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The Project

This website has arisen out of a collaboration between the staff of the Essex Record Office, Harry Carmichael (formerly Head of History at Southend High School of Boys) and Patrick Carmichael (Lecturer in Education at the University of Cambridge Faculty of Education).

Originally, the intention was to produce a set of paper materials for classroom use, and the original transcriptions of sources and the writing of the essays now on the website were produced with this in mind. In 2002, however, a decision was taken to convert the material into an online resource. Rather than present the materials as 'downloads' or as static web pages, however, the sources, essays and other contextual information have been constructed as a 'hypertext' which can be explored by users in a number of ways.

The design of the website is also informed by current practice in KS3/4 History, with its emphasis on analysis of source material, and by work on 'Assessment for Learning' which stresses the importance of dialogue between teachers and learners in determining where they are in their current thinking and what they might need to do in order to advance their understanding. This has drawn on the work of the Learning how to Learn Project, a project of the Economic and Social Research Council's Teaching and Learning Research Programme.

You can read more about the development of the project and the design process used to plan the website in the Spring 2003 issue of the Curriculum Journal.

The Website - some Technical Details

Resource Definition Format

RDF or 'Resource Definition Format' is the emerging standard for the construction of 'semantic web' resources, and allows complex relationships between entities to be expressed. When you enter the site, a 'graph' or network of sources, biographies and links is constructed. It is this which allows users of the site to begin their exploration of the sources at any point; every time a source is requested, a search of the 'graph' is conducted for related materials.

More about RDF and the Semantic Web:

Metadata

The sources themselves are stored as minimally formatted text documents. What allows them to be retrieved and aggregated into web pages are small packets of descriptive information (metadata).

These use categories and vocabularies drawn from a number of established metadata sets:

Programming

The website is programmed in Perl, a free programming language particularly useful for processing text. The core program uses the RDF::Parser module to aggregate content and construct a the logical structure from which each web page, with content and links, is built.

For more about Perl and its role in handling complex data, see:

Hosting

The web site is currently hosted on the server of the ESRC 'Learning how to Learn' project as it is configured to provide metadata-driven web content.

Further Information and Contact Details

For further information about the website, its design and content, please contact essex-ecw@learntolearn.ac.uk or write to:

Dr. Patrick Carmichael
University of Cambridge Faculty of Education
Shaftesbury Road
Cambridge
CB2 2BX

This website is part of the Essex Grid for Learning and uses resources from the Essex Record Office. Essex Record Office Essex Grid for Learning