  by Mark Childs University of Warwick |
DIVERSE beginnings... Mark Childs |
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DIVERSE began life as a Teaching and Learning Technology Programme (TLTP) Phase 3 project, funded by the UK government through HEFCE, the Higher Educational Funding Council for England. The DIVERSE project was based on a previous TLTP2 project at the University of Derby that developed the VESOL system (Video autoproduction and Editing System for Open Learning). The aim of both projects was to enable lecturers and other presenters to produce video programmes in real time without technical support. The DIVERSE project ran from 1998 to 2001 and involved four institutions. It was led by a team located in the Psychology & Life Sciences Subject Area at the Bolton Institute, and had as partners the Centre for Educational Development and Media at the University of Derby, the Centre for Learning and Teaching at the University of Wolverhampton and the Learning Resource and the Learning Resource Centre at the Cheltenham and Gloucester Institute of Higher Education (now the University of Gloucestershire). Thus the group, even from its start, was not only multidisciplinary but also a combination of different practitioners; academics, technicians and staff developers. The conferences At the end of the DIVERSE project, a dissemination event was planned to take place at the University of Derby. However, Professor Chris O'Hagan (the leader of the Derby group, and instigator of the original VESOL project) took the opportunity to create a much larger event, bringing in international practitioners in both video production and videoconferencing. I've still got a copy of that first call. The site for that first conference is at http://www.derby.ac.uk/diverse/diverse1/ Three more conferences have taken place over the ensuing years: Banff, Canada (2002), Derby, UK 2003, Diemen, Netherlands 2004 This newsletter is a new development in the progress of DIVERSE. Its aim is to reach a wider audience than the conferences can, but also to keep all of the DIVERSE attendees in touch with each other, and what is happening in the arena of video and videoconferencing in education. In the first instance this is mainly a website for dissemination, but we hope that it will soon develop into a forum for us to all communicate with each other. We welcome your participation! |
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This document was prepared for the DIVERSE newsletter November 2004 - ref: www.diverse-net.org/diversenl1104mh2.htm |