What's Going On?: a customisable video-interpretation tool

DART (Digital Anthropology Resources for Teaching) is a JISC/NSF-funded project involving the London School of Economics (LSE) and Columbia University in New York, aiming to address problems in the undergraduate teaching of anthropology through the development of digital learning tools and other learning activities. At Columbia the team are addressing large-scale issues through the development of digital library technologies, whereas at the LSE we are working on the small-scale, building digital learning tools to tackle specific teaching problems in anthropology. The tools we have developed are designed to be completely customisable, so that their content can be replaced, and the tool re-used for teaching a different subject. In this paper we focus on one of these tools, a video-interpretation exercise that we call “What’s Going On?”. We explain how the tool has been used in teaching at LSE and evaluate its success. We also show how the tool can be customised to use different content, and provide evidence of its successful re-use at another university.