Should Auld Acquaintance Be Forgot: The Jorum Community

Jorum is the subject of today’s Advent Calendar post from Intute, Posted December 10th, 2009 by Suzanne Barbalet:

http://www.intute.ac.uk/blog/2009/12/10/the-jorum-communit/

Jorum is a service for UK further and higher education communities which was launched in 2006 to encourage the collection and sharing of learning and teaching materials and to build a network of users and contributors.

In the spirit of the Robert Burns’ Christmas and New Year song “Auld Lang Syne” Jorum uses the image of the drinking cup to extend an invitation to join its community.

Jorum’s aims and future plans are summarized in

Nicola Siminson’s presentation at the ALT-C Conference 2009.

Unlike commercial projects such as YouTube, Flickr, Slideshare and many more Jorum can define its contributing community through the use of an authenticated login system and thus ensure the quality of its user based content. At the same time Jorum is looking towards full world wide web access for searching, browsing and downloading educational materials deposited by its contributors and its podcasts can be found onYouTube.

Open access will be available on January 19th 2010.

Who Are Jorum Community Members?
Currently members of these UK further and higher education institutions illustrated below can register as Jorum users and/or contributors.

The repository stores teaching and learning resources arranged under 25 FE and 19 HE subject categories with options for advanced searches. All science, humanities and social science disciplines are represented. Contributors are able to upload and share resources with other teaching and support staff and maintain copyright on their work. When Jorum moves to open access it will ensure safe storage of educational materials using Creative Commons licence.

A search for sociology resources locates materials listed under 8 browse headings, including Gender Studies, Ethnic Studies and Applied Sociology. A virtual object that links to an external URL, providing a text book style online tutorial on “social constructionism” is one example. Others include research methods lectures, incorporating active links to government data sources.

Jorum is a rich teaching and learning resource well worth exploring over the Christmas break.