Putting Educational Innovations into Practice.

2011 Summer/Fall GRAPE Camps

Please introduce yourself and tell us a little about yourself. We have a number of people who are doing GRAPE Camp asynchronously and you can communicate with them this way.

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Leigh-Anne Perryman on December 5, 2011 at 10:01am

Hello everyone,

I'm Leigh-Anne Perryman and I teach contemporary visual art, art history and other humanities subjects at the UK's Open University, where I also write module materials on visual art from time to time.

My mixed methods PhD research explored adults' affective and cognitive responses to controversial contemporary art, the impact of those responses on their learning, and the ways in which arts education pedagogy might be used to minimise any barriers to learning resulting from those responses. I'm also interested in exploring how attitudes towards Open Educational Resources (OER) differ across academic disciplines.

I very much enjoyed our first GRAPE camp session on November 30 and look forward to helping to raise the profile of the Arts within Merlot.

Permalink Reply by Cathy Swift on December 5, 2011 at 12:25pm

Hi, Leigh-Anne:

As I mentioned during session 1, I'm hoping you will add a lot of the modules that you've created. We look forward to having you attend the other 2 sessions, too.

Permalink Reply by Leigh-Anne Perryman on December 7, 2011 at 11:01am

Hi again Cathy and all in the current GRAPE camp,

Further to my asking, during the session, whether accessibility of resources was assessed as part of the peer review process, I've just noticed that there's an 'Add Accessibility Information' link in the 'Add your own' section of each resource's details page. (Well, I'm assuming it's there for every resource.) The very detailed template for providing accessibility information looks great. However, as you said in the session, it would need to be completed by someone with specialist knowledge of accessibility issues.

Thanks for another very informative session today.

Leigh-Anne

Permalink Reply by Cathy Swift on December 7, 2011 at 11:53am

Correct, Leigh-Anne. Actually, that link was just added I believe last month. It is pretty detailed, so you'd have to know a lot about accessibility to complete it.

On the same subject, here is a material that has a link to one of the accessibility reviews completed by College Open Textbooks: http://www.merlot.org/merlot/viewMaterial.htm?id=432483&newcont...

In the box in which you find the Peer Reviews, click on the accessibility link.

Permalink Reply by Barbara M. Hall on December 8, 2011 at 10:36am

Congratulations to Cathy for being named the Sloan-C December Workshop Facilitator of the Month!

From the newsletter.....

The Sloan-C Institute has selected Cathy Swift to be the Facilitator of the Month for December 2011. Cathy has been a fantastic resource though 2011 providing numerous webinars and workshops to help our members and participants know more about resources that are available to them.

Cathy’s experience with MERLOT is Director-Academic Partner Services. She works with all of MERLOT's Editorial Boards to ensure that they continue to maintain the collection of materials in their disciplines. Their most important task is to complete the Peer Reviews, which is one of the unique things about MERLOT. Cathy was a faculty member in the College of Business Administration at Georgia Southern University for 15 years. She became involved with MERLOT back in 1999 as the Leader of the Business Team.

Cathy will be back again in March for another workshop:

MERLOT 101: Share Teaching and Learning Materials with The Online Community – March 7-16th

Thank you Cathy for your hard work and dedication to the Sloan-C Institute!

Permalink Reply by Cathy Swift on December 8, 2011 at 11:24am

Thank you, Barbara. This came as a complete surprise... I read it in the newsletter.

Permalink Reply by Tony Coughlan on December 13, 2011 at 11:04am

So, did anyone else find the homework following the second session quite a challenge?

I hope that when it comes to reviewing for real, I'm never asked to comment upon a subject that I know so little about! My lack of knowledge of business research will probably be evident when we discuss it during our third session.

Looking forward to another stimulating session tomorrow,

Tony

Permalink Reply by Cathy Swift on December 13, 2011 at 11:08am

So true, Tony. I'll quote someone who attended the October GRAPE Camp training. "You were right, it was SO much easier to review in my discipline."

Permalink Reply by Tony Coughlan on December 13, 2011 at 11:37am

Hi Cathy,

I don't know if this is to do with my computer, but parts 3a, 3b & 5 of the YouTube Peer Review Tutorial end with what appear to be a dozen links to Muslim clerics.

Parts 3c, 4a, 4b & 4c end with a dozen more predictable peer review links.

Has anyone else had this experience?

Tony

Permalink Reply by Cathy Swift on December 13, 2011 at 11:41am

Whoa, I will have to check those out. I haven't heard that problem before, but I will certainly look into it. Thank you for letting me know, Tony.