Transcript for Visitors & Residents

Hello, my name is Dave White and I’m the co-manager of an e-learning research and development unit based here at the University of Oxford.

So the Visitors and Residents Principle

is a guide to assessing people’s motivation towards the Web.

Well, the principle came out of work that we were doing on a JISC-funded project called Isthmus,

where we were looking at the institutional provision of e-learning

and the culture of the wider Web and trying to bridge that divide,

because the culture of the wider Web had changed significantly

with the emergence of social media over the preceding five years or so.

And we surveyed our students, our students are lifelong-learning students, at a distance,

but generally speaking older than the traditional undergraduate.

And we surveyed them and we interviewed them

and one of the things that came out of that project was this Visitor-Resident Principle.

Because we started to note that people seem to have very particular approaches towards the Web,

which weren’t based on their skill, and techno-skill, if you like,

and it also didn’t seem to be based on their age.

It seemed to me to do with a different form of motivation altogether.