CORDIS | European Commission
ECLAP
EUROPEAN COLLECTED LIBRARY OF ARTISTIC PERFORMANCE
ECLAP.eu
Grant Agreement No 250481
DE.5.2.2
Best Practices from the WGs, M24
Version: 2.1
Date:07/08/2012
|Project Title: ECLAP |
|Project Number: ICT-PSP-250481 |
|Deliverable Number: DE5.2.2 |
|Accessibility: Public |
|Work-Package contributing to the Deliverable: WP5 |
|Nature of the Deliverable: Report |
|Status: Final |
|Contractual Date of Delivery: 30/06/2012 |
|Approve for quality control by: 07/08/2012 |
|Finally approved by coordinator: 07/08/2012 |
|Actual Date of Delivery: 07/08/2012 |
|Document responsible: Raffaella Santucci |
|Email address: raffaella.santucci@uniroma1.it |
|Affiliation acronym: UNIROMA1 |
|Authors: |
|Raffaella Santucci (UNIROMA1) |
|Lotte Belice Baltussen, Johan Oomen (Beeld en Geluid) |
|Emanuele Bellini, Katia Maratea (FRD) |
|Erik Lint, Peter Eversmann, Josefien Schuurman (UVA) |
|Nicola Mitolo, Paolo Nesi, Michela Paolucci (DSI) |
|Revision History: (only for versions approved by the document coordinator or if this action is delegated to someone else) |
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|Statement of originality: |
|This deliverable contains original unpublished work except where clearly indicated otherwise. Acknowledgement of previously published material |
|and of the work of others has been made through appropriate citation, quotation or both. |
Catalogue:
|Title |Best Practices from the WGs |
|Identifier.de |DE5.2.2 |
|Identifier.ISBN | |
|Creators |Lotte Belice Baltussen, Emanuele Bellini, Katia Maratea, Josefien Schuurman, Raffaella Santucci, Paolo Nesi, Michela |
| |Paolucci, Erik Lint, Johan Oomen |
|Subject |Best Practices |
|Description |Best practice from the M24 |
|Keywords |ECLAP Working Groups, Best Practices, Education, Digital Libraries, |
|Publisher |ECLAP |
|Date |07/08/2012 |
|Format |Document |
|Type |PDF |
|Language |EN |
Citation Guidelines
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Please note that:
• You can become affiliated with ECLAP. This will give you access to a great amount of knowledge, information related to ECLAP services, content and tools. If you are interested please contact ECLAP coordinator Paolo Nesi at info@eclap.eu. Once affiliated with ECLAP you will have the possibility of using the ECLAP for your organisation.
• You can contribute to the improvement of ECLAP by sending your contribution to ECLAP coordinator Paolo Nesi at info@eclap.eu
• You can attend ECLAP meetings that are open to public, for additional information see eclap.eu or contact ECLAP coordinator Paolo Nesi at info@eclap.eu
Table of Contents
1 List of the Acronyms 6
2 Introduction 7
2.1 Executive Summary 7
2.1.1 The ECLAP Project in brief 7
3 ECLAP Networking and Working Group Activities 9
3.1 Main goals and activities 9
3.1.1 Overview of the ECLAP Working Groups 9
3.2 Key recommendations 9
3.3 Key findings 10
3.4 Methodology 10
3.4.1 Challenges 11
3.4.2 Literature review 11
3.4.3 Case studies 12
3.4.4 Survey 12
3.4.5 Interviews 13
4 Working Group A: Best Practices on Education and Training 14
4.1 Main goals of the Working Group A 14
4.2 WG A Topics and priorities 15
4.2.1 Objectives 15
4.2.2 Methodology 15
4.3 Landscape and key concepts 16
4.3.1 The educational field 16
4.3.2 Educational approach: a general model of teaching and learning 16
4.3.3 Subjects of teaching 18
4.3.4 Educational orientation 20
4.3.5 Knowledge and archives 21
4.4 Performing arts education and IT 22
4.4.1 Repositories of performing arts digital resources 22
4.4.2 (Non-)Institutionalized learning and research environments 28
4.4.3 (Task) tools for specific learning and research activities 34
4.4.3.1 Annotation and reconstruction tools 35
4.4.3.2 IT practices in relation to the performing arts 36
4.5 Synthesis: Performing arts, archives, research 40
4.5.1 Recent Developments in Performance Art and Theatre Studies 42
4.5.2 ECLAP and eLearning Tools for the Digital Humanities: Writing beyond Writing 42
4.6 Recommendations and Challenges 44
4.6.1 Recommendations 44
4.6.2 Challenges 45
4.7 Addendum to Chapter 4 46
4.7.1 Working Group A Education and training tools, Interview Script 63
4.7.2 Working Group A - Education and training tools, Interviews 65
5 Working Group B: IPR Issues and Business Models for Content 66
5.1 Main goals of the Working Group B 67
5.2 WG-B Topics, Priorities, and Planned Activities 67
5.3 Landscape 68
5.3.1 Introduction to key concepts 68
5.3.1.1 Intellectual Property Rights 68
5.3.1.2 International IPR agreements 68
5.3.1.3 Copyright and related rights 69
5.3.1.4 Orphan works and out-of-print works 71
5.3.1.5 Open content 72
5.3.1.6 Exemptions 74
5.3.1.7 Calls for change 75
5.4 IPR and Business Models - Best Practice recommendations 77
5.4.1 IPR clearance process 77
5.4.1.1 Determining the scope 78
5.4.1.2 Layers of rights 78
5.4.1.3 Individual licensing agreements 78
5.4.1.4 Collective agreements through CMOs 79
5.4.1.5 Extended collective license 79
5.4.1.6 Registering agreements with rights holders 80
5.4.1.7 Re-use of and access to digital content 80
5.4.2 Business Models: capturing revenue, value and planning for sustainability 81
5.4.2.1 The Business Model Canvas 81
5.4.2.2 Types of revenue models for online cultural content 83
5.4.2.3 Planning for sustainability 86
5.5 Issues and Challenges 88
5.6 Conclusions 88
5.7 Addendum to Chapter 5 90
5.7.1 WG-B - IPR Issues and Business Models for Content, ECLAP 2012 Survey Outcomes 90
5.7.2 Interview Script Working Group B - IPR Issues & Business models 98
5.7.3 Working Group C Digital Libraries and Tools - Interviews 101
6 Working Group C: Best Practices on Digital Libraries and Tools 102
6.1 Main goals of the Working Group C 102
6.2 Objectives 102
6.2.1 Most pressing issues 103
6.2.2 Methodology 104
6.2.3 Relevance of the results 105
6.3 IT Management 105
6.4 Cooperation models 106
6.5 Digitisation strategies and preservation policies 107
6.6 Catalogues and metadata standards 114
6.7 Exploitation & Enrichment 116
6.7.1 Projects 117
6.7.2 Pros and Cons of initiatives 119
6.8 Conclusions and future developments 120
6.9 Addendum to Chapter 6 121
6.9.1 Working Group C Digital Library Tools, Interview Script 121
6.9.2 Working Group C Digital Libraries and Tools - Interviews 123
7 Challenges and recommendations 124
7.1.1 Barriers 124
7.1.2 Lack of support 124
7.1.3 Critical mass 124
7.1.4 IPR issues 124
7.1.5 Sustainability 125
7.1.6 Business models 125
7.1.7 Community building 126
7.1.8 Usability and Common Standards 126
7.1.9 Awareness raising 126
7.2 Conclusions 127
8 Bibliography 128
8.1 Working Group A: Best Practices on Education and Training 128
8.2 Working Group B: IPR Issues and Business Models for Content 130
8.3 Working Group C: Best Practices on Digital Libraries and Tools 132
9 Glossary 134
10 Annex I – ECLAP Survey 2012 138
11 ANNEX II Case studies for Annotation and reconstruction e-tools 174
11.1 CASE ED*IT: digital platform for creative education 174
11.2 CASE Lignes de Temps: annotation and analysis software of temporal objects 176
11.3 CASE Streaming Theatre and I-THEATRE. NET 183
11.4 CASE ECLAP MyStoryPlayer and audiovisual annotation and aggregation tool 185
11.5 CASE Teaching and Learning with Virtual Realities: the Theatron Module 187
11.6 CASE Teaching and Learning with Virtual Realities: Designing for the Stage 194
11.7 Recommendations and conclusions 196
12 ANNEX III - Teaching with ECLAP 197
Figure 1 Aspects of teaching and the elements of ECLAP 197
List of the Acronyms
The following acronyms will be used in this deliverable:
|Acronym name |Explanation |
|BPN (Best Practice Network) |ECLAP is a BPN. The ICT Policy Support Programme Competitiveness and Innovation Framework |
| |Programme 2010 of the European Commission Best Practice describes the BPN as an |
| |instruments that aims to “promote the adoption of standards and specifications for making |
| |European digital libraries more accessible and usable by combining the "consensus building|
| |and awareness raising" function of a thematic network with the large-scale implementation |
| |in real-life context of one or more concrete specifications or standards by its members.” |
|CFP (Call for Papers) |A call for papers (CFP) is a method used in academic and other contexts for collecting |
| |book or journal articles or conference presentations. A CFP usually is sent to interested |
| |parties, describing the broad theme, the occasion for the CFP, formalities such as what |
| |kind of abstract (summary) has to be submitted to whom and a deadline. |
|DE (Deliverable) |The acronym DE stands for deliverables, the reports and objects that will be produced |
| |during the ECLAP project. |
|KoM (Kick-Off Meeting) |A meeting at the beginning of the project or at the beginning of a major phase of the |
| |project to align peoples' understanding of project objectives, procedures and plans, and |
| |to begin the team-building process. The KoM of the ECLAP project was held in Florence the |
| |13-14-15th of July 2010. |
|M (Project month) |The ECLAP project started in July 2010 (M1) and will finish in June 2013 (M36). In this |
| |deliverable, the project months are specified in which certain tasks and deliverables will|
| |be completed. For instance, if a deliverable is due in December 2011, this is M18 of the |
| |ECLAP project. |
|WG (Working Group) |A WG is an interdisciplinary collaboration of researchers working on new research |
| |activities. ECLAP consists of three Working Groups: |
| |- Working group (A) on Performing Arts Education and Training |
| |- Working group (B) on Intellectual Property and business models for content |
| |- Working group (C) on Best Practices Tools for performing art digital libraries |
|WP (Work Package) |ECLAP consists of seven Work packages, in which the various partners carry out specific |
| |tasks. |
Introduction
This document is an output of the ECLAP project, which was established in 2010 under the leadership of the DSI-DISIT of the University of Florence (Italy).
ECLAP is a best-practice network co-funded through the ICT Policy Support Programme of the European Commission. ECLAP’s goal is to enable access to Performing Arts resources, made available in digital form through a unified online repository. In its creation of a seamless and centralised online database, ECLAP has succeeded in providing access to the performing arts collections and archives of the ECLAP partners [1], among which is/are a large number of leading institutions in the field. Their wealth of resources will be made progressively accessible through a common, multilingual, easy-to-use ECLAP e-Library for the Performing Arts.
The ECLAP e-Library is part of Europeana, the multi-lingual online collection of millions of digitised items from European museums, libraries, archives and multi-media collections.
The ECLAP project has established three focused working groups within the overall consortium. These working groups are, respectively:
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The working group structure allows the project to examine a number of pressing issues and topics in the field of Performing Arts digital collections in order to facilitate best practices identification and sharing.
1 Executive Summary
This report summarises the most current results of efforts carried out by the ECLAP project’s Working Groups over their first year of work. The report includes best-practice guidelines identified during discussions in the working groups. The different presentations and activities performed at the WG workshops and the planned activities for the next period are reported in this document.
The three fundamental topics addressed herein are: (1) Best Practices on Theatrical Education and Training Content; (2) Best Practices on Intellectual Property and business models for content; (3) Best Practices on Performing art digital libraries and education tools.
Finally, the report includes a short description of the workshops organised by the Working Groups and their coordinators during the period in question, and a summary of activities planned for the next period.
1 The ECLAP Project in brief
ECLAP aims to establish itself as a worldwide free resource for the Performing Arts.
