Object-based teaching with Exhibit, Recogito, and Workspace
The University of St Andrews Museums and Special Collections hold over a million artifacts, manuscripts, rare books, and photographs, many of which are used in a variety of teaching at the University. In these unprecedented times with limited access to physical collections, the Libraries and Museums have been developing tools to provide an alternative to, or to complement, the use of original material. The three new key tools are Exhibit(accessed through the University collections site, currently named ‘Photographic collection’, but includes all digitised objects requested for teaching), Recogito, and Workspace.
Exhibit
To meet the challenge of providing an engaging and interactive experience with using our museums and special collections digitally, Exhibit was developed as a tool which approaches the sensory and tactile encounters students would have with this original material.
Exhibit enables anyone to create interactive presentations with digitised material from our (and other) collections, including 3D models, manuscripts, rare books, artworks, and photographs. For example a lecturer could create an Exhibit examining the bindings of a book using a 3D scan, and then move to the inside of the book to view pages and the scanned text. Alternatively, lecturers could provide objects to students and request they create their own Exhibit for a project.
Exhibit is easy to use, and can be shared or embedded in Moodle, Teams, WordPress, or even university web pages.
Digitisation of collection objects required for teaching is already underway, and academic staff will be provided with selections of their teaching material alongside instructions for creating their own Exhibits.
Below is a quick video outlining how to use the tool.
Developed by University of St Andrews and Mnemoscene using The Universal Viewer, with support from the Esme Fairbairn Collections Fund.
Here is a demonstration Exhibit:
Recogito
At its core, Recogito enables students and staff to work together on annotating materials (including manuscripts, rare books, or photographs) from the collections. The tool can be used to set group or individual assignments for students in order for them to fulfil a set task (such as “mark 10 interesting points on this painting”, or “as a group, translate a page of Latin from an ancient manuscript”).
Recogito enables staff to upload images (scans etc.) or add records directly from our Collections, then share the items with certain students. Students can then annotate and tag the images, which can be viewed and marked by staff.
Workspace
Workspace is software built into the Collections site (currently named “Photographic Collections, although will be used to store all requested musuem/special collections items for teaching regardless of whether they are a photograph or not). Workspace enables you to open multiple digitised items at once in one window, allowing comparison. An example of this would be the comparison of a handwritten notes on a book, alongside the actual digitised rare book. Other tools include the ability to add items from the Collections site, or from other collection websites (such as Digital Bodleian).
To use Workspace, click on the “view in workspace” button the selections that will be delivered with your digitised requests.
There will be a Live from the Hive event showcasing this software on 2nd September, and a follow up workshop on 8th September (email [email protected] to book on).