Hands across the Border: collaborating with Stòr Cùram

25th June, 2004

Fred Riley and Heather Wharrad are moving forward on active collaboration with the Stòr Cùram project, led by Neil Ballantyne of Strathclyde University. The project is funded by the Scottish Institute for Excellence in Social work Education, and has as its main objectives:

  1. The development of a large number (50 or more) RLOs for Social Work education, on roughly the UCEL RLO development model
  2. The creation of a learning object repository, using recognised learning object models (LOMs) for metadata tagging of objects
  3. Raising the consciousness of Social Work educators with the aim of incorporating the use digital learning resources in Social Work curricula.

There are plainly subject areas in common between Social Work and Nursing, the most obvious being Mental Health, and it's felt that the School and Stòr Cùram can work together in a menage a trois with UCEL to jointly develop and use RLOs with application to both disciplines. This could have far-reaching benefits for teachers and students, not least a measure of interdisciplinarity which could inculcate fresh perspectives in RLO users, and may also result in economies as duplication of effort in RLO development is avoided. Moreover, as both SC and the School need to develop and use learning object repositories in the not-too-distant future, there's plainly room for technical brain-picking on both sides.

Of course, Social Work and Nursing have different approaches to 'service users'/patients and any joint effort will try to ensure that RLOs acknowledge this, and aren't aimed exclusively at one approach or another. The collaboration is still very much at the 'good idea' stage, but there have been a number of email and telephone contacts with Neil Ballantyne, and recently Heather Wharrad attended a UCEL workshop held at Strathclyde on 20th May specifically for Stòr Cùram. Fred Riley is hoping to visit Strathclyde in August to meet with Neil and firm up arrangements for future collaboration. Watch this space...

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