ECLAP will indubitably enrich Europeana through the contribution of a variety of relevant performing-arts media. Records pertaining to classes and rehearsals of the great masters of theatre and dance of XX century will be featured, along with the great masterpieces of the oral tradition. Users will be able to access unique videos, images and texts related to more than 50+ year career span of Nobel Laureates Dario Fo and Franca Rame, featuring recordings, photos, notes, drawings, paintings, sketches, posters, copies of contracts, invoices, books and articles. Other unique material includes video and audio recordings of performances, workshops and seminars of Tadeusz Kantor, Jerzy Grotowski and Włodzimierz Staniewski, along with the performance programmes of their productions, theoretical papers, drawings, design works, photographic documentation, reviews, journals and books.
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Fig. 1
Dario Fo, Histoire du Soldat, Sketch
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Fig.2
Dario Fo, Histoire du Soldat, Mise en scene
ECLAP Networking and Working Group Activities
1 Main goals and activities
The three Working Groups were created with the chief aim of discussing, addressing and, where possible, solving open issues that are felt to be common to the whole consortium, and that whose solutions are best found through collaborative discussions, with the additional involvement of external experts invited by the Consortium. The other aim of the Working Groups is to spread knowledge of ECLAP to other stakeholders and practitioners in the field, through a series of concerted initiatives such as workshops and meetings.
1 Overview of the ECLAP Working Groups
The ECLAP Project has a highly intense agenda in store that is supported by the three aforementioned Working Groups [WGs].
The ECLAP WGs are teams of partners (and external experts where appropriate) that focus on individual issues relevant to the activities carried out by the ECLAP project. These groups are, respectively: Theatrical Education and training, Intellectual Property and business models for content, Best Practice and Tools for Performing Arts Digital Libraries. These three WGs serve to support the ECLAP partners in their efforts to investigate, construct and share best practices in a time of shifting disciplinary boundaries.
ECLAP WGs also include or are planning to include individuals who represent ministries, agencies, memory institutions and centres of expertise without formal partnership in the ECLAP consortium. This is a key means by which the project aims to endow all stakeholders with a clear voice, while maintaining project momentum and focus.
The WGs encourage external expert collaborators to participate in ongoing dialogues, explore ideas and address issues that cross the usual disciplinary or institutional boundaries. ECLAP WGs welcome participation in the exchange of ideas and the establishment of new, collaborative efforts, particularly in the development of those research areas that cannot be addressed by single individuals or institutions.
Additional details regarding the goals and objectives of the individual WGs will be provided in the following sections. Please consult Chapter 4 for the WG-A, Chapter 5 for the WG-B, Chapter 6 for the WG-C.
2 Key recommendations
1. The key point that arose is the consensus that there is the needs to work as facilitator of community-building initiatives.
2. Performing Arts Digital Libraries have the capacity to yield faster and more efficient research results and to foster the creative re-use of digital content.
3. The single most pressing challenge facing Performing Arts Digital Libraries is sustainability. Performing Arts Digital Libraries must be properly funded and employed by research communities in order to remain salient and functional; the potential lack of such necessary support in the medium and long-term makes it challenging to procure the requisite commitments of time and effort by researchers. Performing Arts Digital Libraries must be understood as essential elements of the modern-day research apparatus, requiring long-term commitment and prioritisation for its singular utility.
4. Performing Arts Digital Libraries have the obvious potential to be utilised at international level. For this reason, it is necessary that partners understand and comply with the legal standards that regulate the transmission and access to copyrighted content. When such international standards impede the free-exchange of useful information and content, it is the partners’ responsibility to advocate for their modification. In Europe there is a strong need for unique legislation regarding digital content.
5. There is no one-size-fits-all model for Performing Arts Digital Libraries. It follows from this that implementation and development must be user-driven and bottom-up. Instead, users need to empowered with the capacity to interact within a flexible and customisable environment.
6. In order to ensure a faster uptake, it is necessary to ensure that people in the necessary vocations are kept abreast on current issues and developments, including managers, librarians or archivists, champions or promoters, theatre institutions, performing arts practitioners and researchers.
7. It is crucial to ensure awareness-raising with every means at our disposal: possible (web-based and face-to-face) channels are workshops, conferences, training meetings, viral marketing, and social networking communities.
3 Key findings
• The creation of a Performing Arts Digital Library is as much a social achievement as it is a technical one. This is our most important affirmation and must be kept in mind at all times. A solid approach is more important than an airtight mastery of the technology, since the latter is constantly evolving while the former is based on sounder and less fickle variables.
• It is plain to us that the greatest avenue of development for the Performing Arts Digital Libraries is participation. In order for the Performing Arts Digital Libraries infrastructure to continue in its healthy development, users need to be providing sustained feedback.
• In order to involve more performing arts people, the development of a Performing Arts Digital Library must be communicated not as a technological project but as a community-building project. Effective outreach is a fundamental ingredient to the sharing and exchange of information.
• The need for a unified European legal framework for IPR management is pressing, and institutions and stakeholders should campaign for it.
• Conversely, for Performing Arts institutions there is a strong need for legal skills in the field of copyright applied to the field of media consumption.
• There is a common need for smart tools to treat the ambiguity of natural language in the metadata description.
• In terms of sustainability, a key trend that can be cultivated to our decided advantage is a Wikipedia-style User Generated Curation.
4 Methodology
The present report has been assembled through the use of a carefully constructed four-step process.
A number of technologies were considered for possible inclusion in the investigation, along with the most significant trends and challenges. Our objective was to investigate each topic in progressively increasing detail, reducing the set until the final listing of best practices, technologies, trends, and challenges could be identified. Over 150 internationally-renowned experts and practitioners have been involved, through interviews, rich email exchanges and an ongoing series of conversations and dialogs with IT professionals, librarians, archivists, faculty leaders from colleges and universities, and representatives of leading theatrical institutions. Upon the cultivation of a sufficient amount of material, the work dealt with a systematic review of the available literature -articles, reports, essays, and other materials- that pertain to emerging technology in the field of the performing arts digital libraries. After reviewing the literature, the investigation sought to address the questions that are at the heart of the present report. In the investigation we have applied qualitative and quantitative research methods to identify and select best practices and state-of-the-art technologies for inclusion in the forthcoming chapters.
A key criterion was the potential relevance of the topics to the performing arts. A significant amount of time was spent researching applications or potential applications for the areas of Performing Arts that would be of interest both to scholars, practitioners and the so-called amateurs or engaged users – the target-users. The work was executed in accordance with the guidelines designed to elicit a comprehensive listing of interesting technologies, challenges, and trends from:
• European Commission Information Society an Media Directorate General;
• Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS);
• The Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)
• Digital Humanities Observatory; American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS);
• EDUCAUSE;
• The New Media Consortium (NMC);
• National Science, Foundation (NSF);
• World Wide Web Consortium (W3C);
• Forrester Research.
Once these best practices and applications were identified, they were further explored by involving again experts and practitioners who were either knowledgeable about them, or interested in thinking about how they might be used thanks to the organization of an international event that addressed the need for three WGs.
1 Challenges
Scoping the international Performing Arts Digital Libraries landscape and identifying trends is not an easy task, which is compounded by the fact that, even in the English-speaking world, different countries and disciplines use different terms: for example, terms such as digital collection, digital archive, digital library, multimedia archive are often employed to indicate the same underlying concept, or subtle variations over it.
Another difficulty with identifying existing Performing Arts Digital Libraries is that not all of them are publicly visible: many of them are just for internal use and thus might not be publicised or not even have an public website. It may also be assumed that a considerable number of projects in this area are still in their early stages and hence more difficult to find, unless the project undertook outreach activities from the start.
Given this background, it is very hard to obtain an exhaustive picture of the current global situation regarding this matter.
Our report is aimed to gain an overview of the main features of the general landscape rather than to try to fill in every detail. As such, it is not meant to be representative in the statistical sense, or to be a conclusive, definitive review article.
What we do hope, however, is to contribute to an ongoing discussion on Performing Arts Digital Libraries by identifying trends, issues and best practices from an international perspective, based on the experiences of a selection of experts and practitioners, on the lessons learned from projects and through a review of recent literature, and on the survey that we have designed and circulated.
2 Literature review
For our initial research, we looked into the most current reports and studies regarding the application of technologies to the performing arts (see the bibliography in the appendix); it should be noted that the bibliography has the potential to become much more extensive, since aspects of research collaboration are referenced over a wide range of publications. We also followed up on suggestions provided by interviewees and participants from the ECLAP Events.
It should be noted that literature dedicated specifically to Performing Arts and Digital Libraries is still somewhat scarce, while there are several works on IPR, educational technologies, digital libraries and digital preservation. The main issues arising from available literature are the following:
1) The main challenges and problems impeding the successful implementation of Performing Arts Digital Libraries are funding, pedagogical difficulties in the realm of software and technology, lack of requisite skills and of access to technical support.
2) For a successful Performing Arts Digital Library it is essential that we have unambiguous ownership of the data, a mutually-agreed-upon plan among the collaborators, a clearly defined set of objectives and responsibilities, and adequate resources. The literature emphasises the need for the software and technology to be user-friendly.
Historically in the arts and humanities, collaboration has tended to be constructed around smaller networks; however over recent years there has been a marked shift towards larger collaborations, along with a notable increase in the volume of digital data, and a more widespread usage of ICT-based methods with the rapid advance of technology. Many other countries around the world are engaged in the development of Performing Arts Digital Libraries, including the Netherlands, North America, Australia, Germany, and Japan.
3 Case studies
The case studies were selected based on our initial desk research and the experience and recommendations of the ECLAP partners with the objective of analyzing a range of countries.
Further criteria for case studies were the responses obtained from invitations sent to potential collaborators.
We set out to identify and examine e broad range of projects in order to consider different perspectives and experiences in light of the following criteria: region; size of user community; types of technologies utilized; various subject domains; single or multidisciplinary communities.
4 Survey
We developed an online survey in order to collect both quantitative and qualitative data and determine best practices in the digital performing arts field and to help us to identify people and projects to engage with in more detail.
Why - Survey Design
The objectives of the survey were:
· gather statistical information pertaining to performing arts digital libraries;
· gather qualitative material, particularly suggestions regarding important trends and general comments on best practices in the field of the ICT and performing arts;
In particular, the survey was designed to advance the understanding by investigating certain questions for the non-profit performing arts institutions/organization:
• How do organizations manage their archives/library?
• How do organizations manage their content?
• How do organizations manage IPR issues for their content?
• What business models do performing arts organisations employ in these touch economical times?
• How do organizations manage their educational technology?
• Are their practices sound?
Content of the survey
ECLAP partners collaborated with external experts to develop the content of the survey. Preliminary versions were shared with selected leaders in the non-profit sector of the performing arts, who gave advice on substance, format, and length.
The result of this process was a survey containing about 100 questions [30 for each working group plus some general questions[2]]. The questions were organized into five sections, two of which are general and three of which treat specific topics [Library/archive management, IPR and business models, educational technology].
The sequence is as follows:
1. Background information about the responding organization.
2. Managing the organization‘s library/archive
3. Managing the organization‘s IPR and business models
4. Managing the organization‘s educational technology
5. Attitudes and perceptions about technology and needs and Planning for the organisation‘s future.
Who the survey was aimed at:
People working in organisations that have performing arts collections, and who are knowledgeable in one of the three topics of the ECLAP WGs, people who are working for performing arts institutions, archives, theatres, libraries, festivals, manager/leaders/CIO/CEO/Librarian/IT Manager.
The list was focussed on Europe, but it also included major institutions in the USA.
Invitation Process and Collection of Responses.
A letter from the ECLAP to non-profit organizations in the performing arts explained the purpose of the survey and invited them to participate.
Several associations, institutions and ECLAP’s sister projects, graciously agreed to distribute this letter by email to their members located all over the world. Both the letter and the survey itself emphasized that responses were requested from the organization‘s ―executive director or equivalent position.
The email invitation provided a link to a website that offered two methods of responding:
1. Respondents were encouraged to use an online survey available at .
The email invitations were distributed from May 9, 2012 followed by email reminders approximately weekly for four weeks. Acceptance of responses ended on June 15, 2012.
123 surveys were collected.
Confidentiality
Nothing in the survey asked the respondents to identify themselves or their organization by name. However, the survey asked for the following identifying information, from which the organization‘s name could be deduced in most cases: ZIP code, year founded, and association memberships.
