A couple of days ago I went to a talk at the University of Winchester (where I work) about Humbox. Mick Jardine, one of our Arts lecturers is a partner in Humbox, and had invited the central project team to come and show us what it can do, before it goes live on 26th February 2010. Missed the first 20 minutes of a talk, as had to come from another meeting, but what I heard was really interesting, and the team is still debating terms of interactivity, quality, peer-review, copyright, etc. Many of these ideas have been considered, but there’s not always an easy answer to them.
What is Humbox?
The HumBox project is part of a wider Open Educational Resources initiative funded by the JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) and the HEA, to showcase UK Higher Education by encouraging teachers within HE institutions to publish excellent teaching and learning resources openly on the web, focused around four Humanities Subject Centres: LLAS, English, History and Philosophical and Religious Studies.
As a test, on Tuesday evening, I loaded up my presentation from yesterday, and an hour later had already had 27 views (which as there’s only 70 full users I think is quite impressive) – wonder if any of them will comment on it, although I’m not sure that feature is fully enabled yet!
Each user has a profile page, from which resources published, views, and bookmarks of other resources are connected. I’m not entirely sure if there’s going to be a user URL, but it’s fairly straightforward to find people through the search function if you know who you’re looking for. I’m still not in the least clear on the difference between a Resource and a Collection, but hope that will become clear as I use it.