Workshop Notes: #Ethics and #LearningAnalytics

This morning I’m attending a talk given by Sharon Slade about the ethical dimensions of learning analytics (LA), part of a larger workshop devoted to LA at The Open University’s library on the Walton Hall campus. I was a bit late from a previous meeting but Sharon’s slides are pretty clear so I’m just going to […]

Ethical Use of New Technology in Education

Today Beck Pitt and I travelled up to Birmingham in the midlands of the UK to attend a BERA/Wiley workshop on technologies and ethics in educational research. I’m mainly here on focus on the redraft of the Ethics Manual for OER Research Hub and to give some time over to thinking about the ethical challenges […]

Sociology & Big Data

Can sociological researchers make use of big data? Should they? There’s something equivocal going on between the allure of massive data sets and the temptation to try and explain everything in terms of that data… New Sociological Approach to Big Data » Sociology Lens.

Data Maps: The Next Level

An interesting post by Young Hahn on map hacking has given me some food for thought with respect to the redesign of the OER Evidence Hub. This article led me to another, Take Control of Your Maps by Paul Smith. If I was a better programmer I could probably put some of the ideas to work […]

Data Visualization for Humanities

Here are my notes from today’s OU seminar which offers a survey of major online humanities datasets and some of the tools available for visualising them. Speakers: Dr Elton Barker (Classical Studies Department, The Open University, and Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Freie Universität Berlin) Ms Mia Ridge (PhD student, The Open University, and Chair of […]

What is Open Access?

I just had to share this video from PhD Comics. A really neat introduction to the issues surrounding access to scientific literature…

Data Visualization Tools

There’s a nice list of data visualization tools available on netmagazine. I think it would be really interesting to experiment with a few of these in the context of the redevelopment of the OLnet Evidence Hub in the OER Hub project. Modest Maps could be used instead of Google Maps to provide geolocation for organisations, […]

The Teacher’s Apple

Tess Pajaron sent me the following infographic which attempts to substantiate the claim that Apple is winning the battle for tech presence in the classroom and for use by educators. You can see the full page at http://newsroom.opencolleges.edu.au/features/the-teachers-apple/.

Scoop.It Activity!

My Scoop.It activity has gone through the roof in the last 48 hours. I would normally expect maybe half a dozen rescoops in a week and I’ve had forty in the last two days. Here are just the email notifications from this morning… The posts which seem to be getting the most attention are 50 […]

FRRIICT: Oxford Workshop

Framework for Responsible Research & Innovation in ICT (FRIICT) is an ESRC research project led by Marina Jirotka from the University of Oxford and Bernd Stahl from De Montfort University. Last month I attended their inaugural workshop, entitled “Identifying and addressing ethical issues in technology-related social research”. The overall aim of the project is to: […]