Group Admins
Description
Session Description
This poster and GASTA talk will highlight a series of playful OER-focused workshops that encourage students to creatively engage with the University of Edinburgh’s vast image collections and generate new adult colouring book artworks to be published under an open licence.
Initially ran during University’s Festival of Creative Learning week, students and staff participated in a series of collaborative workshops where they were inspired by over 40,000 images published by the University’s Centre for Research Collections (CRC) under a Creative Commons Attribution licence (CC BY). Combining both analogue and digital processes participants learnt key skills to transform photographs from the collection into new artworks.
There is the expectation for students to utilise reading lists as their starting point when conducting research, but perhaps not to explore image collections for content with corresponding or related metadata. This three-hour workshop afforded students from non-arts subjects, such as law or business, the opportunity to acquaint themselves with an unfamiliar, less conventional resource. CRC staff were on hand to provide further context and insight into the student selected images where available.
Common themes amongst the initial student feedback included the enjoyment of learning a new digital skill, investigating a rich image collection and collaborating on a creative publishing venture that will be shared with others.
Previous adult colouring book images created within the University’s Information Services Group have included portraits of Ada Lovelace, Grace Hopper and Mary Somerville. This series of notable ‘Women in STEM’ have garnered over 9,000 page views on Wikimedia Commons alone.
The first round of completed images is due for publication May 2019, coinciding with examinations, the colouring book will be distributed freely to students as a contribution towards their greater wellbeing. It’s anticipated that over 50 black and white vector-based artworks will be also be released as OERs via Flickr.
References
Cromar, S. (2019). Reflections on our Adult Colouring Book Workshops. Digital Learning Applications and Media (DLAM) blog, the University of Edinburgh. Available at: https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/dlam/2019/02/27/reflections-on-our-adult-colouring-book-workshops/
Anon (2018). Ada Lovelace Day blog, the University of Edinburgh. Available at: https://thinking.is.ed.ac.uk/ada-lovelace-day/
Aim, J (2017). ‘Mechanism of the Heavens’. Interactive Content blog, the University of Edinburgh. Available at: https://interactive-content.is.ed.ac.uk/mechanism-of-the-heavens/
Cromar, S. (2015). ALD15 – Review. Interactive Content blog, the University of Edinburgh. Available at: https://interactive-content.is.ed.ac.uk/ald15/
