Electronic Journals - online journals of specific interest to pedagogy, from academic staff and student perspectives
INTUTE Guide - guide to browsing and searching for resources in
Intute: Social Sciences, and other features available for users
Below are links to web resources which derive from, or have benefited from, previous C-SAP project funding.
All of these web resources are free to use in UK higher education, and address teaching and learning issues within the
C-SAP disciplines. The summary area for each link gives a brief overview of the resource and a link to the full report, which discusses
the project in detail.
The anthropologymatters web-site represents the efforts of a group of post-graduates to encourage and facilitate the creation of a national (and international) anthropological network. The overall aim of the project is to encourage critical engagement with the process of being disciplined into anthropology. In order to stimulate discussion on the production of anthropological knowledge anthropologymatters focuses on training and teaching techniques, and the process of research and writing. Currently the web-site features an academic journal (three back issues are already available on-line) and a directory of anthropological researchers. A moderated discussion forum and a resources section are under construction. A JISCMAIL e-mail list has also been set up. Official institutional links with the ASA are currently being negotiated.
Two Brookes anthropology graduates carried out a nationwide survey of lecturers in the anthropology of art and their students, exploring what they would like from a website dedicated to the anthropology of art. The results influenced and informed the creation of a dedicated website, which is now up and running, and will continue to be developed.
Web link:www.fieldtofactory.lse.ac.uk Project title: Bhilai : Multi Media and Interactive Ethnography on an Indian Steel Town Subject area: Anthropology
This project developed a web-teaching resource linking a group of documentary video films made by local students in the Indian steel town Bhilai to Prof. Jonathan Parry's papers relating to Bhilai. Feedback to the films from students was gathered at two seminars in London and Manchester to help develop the web-site.
The project aims were to develop a teaching web site on Global Political Economy and to transform the static Cyber Picket Line into a dynamic data-base generated site.
The project developed a relational database in Access, containing globalisation-related references (academic articles, journals, reports), and trade unions organisations.
The database generates the information displayed on the web sites, which provide users with the facility to retrieve or deposit structured information sets.
The evaluation findings underlined the value of these resources to users, but also highlighted the challenge of keeping information up-to-date.
The School is committed to their on-going development.
* Please see the pdf version for the full report *
E-learning Global Welfare is a teaching and learning project undertaken by the convenors of the International and Comparative Social Policy Group (ICSP http://www.globalwelfare.net based at the University of Sheffield and previously Queen’s University Belfast, now the Open University) partly in collaboration with GASPP (Globalism and Social Policy Programme http://www.gaspp.org) and Dr. Theo Papodopoulos (Social Policy Virtual Library, University of Bath http://www.social-policy.org). The project aims to facilitate and enhance teaching and learning in the area of global welfare studies through the development of the ICSP website into a unique pedagogic and research resource to facilitate the identification, navigation and practical use of a range of sources and types of information in global welfare studies. The project supports the development of on-line teaching resources and learning activities; collaboration between academics in the field; the provision of a quality checked international virtual library and policy and research digest which monitors and provides comment on international policy reform.
The School of Cultural Studies at Sheffield Hallam University (SHU) attracts a diverse student population including 'non-traditional' [Bowl, 2001] and disabled students. A broad range of subject areas are taught across the School and a wide variety of assessment activities are necessarily used to assess students in and across these different subject areas.
Building on established good practice the aim of this project is to share and enhance existing assessment and feedback practices for disabled students in the School of Cultural Studies and the wider academic community. The outcome of the project was the development of a website to provide practical support to academic staff in the design and delivery of inclusive academic assessments. It was intended that the website would be a repository for resources and best practice guidelines that staff could quickly and easily access.
Instructional simulations place students in some model, game, or other form of simulation in the pursuit of instructional objectives. This project sought to develop a validated method of evaluating the training utility of instructional simulations. Pre-simulation and post-simulation surveys were developed and tested on four different populations of participants in the Peacekeeping Mission, a human-digital instructional simulation. The project concludes that a good instructional simulation is one: whose participants verifiably achieve very specific skill based outcomes; whose participants enjoy themselves because they were challenged and learnt something, not because the event was simply entertaining; which displays high psychological and cognitive fidelity to the situations for which the participants are being prepared; and in which negative responses from individual participants can be attributed to poor performance rather than anything inherent in the instructional simulation.
