Personal Resource Management Strategies
From DigiRepWiki
Investigating the informal personal resource management strategies of individuals and how these might be accommodated, supported or harnessed within repositories and the services around them is a topic of growing interest. See Annex 3 of the JISC Digital Repositories Review: Repository Issues from a Teaching and Learning Perspective: [1], for more details on how this fits into the wider repositories picture, including informal repositories and peer-to-peer developments.
Within the JISC Digital Repositories Programme some projects are interested in investigating this area. These include:
The RepoMMan Project, which has already carried out a survey and interviews looking at how researchers interact with various groups and communities they belong to, and how they store and share the various kinds of information they use and produce along the path from the inception of a research idea through to the publication of their research outputs. See project documents R-D3, R-D4, D-D1 and D-D2: [2]
The CDLOR Project intends to work with RepoMMan to carry out a similar investigation of the personal resource management strategies of those developing and working with teaching and learning materials.
The PROWE Project, which is looking at wikis, blogs, and wiki/blog-like tools as a kind of repository for sharing resources and ideas amongst distance-learning tutors.
The VERSIONS Project, which has carried out interviews with researchers investigating attitudes towards and current practice regarding the storage, dissemination and retrieval of different versions of academic papers during their evolution from idea to publication.
The SPIRE Project, is looking into the fesibility of peer-to-peer working in an academic environment. Can a fluid technology such a P2P really work as part of the academic workflow?
The Rights_and_Rewards Project is carrying out a workflow exercise. This involves interviewing teachers and asking questions about how they create their teaching materials, and the use they make of support staff in this process. Specific questions about version control are included and comments about storage and backup copies of digital items are emerging at interview.
There are other JISC funded projects doing work that may be of interest, e.g.:
The Personal Learning Environments project of the e-Learning Reference Models Programme for the e-Framework: [3]
The WM-Share project of the Distributed e-Learning Programme incorporated some personal resource management strategy questions, similar to the RepoMMan survey, in their survey on sharing digital teaching materials: [4] - NB: results of this survey will be available soon.
The DIDET Project of the JISC/NSF Digital Libraries in the Classroom Programme is looking at how students and teachers may work together using a shared workspace with a repository to share resources and learning materials in the process of carrying out design projects: [5]