ECLAP collected all the surveys and used the identifying information to name the organizations, where possible.
5 Interviews
Over the course of the survey each WGs also interviewed about 20 people, mostly over the phone or using Skype software. Interviewees were mostly selected through the online survey, but also following recommendations from other interviewees and through existing contacts of the project partners. Interviews took about 45-60 minutes and followed a semi-structured approach that allowed the interviewee to develop ideas or explain issues in the necessary detail. Where we had permission, the interviews were recorded and then transcribed; in a few other cases the interviewers took notes during the interviews.
Working Group A: Best Practices on Education and Training
WG Coordinators: Peter Eversmann, Josefien Schuurman (University of Amsterdam)
1 Main goals of the Working Group A
The work group on education (WG A) has a transversal role in the project. This is mainly due to the intrinsically transversal nature of education and research. As a matter of fact each WG has activities with educational implication. Nowadays technology can be of great benefit for the educational environment especially as far as the remediation of multimedia and annotation is concerned. It is in the interest of the portal and end users to look into a tripartite model; a model based on collaboration between performing arts professionals, archives and research and education institutions.
The working group intends to foster exchange of points of view, results, doubts, needs, information. This working group is open to participants coming from all other groups and we aim to provide a review of the current situation, explanation of different approaches, dissemination of key emergent themes and technologies and information about main contributors, events and problematic areas. This working group will be the steward on performing arts education and learning ICT, aggregating and translating the needs of target groups and end user communities to ECLAP as described by Etienne Wenger in Digital Habitats: stewarding technology for communities [Wenger, White, and Smith, 2009]. The main objectives of WG Education are the following:
|Objective |Kind |How |
|Points of view exchange |Generic |Via common work space, forum discussion, article posting, document uploading, social |
| | |network etc. |
|State of the art |Specific |Identification of the state of the art in the area of education; identification and |
|identification | |monitoring of relevant standards; taking note of leading technical solutions; verification|
| | |of standards against expressed needs |
|Market monitoring |Specific |Monitoring market and leading partners evolution via data collection (statistics, case |
| | |studies, focus groups) and document posting / uploading |
|Technology watch |Specific |Monitoring used technology. Survey of top success solutions and technologies via data |
| | |collection (web-research, statistics, case studies) and document posting / uploading |
|Contribution to standards |Specific |Contribution to evolving standards and system requirements via suggestion, submission, |
| | |evaluation and involvement in related bodies |
Figure 1 Objectives of Working group A
In this second best practice exercise of WG A we will be focusing on the identification of relevant best practice and their extracted recommendations and challenges.
2 WG A Topics and priorities
1 Objectives
The objective in this chapter is to describe best practices related to the integrated use of digital heritage and IT in performing arts education. Although the four separated domains of performing arts, education, heritage and IT are huge, the combined field is young and relatively limited.
Three layers of educational IT are separately investigated. The three layers have their own pace of development and this categorization allowed us to extract leveled recommendations and challenges.
1. Repositories of performing arts digital (heritage) resources
2. (Non-)Institutionalized learning and research environments
3. Domain specific learning and research task tools
During the setup of the best practice analysis we identified a set of key issues. These issues will be addressed in the following chapters:
- Lack of availability of online accessible and reusable performing arts contemporary heritage resources
- Lack of integration of performing arts digital heritage resources in educational IT
- Lack of actual use of performing arts educational IT
- Lack of sustainable performing arts educational IT products
2 Methodology
Performing arts contains multiple artistic disciplines. Addressing educational IT practices and challenges across these domains has turned out to be quite complex. If we use a broad definition the arts of music or film should be included. But they form completely separated domains in themselves, not in the least in terms of education and IT. Moreover the relatively smaller disciplines like puppetry and circus appear to be quite resistant to practices of integrating digital resources into their education. In this chapter performing arts initiatives mostly imply projects of theatre or dance education. To be more precise the analysis is for an important part based on practices in dance education. In spite of an intensive search for relevant initiatives and practices across all the core disciplines, the relevant expertise seems to be mostly appropriated within the sub-domain of contemporary dance. They seem not only most strong in initiating innovative projects, they also are ahead in theorizing about this very specific combination of heritage, IT and education. From the late nineties of the past century projects and theory are accumulated in adjacent artistic and scholarly oriented dance networks.[3]
This chapter is based on a wide range of activities performed form January – June 2012. We collected data and domain knowledge via desk research, a survey, and interviews with experts working with educational IT and performing arts digital heritage. The main focus in the process of collecting of best practices was on initiatives dealing with actual content repositories.
1. Desk research
For the previous version of this deliverable extensive desk research has been performed. For this updated version we have added the list of specific publications like projects plans, project evaluations and lessons learned from relevant initiatives throughout Europe and the USA.
2. Survey
In collaboration with the other working groups we have spread a survey on educational IT. It was created in the online survey software Survey Monkey and contained a general chapter on educational IT and heritage and a chapter in which the respondent was invited to go into detail on his/her main educational project. The dissemination was done via all available networks and channels. Still the response was relatively low. There were 33 respondents of which 16 completed the 2 working group chapters of the questionnaire. The survey and the charts based on the responses are integrated in the Addendum to Chapter 4
3. Interviews
In course of three months, Mai, June and July 2012 we interviewed 11 domain experts involved in heritage and education and IT. They were selected via the ECLAP network and the survey. In chapter 4.7.2 a table contains all the interviewees and the projects they work on. The interviews were conducted via Skype and took between 30 and 60 minutes. The interview script is presented in Chapter 4.7.1
4. Expert user interviews and survey
In the framework of the previous deliverable DE6.2.1. we extensively investigated user characteristics and user needs in October and November 2011. We will refer regularly to the insights derived from that research and compare them with current practices.
3 Landscape and key concepts
Before diving into practices around domain specific and applied IT in this chapter we describe some basic concepts in performing arts education and research.
1 The educational field
We identified three parameters that one should take into account and which comprise a 3-dimensional space in which different educational programs, activities and events can be mapped:
- Orientation: theory or practice
- Level of education (target groups): primary-, secondary-, tertiary education; general audiences; specific target groups
Aim: training professionals within the field or non-professionals (amateurs; general interest)
Within these parameters we will focus primarily on tertiary education (universities, academies, vocational schools) with now and then a detour towards secondary education. This means that we will look at educational resources and tools that are theoretical as well as practical in nature and that are geared towards training different kinds of professionals.
2 Educational approach: a general model of teaching and learning
What are the basics of education that underlie learning processes? A very general answer to this question can be formulated thus: studying is the active appropriation of knowledge, skills and self-confidence, while teaching consists of supporting this learning process. In table nr 2 the underlying structural processes are schematically presented.
|Structures of learning and teaching |
| |Learning |Teaching |
|Cognition |Knowledge of subject |Structuring |
| | |Explication |
| | |Instruction |
|Motivation |Affection with subject |Stimulation |
| | |Validation |
|Assessment / evaluation |Self-confidence regarding subject |Conversation |
| | |Interaction & Feedback |
|Motoric skills |Control of body (muscle memory) |Providing Examples/Models |
| | |Drills & physical corrections |
Figure 2 A general model of learning and teaching
The table presents a general model of learning and teaching in which the layers that play a role in education are schematically worked out for both these sides. It starts with the notion that there are three important dimensions of any learning process: cognition, affection and assessment/evaluation and ads a fourth layer when mastery of motoric skills is involved.
For the student the first layer, cognition, has to do with getting knowledge of a subject and/or acquiring certain skills. It is the aspect of grasping and understanding the concepts that are involved, of being able to deal efficiently with the subject at hand and of mastering the problems of a field.
The second layer, motivation, points to the affective aspects of learning. Here one deals with things like personal involvement and the arousal of interest. What motivates the student to put in time and energy? How important is learning about a certain topic in the experience of the individual?
The third layer, assessment and evaluation, contains the aspects that have to do with feedback on how a student progresses. In any learning process one should have a clear idea on where one stands at a certain time. In other words: this dimension is about knowing what one knows and about the ability to evaluate ones progress with regard to a subject. On the learning side this clearly has to do also with self-confidence; with realizing that you have mastered the subject to a certain degree, can skilfully handle the problems and operations belonging to that degree and can evaluate whether or not you need or want to know more about the field of study.
Finally one can discern a fourth layer that is especially important for vocational training in the performing arts (acting, singing, dancing, music making, circus and the like). Through practice and often rigorous training the student has to acquire the bodily control necessary to execute complex movements, to handle instruments or installations. In order to reach the required level of fluency the training is not only aimed at being able to control the body, but also at instilling a kind of automatism in it through the so called ‘muscle memory’ enabling a more or less unconscious execution of the movements.
The four layers do not only function on the learning side but also on the side of teaching. Each dimension brings with it certain aspects of teaching that in educational theory are seen as important elements that facilitate the learning process. To help with the cognitive aspects of that process a good teacher, course or textbook should structure the study material well, meaning that subjects are approached consistently and in a systematic manner. Explications that clarify difficult and complex topics in such a way that they can be grasped more easily also function on the cognitive level, as do instructions: clear indications (often accompanied by examples) of how a subject should be dealt with.
As to the second layer: all educators and pedagogical textbooks underline the prime importance of motivating pupils. Without instilling a certain drive in students, the chances that any learning will take place are practically zero. Of course one can try to use negative motivation here whereby the avoidance of punishment becomes the main reason to delve into a subject, but it has been shown to be far more effective to stimulate people in a more positive way, by trying to arouse their personal interest. In addition to stimulation a key concept when it comes to involving students with a subject is validation. This means that one has to clarify the importance of a subject within a curriculum. If one doesn’t do that and students fail to understand why a topic is useful or how it fits in with the rest of their studies, results will most certainly be a disaster.
Traditionally the third aspects of assessment and evaluation are seen as the exclusive domain of the teacher and are associated more with control and testing whether any learning has taken place than that it is seen as a means to facilitate the educational process. If however one thinks of this dimension in terms of feedback the importance of it with regard to building self-confidence in mastering a subject becomes clear. Having the possibility of ‘conversations’ with the teaching instance during a learning process, with appropriate time for questions and remarks, is probably where self-assessment starts. Just being able to formulate a question is already a kind of test on how well one has grasped a subject. In later stages then there is more two-sided interaction and the discourse on the interpretation of a subject is furthered, ideally resulting in students now trusting their knowledge and skills; becoming more and more an equal partner to their teachers.
The fourth layer mainly involves giving the student exemplary models to follow (through showing one’s own or somebody else’s motoric skills) and providing a training program that progressively instils the correct muscle movements. Thereby it is almost always necessary to physically correct what students do (otherwise faults trend to creep in). For speeding up the learning process it has been proven very helpful to give auditory or visual feedback (by means of recordings) so that the students can actually see/hear what they are doing – as it were from the outside.
3 Subjects of teaching
To zoom in a little more, we finally have identified what university teachers actually teach. The following are the processes in our field that scholars, researchers and teachers are familiar with and that students train in:
- Describing performances
- Analysing performances
- Comparing performances
- Classifying and grouping performances
- Contextualizing performances
- Reconstructing performances
- Historic research
- Practice
These processes are all relying on certain tools, skills and knowledge that have to be acquired within the curriculum. They might partly overlap.
I Describing performances
Probably the most basic skill that is asked from a performance studies student is that he/she learns how to describe a performance. Description is ubiquitous in the existing literature on theatre and performance. Although the nature of it might change somewhat in the near future when audio-visual registrations of stage performances will be more and more readily available to the student/researcher they will not be replaced by it. Rather the multimedia info will serve as an addition to the description that will enable the reader to check the value and trustworthiness of that description – much as the depiction of a painting in art historical literature can serve as justification of the description/interpretation of the author.
II Analysing performances
Performance analysis (including drama-analysis) can be considered the bread and butter of scholars in our field. To be able to dissect a performance in its existing parts, to explain how these parts relate to each other and in doing so laying bare the structure of a performance is what every theatre scholar should be able to do. There is not one ‘right’ way of analysing performances and as a consequence there are a huge number of analytical ‘tools’ that are used. This is because any analytical process has to be motivated by a question or problem. For example: to analyse the possible emotional and cognitive effects of a performance on audiences needs a different approach then analysing narratological strategies that are involved. Explicating how time is structured in a certain play is quite another thing than studying how the characters relate to each other. How a performance structures and uses space is completely different from analysing the language, etc. etc. A complete inventory of analytical procedures and techniques is not readily at hand but a starting point might be provided by Christopher Balme’s ‘Introduction to Theatre Studies’ [Balme 2008: passim, especially chapter 4 – Analysis].
