideshare and hare as a downloadable PDF.
It was a really interesting session as we also investigated hooking up Clipper to the new EdShare powered open education resources repository that GCU is about to release. We were able to use the ‘paste’ your URL function to ‘clipperise’ an open video from the GCU repository.
Great interest and comments, particularly about the learning and teaching applications and using video for assessment purposes. As with many of the demonstration sessions the initial usage scenario was as deployed in-house. The idea of a cloud deployment option for individual researchers was met favourably as a way of overcoming time critical in-house IT service restrictions.
The notion of using HTML as the native file format was well received. We had a useful discussion about discussion about IPR / copyright issues and the need to provide enough information about the IPR in the videos in the clip lists and the terms of any applicable licence restrictions. This echoed suggestions from the BUFVC at the London workshop and the desirability to have Clipper connected to a target collection of resources in such a way that it pulls in information about selected resources into the Cliplist (rather like our connection to YouTube). Marion and colleagues echoed the sentiment that users will generally not fill in metadata forms and it is better to have that information entered automatically where possible.
The GCU team are going to have a think about possible implementations for Clipper and get back to us. The GCU team did make the observation that Clipper would need to be supported and maintained to encourage take-up and confidence in the toolkit. This is highly relevant as the Clipper project has just been accepted into the Software Sustainability Institute for support. That potentially answers some of the longer term sustainability issues for research but we also need to think about the learning and teaching side of things as well in terms of a user and developer community coming from that side of the ‘educational fence’.
If the project goes through to phase 3 it would be good to work with the GCU folks to ‘walkthrough’ the open education applications of Clipper in connection with Edshare etc.
Thanks to Marion and colleagues.