I have an idea! Part two
Mark Dewey, UKOLN
Chris Yates, RSP
Stefan Secheud, Centre for Digital Library research at Strathclyde University
It’s a semantic search. It works on a weighting system. When people sign into repositories we can track what they are searching for and what groups they are part of. It would gather different bits of information about the user and build a search index and target anything they would later search for against this weighting which had been previously determined. It would give them more targeted results. Users frequently complain that repository search is not particularly relevant. It comes up time and time again that search terms don’t bring much relevance so this should make academic searches more useful to people.
Juliet Culver, OU
Matt Zumwalt, MediaShelf
Edwin Shin, Fedora Commons and MediaShelf
Chris Wilper, Fedora Commons
We spent yesterday chatting to Dick, a biology lecturer here at Birkbeck and he wanted his students to write better lab reports so we had a chat about how that could be improved. One of the things is that they want them to produce drafts and then get feedback and iterate their lab reports to produce better ones. We want to come up with a system that provides ways for the students and the lecturers to give feedback on the whole lab report and also on specific parts of the report. It would also direct people to help eg tips and checklists and direct them to other reports to look at for various sections. If you can give students advice at a particular point in the process then you can help them to avoid those problems in future. The metric for success is that students will write better academic papers so we hope it will not just be the instructor doing to commenting but also open it up to their peers. It’s about doing more than one draft so that people are learning from what they do. This could also be adapted to other disciplines.