III Comparing performances
Since performances are often scenic translations of the same source material (whether this is a play, a musical score, a choreography and so on) it is often very rewarding to compare performances and try to draw conclusions from the (artistic and/or cultural) differences and similarities between them.
IV Classifying and grouping performances
A particular endeavour that sprouts from comparing performances is as old as Aristotle: grouping different performances/plays and classify them according to certain features/characteristics that they possess in the eyes of the researcher. The various genre theories are based on such taxonomic processes and it should be noted that a lot of publications in our field are doing exactly this: grouping a number of performances (or performance artists) and giving them a telling label – often claiming that they represent a ‘new’ kind of performance art. Examples abound but one can think for instance of Hans Thies-Lehmann’s ‘Post-Dramatisches Theater’ [Thies-Lehmann 2006] as an attempt to formulate the characteristics of a new theatre form – complete with various sub-genres.
V Contextualizing performances
Attributing performances (or performance artists) to a certain genre/group and then elaborating on how these performances or artists fit within this genre/group can be considered a form of ‘internal’ or ‘artistic’ contextualization. The contextualization process is much wider though and ranges from relating a performance to other performances and art works that influenced it (intertextuality!) to studying the embeddedness of a performance within its social, political, economic, historical, geographical, etc. contexts.
VI Reconstructing performances
Of course reconstruction of past performances is not possible. As soon as the curtain falls the performance is irrevocably lost and can never be found again. It’s a total illusion to think that any theatre from the past can be recovered – as if it is lying hidden somewhere waiting for someone to say: hey, look what I found: the theatre from 1547 and look there isn’t that the theatre from 938? Even if it would be possible to create an exact copy of an historic performance – and the impossibility of such an endeavour is readily seen when we only think of, for example, the physique of the actors – but even if we could restage a performance in minute detail we should realize that we cannot recreate the theatrical event itself. The spectators and their mind set were different from us, the culture in which the performance inscribed itself is not our culture and hence the relations between a theatrical event and its surroundings, its meanings and its impact are forever gone.
Why then should we even bother and is the academic discipline of theatre history from its early beginnings marked by such numerous endeavours to reconstruct theatres and performances? It’s a question that is not so easy to answer, but it undoubtedly has something to do with historic curiosity and a basic need to integrate the different traces of theatre productions into a coherent whole. We realize that theatre is a multimedia art in which textual, visual, auditory, spatial, performative and temporal aspects all have their role to play. And therefore we want to combine all the different components of historic theatre in order to have a complete picture. And if – as is very often the case – we lack a lot of historical, sound evidence we are prone to let our imagination run pretty free; no matter how big the gaps we still want to fill them in. No matter how inconclusive our materials, we still want to interpret them and conjure up the totality of a theatrical performance before our mind’s eye. It is at this point that scholarship can step in. Not only by discovering historic detail but also by adhering to its basic principle of systematically revealing and sharing the sources of a reconstruction.
VII Historic Research
As such reconstructions (and to a certain extent also the contextualization of performances) are based on historic research. However: the goal of this research is not always reconstruction of performances and/or theatre venues. Within the discipline there are numerous examples in which historical aspects of theatre and performances are studied within their own right; as separate strands or point of interests that inform one on the development of certain features in the realm of the performing arts. Hereby one can think of such diverse topics as:
- autobiographies of theatre-makers, actors, directors, dancers, musicians, playwrights, etc.
- historical studies of audiences, critics, etc.
- studies of so called ‘mediating instances’ and their influence on the stage: patrons, censors, legalities, etc.
- historic studies of the foundation and development of theatre venues
- tracing developments in (the use of) set design, lighting, costume, etc.
- the description of artistic movements in history
- Etc.
VIII Practice
Whereas the above subjects are clearly predominantly academic and theoretical in nature, there is also a vast area within education of the performing arts that concerns itself with the practicalities of actually making performances; with teaching vocational skills and learning how to engage with the challenges of becoming a practitioner in the field. The subjects in this area start from individual training, whereby the motoric skills (together with cognitive and analytical ones) are the main focus of the student and then branch out in learning to cooperate and co-perform with others. For example: the dancer has to master muscle control and train his/her body in order to be able to execute the various steps and movements, but then he has also to learn how to cooperate with a choreographer and to co-perform with other dancers on stage, with the lighting(technicians), with the live musicians, and so on.
Besides these motoric and cooperative skills there is a third subject that is of main importance for the education of performing arts practitioners: training in the creative process and in designing performances. Especially in the domains that govern the overall ‘look and feel’ of a production and that bring together the different disciplines involved (such as choreography, directing, mise-en-scene, costume-, set- and lighting-design, etc.) it is important to teach students how to creatively put together and ‘design’ a production.
4 Educational orientation
Between countries there are some major differences in educational systems. Organizing educational orientation, practice versus academic based, can fundamentally differ. A part of the performing arts educational institutions, especially British-American institutions, combine and intertwine vocational and scholarly education. While in other countries, mostly continental Europe based, the two are quite rigorously separated. In for example Germany, France and the Netherlands universities are for the purpose of training students into scholars, researchers and critics. Academies are comparable to vocational schools and are solely for the purpose of educating practitioners: performing artists, directors, designers, technicians, etc. Opposite to Anglo-American educational institutions in these countries the two orientations are quite isolated realms.
One of relatively recent, important developments in educational orientation is the adoption of artistic research in all European educational arts institutions. From the British-American based educational systems practice-based, theoretical research has emerged, in which artistic expressions are defined as forms of research. This makes whole new levels of theoretical and philosophical notions explicit. Practice based research and scholarly research are slowly integrated in parts of the educational curricula of continental European institutions. Collaborations are initiated between academies and universities so practical oriented students and scholarly oriented students can take courses or whole programmes in both orientations. Practices of learning and teaching and models of knowledge transfer are slowly beginning to meet and the efforts and experiments of mixing them are available.[4]
Paradigms in scholarly oriented education and research place knowledge in primary and secondary sources. New knowledge is created by learning to understand, analyse and structure existing knowledge into new knowledge. Processes of developing cognitive and motivational autonomy are based on studying texts and they make scholarly education and research practices essentially text based.
From the intangible nature paradigms in practice oriented performing arts education and research identify the body as a carrier of knowledge (as opposed to or along with the brains and material objects). But not only the body is a source. “I want to propose the notion of cultivating collectivity as vital in relation to the notion of transfer” [Fabius, Fabius en Van Schijndel, 2007, p20-21]. Performing arts as an immaterial expression and experience has an innate collective character. The collective itself is defined as a carrier of knowledge. This is a quite abstract notion, but when we take a look at the educational practices the notion materializes in recognizable components and activities. It is in the live experience that knowledge is created and transferred and movements are expressions of knowledge. It is the practice of performing artists working closely, physically together. “Can the practice itself be seen as a living archive, a collectivity of dancers through whom the work is lived and preserved, who share experiences and contribute to developments of the work?” [Fabius; in: Fabius en Van Schijndel, 2007, p. 21]
Practices are explored to access this body knowledge of practitioners and knowledge within collectives of bodies. In one of these routes of exploration audio-visual recordings of performances and of training and rehearsal sessions play a central role. Together with scores and notations, recordings are used for the analyses of movement, the analyses of interactions between artists’ bodies, analyses of mise-en-scènes and choreographies. In the domain there is a search for how knowledge contained by bodies can be accessed and captured for the purpose of transfer and educational practices.[5] In the use of audio-visual resources practice oriented and scholarly oriented education advance.
5 Knowledge and archives
The brains, the body and the collective as separate carriers of knowledge. In a sense all being physical memory systems (or even archival entities themselves) next to the physical and digital archives we are familiar with. How do these entities relate? And how do they relate to education and research?
Performing arts archival objects have a particular status. All practitioners use footage and video registrations, but first of all, practitioners point out their reluctance of capturing live performances due to the simultaneous process of fixating them. Performing arts are by their live and repetitive nature unstable. Every single performance is an individual, unique expression and performances often develop during the playing period. Therefore performers can have hesitancy towards archives. The archive is not something performing arts practitioners easily identify themselves with. There is a historically and culturally grown distance between archival or museum objects on the one hand and people on the other. Isolating archival and museum object from society is conditional for their status and value. But practices of putting them into acclimatized buildings and depots, controlling them via rituals of worship and gatekeeper-ship are very contrary to the physical, collective practices of the performing arts in the post-dramatic area.
Secondly archival objects cannot level the aesthetic experience awakened by a performance. One of the interviewed experts, a dramaturge, very supportive of initiatives to create access to digital archival objects, pointed out “please put it up there, but who is going to look at the stuff? You can’t have an aesthetic sensation similar to the immaterial experience from an audio-visual registration.” From the perspective of practitioners the aesthetic sensation is very hard to capture. From the perspective of scholars creating the conditions for historic sensations is almost as difficult. Circumstantial objects essentially cannot recreate an intangible expression. The depth of the divide between the art and it’s archival counterparts is in itself a domain specific characteristic and a conditional starting point for education and digital archiving projects. “So in contrast to architecture, literature, music and painting, there is no authorised object in dance incorporating the history, the materiality, the meaning and the form which distinguish it as a work of art.” [Cramer, 2007]
Within the domain there is consensus on the importance of capturing performing arts expressions to preserve performing arts legacies, but practices of fixation and isolation fundamental to archiving and collecting are in fact contrary to practices of knowledge transfer in the domain. One of the reoccurring exemplifying, significant trends in the discussion with the performing arts educational experts, both practice and scholarly oriented, is how they conceptualize digital heritage resources. They are not so much speaking of archival or heritage objects, but prefer to speak in more neutral terms of knowledge objects. Heritage objects level with the other knowledge carriers and are just one of the tools used in teaching and learning.
Practitioners working in an educational settings consider these knowledge carriers as lived/living objects that can be used and contextualised for specific educational needs. Good practices in performing arts education integrating digital heritage and IT, position themselves according to the user group parameters and facilitate one or more of the described educational processes. Best practices add the investigation into their position by acknowledging the existence of multiple knowledge carriers and trying to connect and add to them. They explore their potential in terms of cognitive, motivational, reflective and physical training potential. Thus they explore how to become part of the collective.
4 Performing arts education and IT
As introduced at the start of this chapter, investigating practices of integrating digital (heritage) resources into performing arts education has led to a research structure of three levels at which IT resources are used and developed. Users, teachers and learners, apply one or combined resources from these levels in a specific educational situation. The three levels have their particular uses, practices and challenges. They will be discussed in relation to practices within the three stakeholder groups - heritage institutions, educational end user groups and performing arts practitioners - concluding with specific key challenges.
This chapter consists of the following paragraphs:
1. Repositories of performing arts digital (heritage) resources
2. (Non-)Institutionalized learning and research environments
3. Specific learning and research task tools
4. Conclusions: integrated use of digital objects and multiple IT resources
1 Repositories of performing arts digital resources
Educational repositories are themselves the first level of educational IT and online use. Without the frills of tools and special educational applications, the digital resources themselves are one of the core element along which performing arts educators can access the history and accumulated knowledge of the domain. Apart from enhancing access and educational use via educational IT, creating basic web-based access to the actual digital performing arts resources and the way in which this access is given shape is therefor in itself of huge importance to performing arts education.
When one takes a look at the websites of performing arts heritage and information institutions, 9 out of 10 only have a catalogue to accomplish access to their collections. Just a few of them present parts of the actual digitized, archival objects online. The lack of clear copyright law and jurisprudence in publishing performing arts digital resources online makes it difficult to share content with professional and amateur end users.[6] There ís a lot of performing arts content online. All users in higher education indicate they look at places like You Tube, Vimeo or UbuWeb to find their resources.[7] The materials to be found there are too often of non-authoritative provenance, of poor quality, not without the necessary (context) information for proper educational use and/or their management is not embedded in a digital preservation strategy.