This project has led to the development of a number of facilities to improve the usability of the CSAC and ERA Web Sites for learning and teaching, including new ways of navigating the material through subject headings, modularisation of the documents, and user-authoring of pages based on the resources, as well as other content-based means of accessing content. Over the next few months a "grid" service deploying our resources (in addition to the present web-based service) will provide the first Anthropology E-Science facility world-wide. This is being funded by a joint EPSRC/ESRC E-Science middleware project which would not have been possible for us to participate in this initiative without the timely support of CSAP, which effectively provided us the pilot for the newly funded project.
* Please see the rtf or pdf version for the full document *
This project investigated ways of strengthening the relationship between teaching and research activities in the Department of Sociology, University of Warwick. The aim has been to expand the opportunities for second and third year undergraduates to learn through research activities in order to achieve a greater balance between didactic teaching methods and student-centred ones. Outcomes include the production of a student-led evaluation of the undergraduate experience of teaching and learning in a research-oriented department; four case studies of research-based learning in the teaching and learning of sociology and a report on the management of research and teaching in sociology in a research-oriented department.
SDR was a collaborative multidisciplinary project to create reusable learning objects (RLOs) for use and evaluation in Sociology and Anthropology, including its constituent fields (Biological, Medical and Sociocultural Anthropology). RLOs are stand-alone "chunks" of interactive web-based multimedia, which support a single learning objective. Being flexible, they can be used and reused across disciplines.
Two broad topics were identified as particularly salient across the above disciplines: sex (including sexually transmitted disease and reproduction) and drugs (including drug dependency). These two topics formed the basis for multidisciplinary development of a collection of eLearning resources that were subsequently widely used and evaluated.
SHIELD was an interdisciplinary project, building on the success of the innovative Medical Sociology Interactive Cambridge course, to collaboratively produce a collection of eLearning resources to support teaching and learning in sociologies of health and illness. The project draws on expert knowledge, transforming it into high quality interactive multimedia resources. Each resource, or reusable learning object (RLO) explains/explores a 'stand-alone' concept or idea.
The resulting databank of e-learning resources is available on-line free of charge, and is promoted and disseminated to the wider academic community. Student evaluations have also been collected and analysed and the results form part of this report.
This project has developed a searchable database of online texts, the global library, as part of the Sussex-based interdisciplinary social science portal, the global site. The database has enabled students at Sussex and other internet-users worldwide to locate online academic texts, official reports and other materials of direct relevant to social science study. The project has republished some print materials, and has incorporated a wide range of other online materials, including those published by the parent site, in a database that is readily searchable by author, title, keyword, etc.
The Graduate Journal of Social Science was started in 2001 by a small group of postgraduate students interested in developing and exchanging views on research methodology across the social sciences. With a first issue published online in December 2003 and two committed boards of researchers located in London and Amsterdam, we are now transforming the initial idea into a web-based platform for exchanges among junior and senior researchers at the international level, encompassing an internationally recognised journal as well as a series of web resources for graduate researchers in social science.
Web link:www.swansea.ac.uk/visualanthropology Project title: Visual Technologies and their Assessment in Undergraduate Teaching and Learning Subject area: Anthropology
The project developed means of diversifying methods for teaching, learning and assessment at undergraduate level. Students participated in the design of assessment criteria, and submitted 39 CD-ROMs (for the History of Anthropological Theory) and 8 visual ethnographies on video ( for Visual Anthropology).
This project has consisted in developing, launching and using a website that aims to serve as both a resource in its own right and a gateway to other existing on-line resources. Its focus is visual ethnography and is primarily aimed at students and researchers who are interested in using visual methods and media in their work. Its level is introductory in terms of the 'methods and media' texts provided on the site, although these provide links to other more sophisticated and advanced written and visual work. The 'interviews' and 'experiences' sections are intended to provide accessible accounts and examples of the work of existing established researchers and visual practitioners that have been prepared especially with this audience in mind.
The project has established a website for information and course materials on voluntary action by students in sociology and related disciplines, currently hosted by the University of Liverpool. The website promotes a network for academic staff involved with or intending to become involved with volunteering within the curriculum. The aim is to share information and experiences, in order to develop good practices and to investigate the impact of student voluntary action. The project relates to the Higher Education Active Community Fund for student and staff volunteering, but is distinct in its emphasis on volunteering within the curriculum.