When Worlds Collide: Changing Cultures in 21st Century Education

This publication captures the outputs of a JISC infoNet conference held in February 2004 in the Royal York Hotel, York. The event was entitled ‘When Worlds Collide’ because it aimed to explore the cultural differences between the different communities involved in developing and supporting learning environments hence the event was promoted in collaboration with ALT and UCISA. We defined learning environment in the broadest sense to encompass all of the structures, systems and processes that impact on the learning experience. For many this is summed up in the term Managed Learning Environment (MLE) although others favour alternative terminologies. The event was thus unusual in that it brought together people, from learning and teaching, MIS, library, administrative and senior management backgrounds, that don’t often get the opportunity to network with one another.

Learning in Immersive worlds: A review of game-based learning

The report has been produced to inform practitioners who are considering using games and simulations in their practice. Towards this end, the work includes a review of the literature and a series of case studies from practice to illustrate the range of uses of games and to synthesise key issues and themes arising from learning in immersive worlds.

Digging into signs: Developing standard annotation practices for cross-linguistic, quantitative analysis of sign language data. Final Report.

For sign languages used by deaf communities, linguistic corpora have until recently been unavailable, due to the lack of a writing system and a written culture in these communities, and the very recent advent of digital video. Recent improvements in video and computer technology have now made larger sign language datasets possible; however, large sign language datasets that are fully machine-readable are still elusive. This is due to two challenges. 1. Inconsistencies that arise when signs are annotated by means of spoken/written language. 2. The fact that many parts of signed interaction are not necessarily fully composed of lexical signs (equivalent of words), instead consisting of constructions that are less conventionalised. As sign language corpus building progresses, the potential for some standards in annotation is beginning to emerge. But before this project, there were no attempts to standardise these practices across corpora, which is required to be able to compare data crosslinguistically. This project thus had the following aims: 1. To develop annotation standards for glosses (lexical/word level) 2. To test their reliability and validity 3. To improve current software tools that facilitate a reliable workflow Overall the project aimed not only to set a standard for the whole field of sign language studies throughout the world but also to make significant advances toward two of the world’s largest machine-readable datasets for sign languages – specifically the BSL Corpus (British Sign Language, http://bslcorpusproject.org) and the Corpus NGT (Sign Language of the Netherlands, http://www.ru.nl/corpusngt).