Besides a focus on cataloguing, a second widespread practice leads to a relatively low interactivity between higher education and performing arts heritage institutions. Performing arts heritage institutions have their educational departments. The main focus of these departments however is 9 out 10 times primary and secondary school children. Educational programs based on performing arts content combined with relevant trends like gamification of learning or mobile and blended learning strategies are often directed to introduce non-professional educational stakeholders to the performing arts.[8] From the perspective of performing arts heritage institutions learners and teachers in higher education need to find their own way, taking their interest in and commitment to performing arts collections and archives as a fact. They are hugely outnumbered by the primary and secondary school children. Developing outreach programs for that level of education, joining national arts programs and curricula, guarantees a critical mass of users with shared and generic needs. And, finally, tertiary education is more geared towards learning how to do research and (educational programs of) performing arts heritage institutions are not so much about research but rather about transmitting existing knowledge.
In 2010 the eContentplus programme project EdReNE[9] recommended the following strategies for repositories to be truly educational [Lund and Holjsholt-Poulsen, 2010, p. 4-9]:
- Leverage the support of existing communities of practice by supporting their needs
- Take advantage of generally used, open standards to allow for the broadest range of partnerships future adaptability and innovation
- Engage with all stakeholders early in the planning process and base development on user needs
- Support open licensing to increase impact of funding and maximize possibilities for reuse and repurposing
- Acknowledge that integration with a range of tools and services will greatly benefit uptake and use of digital learning resources
- Carefully build a sustainable business case based on the broad existing evidence base.
During the interviews many (expert) performing arts educators and researcher indicated that, somewhere in the past they themselves had started building digital repositories of performing arts collections at their local universities. It is a widespread practice of performing arts educators to regularly request or receive from performing arts companies DVD’s with the recordings of their latest performance so they can use them in their teaching and in their classrooms. Most performing arts companies happily meet these wishes for a number of reasons - without transferring their rights. It’s a characteristic of the performing arts domain that many educational institutions have relative large collections of audio-visual performance resources within and outside their own institutional libraries. Resources not easily accessible anywhere else.
The use of these recordings or resources was and is completely restricted to the physical educational spaces of the respective educators. Creating digital archives of these recordings was often attempted, but mostly failed due to copyright regulations, prohibiting general, web based access to the actual resource.[10] So throughout Europe performing arts educators and educational institutions have their own, inconsistent, isolated selection of contemporary digital performance materials. The advantage of these materials on physical carriers is that they are often of good digital quality and easy to use in a classroom setting. For web-based repositories to catch up with this practice of using digital performance resources on physical carriers, the strategies identified in EdReNe are crucial.
The interviewed (expert) educators make it very clear that this aspect of proper access is what they need most. The content is what they already use in their teaching and what they will keep using apart from any environment, tool or pedagogic approach. The digital materials need to be of the highest possible quality, at least for the practitioners. The latter use the content for the detailed analyses of sound, movement, sets, costumes, lighting and so on. They all need access to materials they don’t have stowed away somewhere themselves: recordings of performances outside their own, direct network, historical recordings, documentation materials of performances and of performing arts companies.
Complementary to the need for audio-visual resources, best practices in aggregating content for performing arts higher education are identified by experts as repositories with contemporary digital resources produced or captured during the different stages of the production process of performances. These stages start with ideas, sketches, texts and images, evolve into final products of drama, musical scores, lighting and stage design plans, costumes and rehearsals, into public performances. So on the one hand trying to preserve multiple types of objects like sketches, technical design plans, photographs, audio and video is crucial for understanding the total creative context and concept and for facilitating education on all the specialized aspects. On the other hand preserving rehearsal resources is important in itself. This is one of the ways to acknowledge and facilitate learning of this unfixated nature of the performing arts. In some specialized (small) repositories one can find audio-visual recordings of the rehearsal processes: directors, choreographers and dancers, actors, musicians engaged in internalizing movement, speech, emotions or stories.[11] For the educational institutions alike, teaching with other training materials can be important. These rehearsals contain knowledge themselves, they allow reflecting on existing and previous training practices, and they enable analysing the creative and physical processes of a performance production.
It seems that a major part of the educational users is only interested in access. There seems to be a digital divide and a lack of awareness between teachers and learners using digital heritage or multimedia resources of performances in a kind of illustrative fashion and the ones going beyond basic educational driven consumption. During the interviews with performing arts educators in higher education, many indicate they use digital resources, they acknowledge the importance of these resources, but actually thinking on a more analytical or conceptual level of how these resources could be used in new ways to enhance education is only happening in a few places around Europe and beyond.[12] If we focus on contemporary resources at this moment the integration of performing arts digital heritage and IT in education depends on the efforts of a few highly engaged individuals and their projects linking institutions of higher education and performing arts companies.
To get all performing arts educators involved in building more active relationship between digital heritage and educational practices awareness of its potential must be raised. Not only awareness on the level of educators, but awareness on the levels of management and policy makers of higher education institutions. Digital heritage resources as educational resources need to be appreciated as one of the main knowledge carriers. Especially the possible benefits of tapping into this knowledge by combining the content with specialized IT facilitating the development of personal and shared research assistants of e-learning environments needs to be more widely explored. Processes of upscaling incidental and individual use of contemporary digital resources to an integrated, shared use of digital resources are initiated. But there is a huge effort to be made to go beyond the group of tech savvy educators and involve all the others. Time is one of the great barriers in this process and time can, sometimes directly, be translated in terms of management support. Educators indicate it’s their main barrier. It takes time to internalize new pedagogical models and time to actually create new courses based on (blended) learning methods.[13]
[pic]
Figure 3 This chart shows if the organization of the respondent has an educational IT policy
in combination with budget for developing educational IT.
Another time-based reason why the potential of digital resources is only limitedly explored is that educators encounter a great lack of digital literacy in their students’ skills in finding and using digital content in an scholarly way. A step they have to take first when using digital resources in the classroom, is to start with teaching the students the basic paradigms in finding and using digital resources. This is time consuming and goes at the expense of teaching about performing arts.[14] A best practice in creating repositories and linked educational IT is to explicitly integrate learning and teaching in digital literacy and research skills.[15] It is vital to get the students of higher education at an acceptable, professional level and to get them motivated to use digital resources. They need to be able to find, interpret and value digital heritage resources like they do with all the other knowledge resources.
Best practices of forming educational repositories of performing arts contemporary content are at this moment relatively much developed and cultivated at universities and performing arts companies.[16] There are a few projects around Europe (and globally) in which alternative archiving and documentation strategies are developed within educational institutions and performing arts companies.[17] As we saw, the institutions possess relatively large collections digital resources but another reason why educational institutions are at the forefront of publishing contemporary content is that they have relatively direct access to funds for creating accompanying specialized IT applications. Institutions of higher education know better how to tap into research and development funds for these kinds of projects and in the meantime great specialized repositories.
For the purpose of this analysis creators and/or managers of a set of independent educational repository projects were interviewed.[18] Being quite different in their detailed approach, there are some striking similarities between the investigated initiatives. First of all none of the respective initiators have a professional background in archives and collections. As mentioned, at the root of these projects lies a collaboration between performing arts academics and performing artists but it seems professional archivists and collection managers are often altogether excluded or only involved in later stages. The platforms are channels via which performing artists can attract attention to their work, can present it in a controlled environment and have the derivatives of their immaterial artistic oeuvre collected.
To put performing arts practitioners in such a central position, leads to another interesting resemblance between the initiatives. The core of these collections are contemporary, audio-visual materials (combined with other types of content and/or with rehearsal resources). This is content most wanted by the domain educators, but extremely complex to clear in terms of copyright restrictions if one wants to make them available outside the confinement of a particular, individual classroom. Offering channels and collaborations makes it possible to explore models of online publishing of digital content otherwise fenced off. Within the framework of the initiatives tailored arrangements are made with the different kinds of copyright holders. At this stage copyright barriers can only be overcome by taken the time to clear them.[19] This is firstly done by working together with performing artists. This is a trigger for performers to not block projects by exercising their rights. If a key rights holder is ‘embedded’ in a digital archiving project from the start, and a relation of trust is created, other copyright holders tend to be more inclined to cooperate. If a best practice is to involve performing artists in the creation of repositories, then the next is to not make them ‘too archival’.[20] “Digital Heritage Institutions should start archiving the present and act as a service; for us our history starts now”.
Practices of these projects start with relatively small amounts of digital objects and slowly let the collection grow. Letting performers and performing arts companies assist in describing and annotating the works results in small, but scalable digital libraries very well suited for educational purposes. Another practice in these projects is the information or metadata richness. Being conceptualized as educational repositories the amount and depth of information about the resources is essential. Understanding (the meaning of) digitized heritage resources always requires an serious effort taking into account the depth of the divide between the performing arts and their derivative resources. Providing objects with plenty and accurate information is essential for their educational applicability. Starting small enables this approach.
The alternative archiving strategies of contemporary resources requires active and intense collaborations with performing artists. Retaining an overall high level of quality is actually the only way to make collaborations with performing artist work. Selection and presentation of the resources need to answer to their artistic and aesthetic demands.[21] Best practices integrate qualitative KPI’s on requirements and activities of the selection and presentation processes. This is one of the ways to overcome the unease between performing arts practitioners and institutionalized performing arts archival practices. Overcoming this unease and bridging the gap between currently developed educational repositories, their aggregation strategies and institutionalized archival practices is necessary because the alternative archival strategies now developed mostly lack long-term archival preservation policies.[22] Best practices in creating educational repositories are not automatically best practices in maintaining them, or best practices in terms of archival standards.
There are different types of repositories, besides the basic archival and library catalogues with or without digital content, educationally driven repositories of contemporary digital resources are emerging. As written above the investigate non-archival, non-library projects didn’t and don’t have professional archivists or librarians within their (initial) teams. In the best examples they consult them as advisors. The concept of the archive in general terms of preserving and fixating legacies is well debated amongst performing arts professionals outside the institutionalized heritage and information networks, but there is an unease about archival practices focussing on information structures and information management. Creators of educational repositories don’t prioritize archival information standards. This could be a serious threat to future access and use of performing arts digital resources and non-institutionalized repositories created the past 5 years.
Starting with analysing the ‘why’, performing arts heritage and information institutions need to be more proactive and service oriented towards the stakeholders in their domain. They need to engage in more active relationships with institutions of higher education and they need to raise more awareness of the importance of archival standards and practices. They have to be there, were the repositories are created and this is outside their institutionalized environment, then providing services in terms of advice and support are essential. Only then the funding resources for educational IT, performing arts content and long-term access can turn productive. They need to find ways to bridge the gap between new non-centralised, perhaps non-institutionalized archival strategies and their profession’s standards and procedures.
I this chapter we have discussed the first level of performing arts educational IT resources: the digital heritage resources and content repositories. Based on interviews at least a part of the digital resources need to be contemporary, they need to be diverse and stemming from different phases in the artistic production process. The digital content also needs to be of high quality in terms of intellectual and technical content. Repositories should act as open, transparent, participatory networks. Returning to the strategies as defined in EdReNe there are still key challenges to overcome. The first important one is copyright, and need for simplification and internationalization of copyright legislations for educational use of heritage and artistic objects (fair use policies). The second is the factor time, the time educators need for effectively adopting digital content and being able to evolve their learning methods. Furthermore two crucial divides appeared from analysing current practices. On the one hand the digital divide in the complexity and depth of using digital resources within the performing arts educational sector. On the other hand in creating repositories there is this archival divide between educators and performing arts practitioners on one side and performing arts heritage and information institutions on the other.
These divides have to do with awareness. The digital divide is running right through institutions and countries and can only in derivative ways be linked to divides in terms of preconditions of infrastructural access to IT resources. All educators are using (audio-visual) resources but actively engaging with them in terms of defining their width and depth as a source for scholarly and practice oriented education and research, in exploring their position within the domain as proprietors of knowledge and how they relate to other knowledge carriers could be much more supported. Within educational institutions there is need for more space for exploring and experimenting with (new) knowledge sources and the new pedagogic models they fit in.
The archival divide is an awareness issue as well. There is a great innovation push from performing arts companies and educational institutions to get digital performance resources available. But the performing arts domain as a whole needs to be more aware of archival practices and the importance of these practices. They need to be challenged to adapt and adopt digital preservation strategies in an archival landscape no longer dominated by central heritage and information institutions but created and influenced by all the domain players. The financial cuts in governmental funding of performing arts heritage institutions and the increase in general availability of professional IT solutions will be changing this landscape even faster and will make it more urgent to address this divide.
