Resisting the surveillance project: Siân Bayne keynote at #altc

This keynote presentation began by describing the ‘slow death’ of Yik Yak, an anonymous geosocial networking app launched in 2013. The software allowed people in close proximity to send and receive short, anonymous messages and write posts (Yaks). It was heavily marketed on university campuses. Yik Yak was totally anonymous, and was moderated by community […]

Launching the Open Education Handbook

This morning I am taking part in a hangout to launch The Open Education Handbook, a collaboratively written document published by Open Knowledge Foundation for which I acted as the editor for the most recent edition. Lots of people were involved in putting together the manual, both directly (in book ‘sprints’ and through a working […]

Ethics, Openness and the Future of Education #opened14

By popular demand, here are my slides from today’s presentation at Open Education 2014. All feedback welcome and if this subject is of interest to you then consider checking out the OERRH Ethics Manual and the section on ethics (week 2) of our Open Research course.

liveblog: Predicting Giants at #altc #altc2014

Here are my notes from this afternoon’s session at the ALT-C 2014 conference. There were three presentations in this session. Richard Walker (University of York) – Ground swells and breaking waves: findings from the 2014 UCISA TEL survey on learning technology trends, developments and fads This national survey started in 2001 and has since expanded […]

Liveblog – Catherine Cronin keynote at #altc #altc2014

For one day only I’m at The University of Warwick for the ALT-c conference where I’m speaking on OER Impact Map. (You can access my slides for today here.) Catherine Cronin (National University of Ireland, Galway) – Navigating the Marvellous: Openness in Education Catherine began with a quote that illustrates her view of eduction: “Education is […]

Open Research into Open Education #calrg14

Here are my slides from today’s presentation: feedback welcome as always. The project website is http://oerresearchhub.org and the OER Impact Map is available at http://oermap.org. Open Research into Open Education: The Role of Mapping and Curation from Robert Farrow

Guerrilla Research #elesig

Today I’m in the research laboratories in the Jennie Lee Building at The Institute of Educational Technology (aka work) for the ELESIG Guerrilla Research Event. Martin Weller began the session with an outline of the kind of work that goes into preparing unsuccessful research proposals. Using figures from the UK research councils he estimates that […]

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 […]

My ORO report

I’ve just a quick look at my author report from the ORO repository of research published by members of The Open University. I’m quite surprised to learn that I’ve accrued almost 1,300 downloads of materials I have archived here! An up to date account of my ORO analytics can be found at http://oro.open.ac.uk/cgi/stats/report/authors/31087069bed3e4363443db857ead0546/. I suppose […]

JiME Reviews December 2013

We’ve got a great set of new books in for review in the Journal of Interactive Media in Education (JiME) at the moment – thanks to Routledge for the review copies. If you’re interested in reviewing any of the following then get in touch with me through Twitter or via rob.farrow [at] open.ac.uk to let […]