Projects done in the past
Below are some examples of projects the ICTO-SW team has undertaken together with staff of the College and Graduate School Social Sciences, UvA.
Knowledge clips
The ICTO-SW team has done some fabulous work with making knowledge clips to be used in classes or as orientation materiaal to help students make choices in what they want to do.
1) The “web-class” for anthropology is meant for students who still have to decide which bachelor they want to enroll for. Since most high schools do not offer Anthropology as a class, many students don’t have a firn grasp of what the programme entails. This web-class hopes to make that clear in an easy to follow manner. Erella Graziani walks us through some of the aspects of what studying Anthroplogy entails.
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2) This animation gives insight into the specialisation Policy and Management within Political Science, making some difficult concepts easy to grasp:
3) The first clip we made is one we are especially proud of, explaining the concept op Gentrification:
International Development Studies
In 1985 the Workgroup Development Issues (Werkgroep Ontwikkelingsvraagstukken, WOV) was established at the University of Amsterdam (UvA), when all International Development Studies expertise was bundled into one interdisciplinary workgroup. At this time the International Development Studies Lecture Series was held for the first time. The lecture series was set up in such a way that students from all over the Netherlands could participate.
Late 2006 a cooperation with the World Bank and UNDP was introduced, which allowed videoconferences with lecturers worldwide. To enrich the experience UvA lecturer Nicky Pouw organized the participation of students from India and Colombia. As the Global Development Learning Network, who joined a year later, posted on their website: “Each class, […] students connect with their peers in Bogotá and New Delhi, and together listen to lectures by specialists from around the world, including universities, non-governmental organizations, the United Nations and the World Bank.”
Up to 2008 the lectures were broadcasted live to all the participants, but due to increasing costs, time differences in teaching schedules and due to fact that this way of broadcasting is very labor intensive it was decided to film and edit the lectures. The lectures were then posted online for the Southern partners to view at a time of their convenience.
Since 2009 we have hosted a website with all the lectures provided under a creative commons license and continue to update the weblectures up till today.
SMS project ‘Alternative view’
During semester 1, 2009-2010 professor Gerd Junne (Political Sciences) asked us to help with
integrating mobile phones into the educational program of Internationale Betrekkingen. We realized his idea to send students a weekly question in a text message with a topic related to the classes. The students were supposed to reply with an answer within the limits of 160 characters of a text message. These messages were then gathered by ICTO and published on a blog (ib-uva.blogspot.com), where students could start a discussion based on the responses. In the next class Gerd Junne was able to discuss the input. His idea behind this project was to make education more interactive and make use of technologies most students are thoroughly familiar with. Using mobile phones provided this need and had as positive element that students could answer almost anytime and anywhere. In a class evaluation students responded they appreciated the challenged and that they experienced a closer bond wit the topic in class.
Geonatris
In 2009 Ton Dietz, Herman van der Wusten and Frank den Hertog approached the ICTO team 
Social Sciences. They wished to connect the users and the authors of the book Van Natuurlandschap to Risicomaatschappij online. The goal of this website was to allow a community of practice to add relevant information (e.g., articles and links) to sections of the book. The website that was build is structured in such a way that selected members (the community of practice) can add that information to pages that contain the PDFs that hold the various sections of the book. The work of the community of practice enables other visitors to download more than just the book. They can download updates and related information on the topics as well.
The ICT and Education team has fulfilled various roles in this project. Before building the platform, the team acted as a consultant in order to help the Dietz, van der Wusten, den Hartog and project leader Jaap Rothuizen turn their idea into a project plan. After working out the best way to shape the platform, it was actually build by the team. Subsequently, the team has been advising the project leader about managing the community of practice.