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Figure 4
2 (Non-)Institutionalized learning and research environments
The point of researching the three levels of educational IT separately is the fact that performing arts educators use these three levels more separately than integrated. But our interest is in combining them. Within the domain just a few people and projects are engaged in integrated concepts of combining repositories with virtual learning environments (VLE’s) and specialized tools. Before we discuss practices of domain specific initiatives, we will start with the context of general use of learning environments. Firstly the common presence of institutionalized learning environments like Moodle and Blackboard in universities and academies and secondly the emergence of generic e-learning environments specifically designed for creating lessons and modules based on digital heritage materials.
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Figure 5 This chart shows most respondents of the survey aim to create specific tools
Every performing arts teacher and learner is using an institutional educational environment. Educational institutions throughout Europe have implemented generic educational IT to enhance organization of courses and interaction between learner and teacher. Organizing interviews and surveys within the framework of ECLAP showed teachers and learners use online educational environments only at an organizational level.[23] Teachers communicate planning, course objectives, documents containing (preparatory) assignments etc. None of the respondents said they were engaging in pedagogic or intellectual interactions via this method. One of the main things missing in current institutionalized VLE’s is content, the actual intellectual or knowledge resources to create courses. There is almost no connection between (heritage) repositories and online learning or research environment. Users are accustomed to using different applications and tools simultaneously for different purposes and different tasks. Institutionalized virtual learning environments are a, often compulsory, first administrative level.
Consortia of heritage institutions are initiating projects to bridge the gap between educational environments and educational content.[24] These initiatives aggregate actual digital heritage resources built search features and create extensive course modules or learning pathways on top of them. Best practices of developing these specific VLE’s are based on close collaboration between disciplines, putting developers, archivist and pedagogics in one room. Another best practice is putting the teachers in the centre of development; they are the mediators between (digital) heritage resource, (digital) educational resource and learner.[25] They show students what IT is relevant, how it can be used and very important, how to use the right IT resource at the right moment. This way they introduce learners in effectively using IT to enhance their learning experience and introduce them in this essential part of the rest of their professional life.
As a start we define good practices from the perspective of users. Putting teachers at the centre, means the VLE needs to be adapted to their conditions of use. One is providing teachers with semi-finished educational products. Finding resources, combining them into themes or stories and ultimately creating courses takes a lot of time. Providing half-fabricates of selected thematic dossiers or e-course set ups has proven to be one of the main lessons learned.[26] Another key condition is not only providing half-fabricate educational resources, but to very carefully choose the subjects of these semi-finished e-courses. If the topics fit in with programmes and curricula running in educational institutions, the chance they are actually used increases considerably. Furthermore practice shows that assisting teachers in creating courses is also vital.[27] with abundant, good manuals and inspiring examples helps them to
Another group of good practices of (heritage driven) VLE’s is that it covers the entire teaching and learning process and support the three or four structural processes of cognition, motivation, assessment and self-evaluation and motoric skills.[28] Learning follows a ‘path’ from curriculum or idea, to preparation, to design of the course, to the learning experience itself into the last phase of testing, evaluation or self-reflection. Good educational IT creates these pathways for individual (teacher) and for collaborative approaches (teacher-learner). They combine learning-process-driven course modules with communication and network tools. The VLE should also be designed so it can be used in different settings, at home and in a classroom and progressively in mobile settings. A third group of good practices is a sharp focus on usability. There is extensive evidence and literature that just a small part of the teachers is able to get over technical and usability obstacles.[29]
Apart from actually integrating content, from a technical and business model perspective good practices of these heritage driven VLE’s are two key architectural characteristics: scalability and openness. Depending on the business model they are able to meaningfully integrate new kinds of heritage resources, able to adapt to new user groups and user levels and able to continue development by integrating new tools and features. On all levels they apply international standards. To be scalable and generic means respecting general IT standards, archival standards and educational IT standards in an integrated manner. It makes the e-learning environments internationally interoperable and compatible with other heritage and educational repositories.
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Figure 6 This chart shows that 1/3 of the respondents was integrating or aware of relevant standards.
Corresponding with findings in the paragraph above, these initiatives are yet primarily directed towards primary and secondary school children. The extent of the financial investments of these kinds of IT resources demands a corresponding volume of (potential) end users. From a business model perspective they focus on school kids having the same curriculum nationwide, sometimes Europeanwide. None of the initiatives discussed is self-sustainable without some way of government funding. One works with mixed approaches combining part public funding with selling licenses to organisations mediating in buying courseware for schools. A good practice derived from this approach is choosing partners on the same national or international level in adjacent business markets, who know your targeted market better. This is one of the ways to increase the impact and adoption of heritage driven VLE’s.
How do the performing arts fit in or how could their higher education benefit from these trends? To us only a few relatively small scale examples are known of attempting to create something like a VLE based on performing arts content.[30] One, The Tempest from Luminary Digital Media, was just launched this year and is one of the first examples of seriously trying to go mobile in performing arts higher education by creating a tablet application around work of Shakespeare.[31] A second example is the project Dancetraces from the Coventry University.[32] The project was a follow up to investigate how the use of Replay, the educational, archival repository of the work of dancer-choreographer Siobhan Davies, could be increased and enhanced.[33] D-traces focused on investigating how Replay and its resources could be more integrated used in the UK national e-learning infrastructure and more appreciated by learners. The third initiative was i-Theatre, a Dutch domain specific VLE combining contemporary digital performing arts audio-visual resources within an educational framework of multi-media essay writing and annotation and networking tools.[34] It was only used internally due to copyright restrictions on the content and currently not updated in terms of software and hardware requirements.
The lessons learned from these initiatives bring us to a set of challenges of performing arts-heritage driven-VLE’s.[35]
1. The question of bridging the physical encounter and distant learning possibilities;
2. Motivation – how can users be motivated to use virtual environments?
3. Again the copyright restrictions on contemporary digital resources which creates innate restrictions to the educational modules and eventually to the educational resources
4. Issues in long-term support of specialized performing arts educational IT
5. And on a more theoretical level how do these e-learning initiatives fit in the educational infrastructure of knowledge transfer and knowledge creation?
Since a few years mobile learning and blended learning methods are designated as the way education will develop in the nearby future.[36] Relationships between teachers and students will change and education will individualize and personalize. But developments around institutionalized VLE’s, around specialized educational mobile applications and creating domain specific repositories are until now quite separate realms. Performing arts education situated in so many different spaces like the studio, the classroom, the theatres and the home, would be an excellent domain to explore mobile educational applications and simultaneously exploring solutions for combining face-to-face encounters wíth distance learning.
In the final report of D-Traces one of the identified challenges is ‘digital inclusion’ and they tell about two laptops being bought to be used in the studio so all students would have basic internet access. [D-traces. Final Report, p. 16] This looks like a case where educational IT is added to a face-to-face tuition, and it looks like a case of translating desktop methods to a basically mobile situation. European performing arts higher education is very much desktop based, as well as European heritage driven VLE’s uphold desktop based practices.[37] Methods are challenged by artistic practices[38] and for example by the launch of the Tempest, but bringing together the quite separated processes of building VLE’s, building repositories and creating mobile application for higher education in strategies of providing access and tools on multiple platforms is one of the great challenges.
Within the domain users dislike institutionalized VLE’s plus there is a lack of awareness on the possibility of mobile applications.[39] How are performing arts users motivated to intensify the use of e-learning resources? One way is to adopt the best practices evolved in generic heritage VLE’s. Designing the dedicated IT around the teacher, giving him a central and intermediate position, facilitate the entire educational process and make it collaborative and networked from the start. Another clue is provided again by EdReNe, support the community practices with specific tools and services. State of the art, as well as a best practice is the mobile application developed complementary to the Transmedia Knowledge Base, which is due to be launched.[40] A tablet application is developed to visually annotate either the videos shot in real time by the artists or the archived resources from the TKB repository. This app will allow users to study and analyse movements of performing artists by painting with the fingers on the tablet screen. It’s an example where IT allows learners and teachers to do something previously impossible. And it is an activity known to be needed in the different disciplines and educational settings of the domain. This multi-platform strategy answers to users multi-levelled needs and behaviour.
The third challenge is copyright restrictions on the heritage and artistic content. It is one of the main reasons why the output of the VLE’s, educational resources or (e-)courseware, cannot be opened up. Open educational resources or open courseware are learning and teaching materials published under licenses permitting the use and reuse of these materials by others.[41] Moving educational institutions towards choosing open strategies is strongly supported on all policy levels.[42] Collective license agreements can arrange the use of heritage content in education, but do not extrapolate to educational resources. The result of investment can only be used directly and not be shared with a wider community.
At this stage the performing arts can benefit from VLE development by learning from the successes and failures of more generic examples and/or by trying to join these initiatives. In itself important recommendations. Benefits on a more general, public level using and reusing the resources created by (heritage) content driven VLE’s is less easy and demands next steps in negotiating high level collective license agreements. The heritage domain is trying to deal with and overcoming the creation of isolated data silos.[43] Similarly the educational domain is finding strategies to overcome the creation of separate silos of educational resources. [Trendreport OER 2012, p. 35][44] In combining the two for the performing arts issues double up and challenges arise in terms of demanding intense cross domain copyright discourses.
A last important challenge discussed here is long term support of specialized IT resources. There have been attempt to create repositories; there have been attempts to create virtual environments, tools and services but partly are not available anymore.[45] Apart from continuous development approaches to answer to evolving user needs, already huge issues arise with securing permanent funding of hosting costs and answer to new software and hardware updates. All domain players try to facilitate continuous development by accumulating projects. But interviewed initiators of the long running initiatives indicate they have (small but vital) financial support from their own institution.[46] Organizing the development of educational IT in projects allows to generate extra funds and to create interdisciplinary, synergetic project teams, but denies in a way the permanent character of the delivered IT resources.
Huge efforts on national and European level are directed at developing financial sustainability and business models, but, at this stage, support from educational institutions is needed.[47] At least to make specialized IT survive three to four year cycles of software and hardware updates. The performing arts are comparatively a small educational domain. Focussing on higher education makes it even more compact. To address questions of (financial) sustainability one can look at mobile (or multi-)platform strategies as well. More state of the art than a best practice as well, initiators of the tablet application The Tempest have challenged themselves to become financially independent in a year after its launch in April 2012. Key features of their initiative are: they present different types of content around a specific topic; the provided tools are known to be needed, amongst which an text annotation tool; the topic itself, the Tempest, is part of the classic repertoire of international performing art education; they cross educational and non-educational user groups; they are networked, upholding best practices of developing web 2.0 tools; they uphold best practices of general IT development processes; and they have started small, working in a phased development process of adding features, content and devices. But they do charge for the app and a large part of its content is not open.
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Figure 7 The chart shows that respondents don’t disapprove of their own IT projects.
According to question 61, 10 respondents claim to have identified strategies to deal with multiple aspects of sustainability.
6 don’t have or don’t know about sustainability strategies.
To conclude what is the benefit of all of this? Theoretical models are designed to analyse the position and effectiveness of educational IT within the performing arts. With the slow increase of performing arts educational IT theorizing is starting on how e-learning initiatives fit in the domain specific infrastructure of knowledge transfer and knowledge creation.[48] Existing knowledge models are combined to explore notions that cross the different domains of IT, education and the arts.[49] Ideally knowledge spiral through a domain from professionals to learners, who become professionals themselves. Via interactions, networks, knowledge objects and practices it spirals from theory to practice and back, crossing disciplines and domains. In the end educational IT plays a modest role in learning and teaching processes, but if this modesty is acknowledged in the applied practices, and the IT resource is able to connect and facilitate the elements efficiently it can enhance educational processes and can be adopted.
3 (Task) tools for specific learning and research activities
Besides repositories and virtual learning environments, there is a third category of educational IT relevant to discuss. Within the performing arts domain perhaps the strongest drive to explore and develop educational IT solutions are specific education and research tasks. As already written above, most educators prefer to gather their own specific combination of tools and content to use with their students. This can be generic tools like (micro)blog- or wiki-applications, bibliographic citation tools like Zotero, or existing audio-visual media annotation tools like Ligne de Temps.[50] Generic research tools are mixed with more domain specific ones.
