Thursday 28 January 2010

Introducing myself - Harriet Truscott, the new Arcadia Fellow

Photo of Harriet Truscott
To all the readers of the Arcadia Blog - greetings from the new Arcadia Fellow!

My name's Harriet Truscott, and I'm picking up the Arcadia baton from Huw Jones. By the end of my ten week fellowship, I'm planning to have a tool in use by students across the University. It'll be a race, so keep reading the blog to find out how it goes.

I'll be spending my time here investigating the potential impacts of digitising the storage of all past exam papers at the University. At the moment, college libraries are storing bound copies of all exam papers (6 fat volumes, taking up a lot of shelf space) for each year. It's been suggested that these could be effectively archived in D-Space, the University's digital repository. I'll be thinking about how students can use past papers to learn most effectively, and about the practical implications for digitising papers. I've already been impressed by the vast range of materials included in Cambridge exam papers, from audio files to Sibelius composition software files.

Over the past eight years, I've worked in a number of Faculties in the University, finally putting down my roots at CARET, the Centre for Applied Research in Educational Technology, where I'm Lead Researcher on the Coursetools project, looking at the way courses are designed and run at Cambridge.

I'm delighted to be taking up this Fellowship, and look forward to an illuminating 10 weeks. I'll certainly be learning a lot more about exam papers!

4 comments:

Tony Hirst said...

Hi Harriet

Congrats on your Arcadia fellowship - it looks like it could be a really exciting project:-)

In my all over the place fellowship, I did a little idle thinking around the idea of exam papers as resources...

There's a great project called examopedia (About examopoedia) run by twittername @manmalik that's looking at using exam papers as a communal revision aid.

I also did a little scoping around how the digress.it Wordpress plugin as used on WriteToReply might support commenting around exam questions. See a demo here and this tangential blog post

Enjoy the fellowship:-)

Unknown said...

Dear Harriet

At last! This is excellent news! It seems so obvious that the past papers should all be online. At the moment some are, on various faculty sites, but there's no overall policy about it. I once asked the UL a couple of years ago about putting them online but received no reply...

Tim Gray, Homerton College Library

Edublend said...

Hello Harriet,

Good luck with the Fellowship, the project which Tony mentions is one of mine the site address is not the one he gave (its easy to make that mistake as another someone calls their project also Examopedia). The actual site address is http://sites.google.com/a/port.ac.uk/examopedia

and there is another version for everyone at
http://sites.google.com/site/myexamopedia

Hope you find it interesting.

Manish

HMTruscott said...

Thanks so much, all commenters! I'd already seen (Manish's) Examopedia as looking like a really exciting project, and am looking forward to properly looking into it now I've started the project.