At 04:04 PM 4/26/00 -0500, you wrote: >Do institutions with resources available online offer professors/teachers >instruction on how to use the tools to best advantage? >
We have certainly offered advice and suggestions when asked and I've had plenty to say at conferences but, in general, we wouldn't presume to be prescriptive in the use of the resources we provide in the TAMH project http://www.dmcsoft.com/tamh Indeed, part of the philosophy behind the project was the idea that one resource could meet the needs of very different educational (and non-educational groups) by providing different windows on the data and different query mechanisms. Rather than produce study guides and lesson plans (which educational managers rather than teachers have asked us for) we have worked on developing annotation tools for group use by teachers and individual use by students so that users may repurpose the data in ways they see fit. The plus side of this, from my point of view, is that we have had primary (elementary) school children in Aberdeenshire doing a class project on fisher dress and history undergraduates at university level doing specific research on Mediterranean trade from the same set of resources. What is unfortunate is that, more often than not, we hear about these projects by accident. The annotation tool does create database entries we can look at to see what people are doing but we don't really like to snoop :) It would be nice to think that MCN could be a forum for user experiences rather than just content provider experiences. Douglas TAMH - Tayside: A Maritime History