To mention a few types of (domain) specific task related tools:
- (3D)Training tools for stage design or lighting design
- Drama / text rehearsal tools
- Analysis software for sound or body movement
- Music or dance score analysis tools
- Performing arts historical analysis tools, like (virtual) reconstructing tools for historic theatre sites
- Online games about the history of performing arts
- (Visual) blogging and scrapbook tools
- Multi-media annotation tools for comparing and annotating performances via audio-visual registrations and other objects
Here the diversity of possibilities becomes apparent, the tools can be mapped to the overlapping four domains of education, IT, performing arts and (heritage) resources; they can be mapped to the parameters defining the user groups: orientation (theory or practice), level of education (primary-, secondary-, tertiary education, general audiences, specific target groups), and educational aim (training professionals within the field or non-professionals). And they can be connected to the education and research processes of describing, analysing, comparing, classifying, contextualizing and reconstructing performances, doing historic research en teaching practice. It depends on the very specific targeted educational community which blend or mix of tools is relevant.
It’s a challenge in itself to extract trends and practices from these different kinds of applied educational IT. Developments on this level are quite independent and discipline specific. Every discipline like dance, theatre and music have their own historically grown points of interest to support their educational tasks with IT. From the interviews with users and experts a selection of generic good practices in IT development and their relation to possible domain specific characteristics was extracted. This will be discussed in the last part of the chapter. All the tools can be positioned more or less closer to the integrated use of digital performance resources. In relation to repositories there are a few important categories, clustering the specific research, education and training tasks. Two will be discussed in the next paragraph. One is the group of annotation tools, covering all types of analysis and comparison tools. The second is the category of 3D or virtual design tools for different training and history education purposes.
1 Annotation and reconstruction tools
One of the main types of tools are annotation tools since they support the educational activity of analysing performances and resources.[51] They take different shapes depending on what needs to be analysed and they can incorporate specific tools themselves. We identify three main subcategories: tools for text annotations on digital text resources, tools for text annotations on multimedia objects and tools for visual annotations on multimedia objects.[52] Current developments allow layers of annotations on audio-visual resources, connecting annotations to moments in time-based media. Extended annotation tools have built-in networking, sharing or linking tools; they allow different digital resources to be connected. They cover processes of describing, analysing, comparing and contextualizing with practical educational and community requirements of communicating amongst students or between teachers and students. The best annotation tools are designed following an educational production process: gathering information, arranging information, analysing information and creating new information and knowledge. Collective and individual learning processes should both be facilitated in an open system.
Most annotation in annotation tools are text based. But the visual annotation tool developed alongside the Transmedia Knowledge Base allows students to analyse body movement. These (proto)types are initiated in the field of dance education. Interpreting dance requires the interpretation of movement, of action and reaction.[53] There is no basic source text to return to or to reinterpret. These type of tools exemplify why the quality of content needs to be high. Good practices in terms of creating annotation tools base their development on conceptual models of (tripartite) collaborations and act accordingly because they rely on participative models, open educational resources and knowledge sharing in communities.
The second category of domain specific tools are virtual reconstruction and design tools.[54] In the field of performing arts studies the historic reconstruction of performances and venues is of great importance. Teachers want to instill in their students a sense of what performances in the past were like. They want these students to develop a mental image—as accurate as possible—of what the theatrical event looked like and what it might have meant to a contemporary audience. In short, teaching performing arts history is about having one's pupils put together all the fragments back into a coherent and three-dimensional whole. Multimedia technologies like virtual reality techniques provide methods for this way of accessing and arranging knowledge. They function in the performing arts historic void for which no audiovisual registrations are available.
Virtual reconstructions can be positioned somewhere between the traditional reconstruction methods of sketch and the real replica. Building a virtual theatre forces a student to be as accurate as possible. There is no room for leaving things unclear (as one can do with a sketch) and also one cannot dismiss certain problems because the solution is dictated anyway by the budget or the building materials. This interaction between reconstruction and medium is one of the more interesting aspects of historical research with the aid of virtual theatre models. These virtual environments are in the best cases based on existing historic objects and texts.
2 IT practices in relation to the performing arts
To conclude four generic good practices of IT projects are described in relation to performing arts domain.
I Collaboration and interdisciplinarity
It has been mentioned many times in previous chapters and all the interviewed experts indicate the same, the importance of collaborations. The performing arts themselves are always a product of collaborations between multiple artists, writers and technicians. This intrinsic interdisciplinarity is seen as a key aspect which should be mirrored in IT development processes. The development process itself should be approached collaboratively. The concept of the absence of a material, artistic end product and the concept of knowledge lying in the collective makes it a great challenge to create IT for this domain. A best practice in this respect is regularly planned interdisciplinary meeting or ‘labs’[55].
In the best cases the created platforms and tools have development teams including performing artists, multi-media specialists, educators, and pedagogics.[56] These best cases integrate real users and non IT-experts in the core of their projects, analysing behaviour, needs and ideas, in a next stage translating them in scenario’s and requirements. From an IT perspective this corresponds with concepts of socio-technical development processes.[57] User or behaviour driven development workflows should include deep user analysis including the user environment, paper prototyping, user testing, short iterations and continuous testing and feedback. It ensures that the delivered digital space coincides with and is complementary to the real and the social space the users are engaged in.
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Figure 8
II Multiple educational environments and mobility
Learning and teaching are individualizing and personalizing. Mixed forms of educational settings were face-to-face tuition is combined with individual and group (distance) learning are increasingly designed. Performing arts educational domain is not yet fully engaged in this direction, but from the general domain of educational IT this is one of the major trends.[58] The basic approach is to make educational platforms and tools interoperable with multiple device suppliers and operating systems. It’s not only a good practice driven by business model decisions; it is the first step to make learners mobile. The second step is device specific interaction and interface design. A third step is providing users with different tools and features per device, creating complementary experiences per device. Multi-platform development and publishing strategies are essential to connect to new generations of educational users.
III Artistic perfectionism and quality
Another characteristic of performing arts IT project is the visual or overall qualitative demands. In collaborative repository projects, interviewed experts indicate that the perfectionism with which performing artists approach their own works, is evenly applied to the educational and digital realm.[59] In project of virtual learning environments user-friendliness and visual quality in as least as important to get teachers and learners involved. If a socio-technical method is chosen then this is one of the characteristics to take into account in the performing arts domain. The qualitative demands stretch from content selection, content presentation and available metadata to all the web design aspects. Perhaps they go beyond basic usability practices, but usability testing is a first prerequisite in the acceptance process IT resources by end users.
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Figure 9
Another aspect filtered out by usability tests is the level of complexity your specific user group can handle. Specifically for educational IT is known, that it needs to be time saving instead of time consuming. As discussed teachers on every educational level generally don’t use tools and services if the learning curve takes (too much) time. This is one of the reasons why virtual learning environments are slowly adopted and why for example in the case of Les2.0 the Dutch heritage driven VLE is providing intermediate educational resources. Visual quality, user-friendliness and time efficiency are three key factors in developing performing arts educational IT.
IV Project infrastructure and scalability
As pointed out in the EdReNe report “generally used, open standards allow for the broadest range of partnerships, future adaptability and innovation.” And as describes above getting performing arts digital resources accessible requires large project resources and funding. Projects to create repositories with actual high quality content almost always start with small amounts of digitized or digital resources and with some basics educational features. Performing arts practices show that projects start small and can be accumulated over periods of 10 to 15 years to keep exploring and innovating.[60] To be sustainable requires being infrastructurally sustainable. Openness and using standards from all the relevant professions, to be adaptable and scalable is essential in temporally based, scars funding structures of the performing arts domain and the high speed innovation in IT in general.
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Figure 10
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Figure 11
5 Synthesis: Performing arts, archives, research
Performing arts objects in archives and collections have very specific characteristics and qualities when viewed as research and education objects. The performing arts are intangible cultural expressions, their essence based in their transitory character. Considering the artistic expression in this field as an encounter between author(s) and an audience via a temporally and spatially defined performance makes it on a fundamental level impossible to archive the totality of that expression itself. Therefore the digitized objects in ECLAP are in terms of research methodology always secondary or even tertiary sources. Sources that by their nature are more or less subjective testimonies or recordings of a unique event at a specific place and time that no longer exists but (at best) has left some traces behind.
The missing link in our domain is a fundamental one: the unique expression of the author is absent. The objects available only allow us to visualize or reconstruct the object of our education and research. We are in fact working with representations to the third degree: stating the theatrical expression itself as the primary source, the archived object being just a mere reflection (or incomplete part) of this expression, and the digitized objects being a derivative of the archival source. Immaterial aspects like the broader context and inspiration are at risk of exclusion. Performing arts are always situated in context; in the here and now of the encounter with the audience, and to some extend in the public debate in society. It is this reflective quality of performing arts that should not disappear under the radar of archives but made available. Context in performing arts is socially structured and relational and e-Tools could well function as mediators of these immaterial aspects. Ideally existing or custom-made e-Tools should be able to facilitate the revelation of the underlying reflective context of performances. They need to cross the dimensions allowing the user to interact with all the different levels of interpretation and understandings.
The reflective function of theatre, performances and performance artists takes a central position in the research and curriculum of theatre studies as well as in the field of theatre and education. Taking this perspective as a condition makes the analysis of archival preservation and access practices into a quest for the best model for capturing and preserving immaterial aspects of a performance. The question is; how can we preserve the reflective immaterial context of a performance? What kind of tools and services are available and what should be provided in order to promote and facilitate the use and reuse of digitized heritage objects? Which educational e-tools or learning user interfaces in the vast domain of education ICT industry are useful? And what strategies and models are relevant to address the needs of our specific target groups?
Education and research are in a way the perfect intermediary of knowledge between performers and archives, considering the tasks of annotating, archiving, interpreting and reconstructing performances. Metadata- and enrichment strategies as annotating and tagging, here conceived within the context of didactical tasks, play a vital role in facilitating the mediation between performers, archives and end users. However an interesting question is, if these strategies will guide us towards the digital equivalent of hypothetical research tool described by Vannevar Bush in his 1945 essay, As we May Think: “A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.” [Bush, 1945, p6] Bush formulates the fundamental principle in the design of his memex or hypothetical individual memory machine as a trail, of two or of innumerable, items/objects.
“The process of tying two items together is the important thing.”…“He (the owner of the memex) has dozens of possibly pertinent books and articles in his memex. First he runs through an encyclopaedia, finds and interesting but sketchy article, leaves it projected. Next, in a history, he finds another pertinent item, and ties the two together. Thus he goes, building a trail of many items. Occasionally he inserts a comment of his own, either linking it into the main trail or joining it by a side trail to a particular item.” [Bush, 1945, p7]
This creative, relational and associative process of building a trail of connected items could well be characterized as one of the major activities of researchers. Metadata and enrichment strategies like folksonomies, thesauri, free tagging and annotations facilitates mainly the archiving process of describing and categorizing cultural object, and do not, or only to a certain degree, facilitate creative connective knowledge distribution in electronic learning environments, let alone in Personal Learning Environments (PLE) or Personal Research Environments (PRE). Researchers tell stories based on the connections between these knowledge items in a trail and guide students to tell their own stories according to scientific methodologies. The use of historical sources is not only a matter of semantics but of action, interpretation, debate and meaning. This ‘making meaning process’ reveals the landscape of theatre studies, performance art on the one hand, and its pedagogy on the other. Both domains can be characterized as performative: Performatives are utterances that perform the action to which they refer. Here we touch the core of the missing link in the various classification and semantic enrichment strategies of cultural heritage institutions and eLearning environments.
Starting point for this working group A is the hypothesis that the best practices (e-learning tools, models / concepts) to study theatre and performance art are performative. These tools should facilitate the making meaning process as described above as well as the so-called performative speech acts in the (virtual) classrooms and or discourse network of academics and teachers working with (open) educational resources. At the pragmatic web conference i-Semantics in 2010 IRI presented their concept NiceTag, because “Current tag models do not fully take into account the rich and diverse nature of tags”.[Monnin, Limpens, Gandon, Laniado, 2010, p1] NiceTag is based on the principle that the act of tagging might as well be considered as a speech-act. “The resource, the sign and the link between them are the three components of the acts of tagging that we want to explicitly represent as social actions, akin to speech acts.” [Monnin, et al, 2010, p1] The underlying motive for assigning specific tags, be it associative, reflective or logical, to a chain of items establishes a trail of social relations between items that can be analysed; like the trail of items Vannevar Bush uses in hypothetical description of the memex. The x of the meme in memex (a portmanteau of "memory" and "index") relates to the act of knowledge item assemblage and in the world of digital semantics to the act of connecting knowledge items. He speaks of ‘slanting translucent screens’ and this idea might be a visionary prediction of the use of annotation layers on top of websites which can be done with OERglue beta: .
For bridging the gap between theatre studies and performance art within the digital habitat of digital preservation and education the use of metadata, tagging, folksonomies, and annotations are not enough to cover the needs of scholars. For performance artists, critics and theatre researchers it’s all about what’s in between the social relations and what’s being communicated. It’s all about the creation and distribution of meaning in performances and about the act of researching/teaching. The connections in between a trail of items are like social linked data in knowledge communities. Software as a Service models like OERglue, PLE’s of PRE concepts like AWESOME aim to cover “the necessary activities today’s researchers are faced with” [Reinhardt, Mietzko, Drachsler, Sloep, 2011, p1].[61]
As a result from these developments, this group advocates a shift in focus to how digital eLearning tools can be used to facilitate efficient, collaborative, relational scholarship at the time of distributed knowledge. To think beyond the delivery of digital content because it’s not only about availability, findability and sustainability, but also about what the system makes possible for the learning community. Zotero is one of the strong concepts and examples of a ‘Software as a Service model (SaaS), of working in the trail or in the cloud.[62] Zotero is a service that allows one to collect online references in the browser. It allows the user to organize, cite, share, sync, and collaborate their research sources and thus leveraging the tail of scholarship. It acts like a bridge or intermediate between the desktop, the web and the browser by using the potentiality of API’s and ADD-ons in the browser. Naturally SaaS products like Zotero can only become successful if these are able to efficiently facilitate the needs of the next generation of students and researchers. So one of the recommendations of this working group is to focus on the future personal learning and research models in the service of specific domains. To think beyond the classical learning environments like Moodle and Blackboard because teachers and researchers already act outside these learning spaces. By leveraging mobile, tablets, the browser and the desktop, one has to realize that it more and more comes to efficiently organizing connections and collaborative collections of trails. Services should act as the perfect go between. Therefore important basic questions are: what do researchers and students need and what are they already using in their daily digital learning/researching practise?
1 Recent Developments in Performance Art and Theatre Studies
In the era of digital remediation performance art is also undergoing a phase of transformation. Not only the national archives in the domain of theatre but also the producers are working on digital preservation, online presence and awareness. When it comes to the availability of relevant resources for the analyses of performances academics have to realize that the web 2.0 not only offers possibilities unique but that it also brings in certain problems. We can speak of a break, or missing link inside the institutionalized archive because students mainly use Google as primary research environment before they decide to physically visit the theatre museum or library. It reveals a crisis in authority because the students do not primarily gather information from books, journals, academic papers, and archives but instead they assemble and ctrl-v/ctrl-p information in the public spheres the World Wide Web. The consequence is that teachers are placed in front of a fundamental dilemma: how to relate to present-day learning and information retrieval strategies of a new generation of students and academics? Given the speed technology driven communication is evolving it’s about time we think in terms of solutions instead of problems. Intelligent of what is yet available can form the basis of this quest for solutions.
In the digital age knowledge transfer has transformed from an authoritative process into a relational knowledge-sharing model, framed by the encounters between teacher and student. These encounters are a fundamental part of educational practices and strategies. Research and best practices in the field of virtual research environments indicate that the development process of VRE’s (Virtual Research Environment) is a participatory mode of development, with researchers closely involved in generating the requirements and evaluating their implementation. “The development of a VRE needs to be broached not as a technological project but as a community building project, since without community buy-in, the VRE cannot fulfil its function. [Carusi, Reimer, 2010, p6] Other key findings of this JISC report mention the preference for a Web 2.0 style of development, sustainability, VRE’s needs to be driven by researchers, production of common taxonomies, data standards and metadata and finally a set of policies and legal frameworks. The growing interest in the development of virtual research applications and services reveals a shift towards participatory and evolutionary system design processes. Less institutional, flexible, reflexive, and with a strong focus on the potentiality of mash ups, API’s and web 2.0.
2 ECLAP and eLearning Tools for the Digital Humanities: Writing beyond Writing
In line with the key findings of JISC we may assign a certain degree of pertinence to the connection between the social need and the utility of the eLearning products. Publications in the field of the philosophy of techniques and engineering in the digital age will bring about fundamental considerations about the design of knowledge-based distribution system. Academics working in the domain of software analysis are interested in the problem of involving philosophy in the deep aspects of what is called engineering [Guliciuc, Guliciuc, 2010.] This working group would also like to plea for this deep core involvement in the design and engineering process of system based research and learning applications and/or mash ups. Current technological developments like SAAS, API’s and Mash ups seem to indicate that we’re working towards an open educational resources and open learning ecosystems that will bring about new strategies for knowledge sharing and eResearch 2.0.
From this perspective, we take the liberty to speak about these developments in the near future. Traditional academic writing will be questioned and changed through the advent of computer technology. That makes it possible to integrate textual and visual information to a much higher degree than before. The visualization of the concept writing beyond writing consists of three overlapping Venn circles.[63] Following this visual display
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Figure 12
of beyond writing as proposed by Elizabeth Hill Boone in the book The first writing: script invention as history and process [Houston, Boone, 2004, p.334] we may reflect on necessary system requirements for this design process of digital memory systems as ‘tripartite’ extension of the mind. This trilobed model of James Elkin overlaying writing, notation and picture, may also be used to visualise the central intermediate position of annotations in the overlap of circles containing text, images, and audio-visual content. So at the very heart of modern digital writing and memory systems that make synergetic use of text, images and audio-visual content are the annotation and tagging mechanisms employed in hypertexts. It’s also a powerful metaphor and perspective for the analysis of eLearning tools and environments. Annotations and NiceTags are like speech acts in the process of making meaning and adding context to the process of modern writing (in the broad sense using text, image, av). Annotations and NiceTags are the tools to intermediate information between text, image and audio-visual content. Contextualizing and recontextualizing information via mash ups and API’s make use of these special metadata streams like tags and annotations and act as a special service. The potentiality of API’s, Mash Ups can no longer be ignored if we want to achieve a creative personal research and learning environment for performing arts and cultural heritage institutions.
6 Recommendations and Challenges
1 Recommendations
- In the performing arts domain it is found that customized solutions are to be preferred over generic ones. Any educational effort (programs, e-tools or learning environments) should reckon with these in its didactics. In order to do this it is important to realize that the main subject of the field –the performance- is characterized by:
o Transitivity (performance as work of art is processual [production and reception of the work are simultaneous] and ceases to exist after the applause has died)
o Multimediality (performance consists of multiple sign systems and addresses eyes and ears – and sometimes other senses as well)
o Collectivity of production and reception (usually more than one person involved as ‘author’ and more than one person as audience)
o Ostension (‘stories’ on stage are not told but shown. This showing makes often use of the principle of iconic identity: i.e. material signs on stage are identical to their referents)
- Project model: true, collaborative interdisciplinarity is a prerequisite for performing arts educational IT projects. Tripartite models allow synergies between complementary domain expertise.
- Educational content model: integrate rich metadata and content. It should preferably contain contemporary objects, different format types of objects, and objects derived from different stages in the production process of performances.
- Knowledge model: analyze the performing arts knowledge objects and tangible and intangible knowledge flows you relate to and investigate and strengthen your position in the performing arts collective.
- When appropriate facilitate knowledge chains of creating and capturing, preserving and documenting, accessing and using, reusing and repurposing knowledge data.
- Educational IT model: consider learning environments, programs or e-tools as collaborative software, designed for and by learning communities. Design new tools and environments from the perspective of ‘a trail of connections’ between personal and collaborative learning – as ‘intermediate dashboards’. Design and coordinate course flows not as static and immutable entities but rather as flexible, evolving open learning ecosystems. In these systems one departs from the interpretivist learning principle that students should be taught to become independent, self-directive and autonomous learners. The content and usage of e-learning tools are developed in an inter-communal, self-regulative way whereby each learner can potentially contribute to the emerging ecosystem.
o Combine content (knowledge objects) with IT to support learning and teaching processes and specific learning and research tasks or activities
o Think in terms of scalable, multi-platform strategies
o Think in platform agnostic solutions and services. This recommendation stems from the fact that in the educational institutions throughout Europe there are differences as to platforms, connectivity, interoperability, etc.
o Connect to generic IT commonly used in the community
o Think beyond availability, sustainability, findability and thus in terms of the social, the relational and creativity.
- Open up to enable use, re-use and repurposing of data and resources in the best possible way
o Connect to techniques and strategies to produce and aggregate open educational resources and open courseware
o Choose licenses together with performing arts copyright holders
- Sustainability, long-term access and preservation
o Use international standards for IT, education and archiving in an integrated manner.
o Document the concept, the activities and the delivered outcomes
o Contain the permanent nature of maintaining IT
o Think at the earliest possible stage about how to consolidate efforts and achievements
2 Challenges
- Educational best practices using digital heritage are not per se best practices from the perspective of archives and archival standards. Converging practices of archives, education and performing artists is a great, urgent challenge in preserving contemporary performing arts resources in an arising de-centralized, non-authoritative archival playing field.
- Performing arts heritage institutions need raise the awareness of importance of archival best practices and standards and they could be more service oriented towards higher education and towards practitioners.
- Although most innovative projects of joining IT and content are initiated at institutions of higher education, only a few dedicated experts are actually involved. Awareness of the educational potential of performing arts content or digital knowledge resources needs to be spread throughout the educational field and towards management within higher education institutions.
- Long-term support for sustaining access and use of digital resources and IT products is still not commonly integrated in projects. Funding agencies need to be more supportive and directive in guiding the performing arts domain towards adopting sustainability strategies.
- On all operational levels of educational IT projects copyright issues need to be addressed. Specifically in the performing arts, online access to (contemporary) heritage objects and educational resources is extremely time consuming and can be hard to achieve.
- Too often IT products end up not meeting the exact needs of the targeted users. There is abundant, accessible information about good and best practices in developing IT, but awareness of these generic practices needs to be raised.
- There is a lack of overview of specific programs, tools and e-learning environments for the field of performing arts coupled to educational criteria and target groups.
7 Addendum to Chapter 4
WG A, Education and training tools, ECLAP 2012 Survey Outcomes
This chapter focused on the presence of educational IT projects, their characteristics and on the integration of heritage resources in educational IT. The dissemination of the survey was pushed via the networks of all the involved partners of ECLAP and people were personnally invited to fill it out. Even so there were 33 initial respondents to this chapter of the survey and only 16 people completed it. This makes the collected data not suitable for a quantative, statistical analysis. The charts below show the clean, submitted data. A selection of the charts has been integrated in the chapter 4 of the reports providing qualitative information and insights.
Chapter 1 Page: GENERAL INFORMATION ABOUT YOUR ORGANISATION
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Question 19: What would you say are the most pressing technology issues facing your organization at this point in time
|Answer related to topic: |Amount of responses |
|None |5 |
|Integration of social media |3 |
|Sustainability in terms of coordinating projects and synergy |3 |
|Sustainability in terms of hardware and software |3 |
|Didactic quality of IT |2 |
|Lack of media literacy skills |2 |
|Sustainability in terms of financing and funding |2 |
|User support |2 |
|Generation gap in user groups |1 |
|Unknown |1 |
Question 20: What would you say are the most pressing non technology-related issues facing your organization at this point in time?
|Answer related to topic: |Amount of responses |
|Sustainability in terms of financing and funding |10 |
|Sustainability in terms of decline in (educational) user groups |4 |
|None |4 |
|Sustainability in terms of coordinating projects and synergy |2 |
|Focus on management instead of hands on activities |2 |
|Unknown |1 |
Chapter 2 Working group A - PART 1: PERFORMING ARTS EDUCATION AND TRAINING TOOLS
The first set of questions was directed at a more general level of the involvement in the development of educational IT.
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Q27 and Q28 All submitted names of projects and websites alphabetically arranged on unique project name
| |Q 27 |
|Yes, 1.00010.000 unique end users |2 |
|Yes, ................
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