Thinking Learning Analytics

I’m back in the Ambient Labs again, this time for a workshop on learning analytics for staff here at The Open University. Challenges for Learning Analytics: Visualisation for Feedback Denise Whitelock described the SaFeSEA project which is based around trying to give students meaningful feedback on their activities.  SaFeSEA was a response to high student …

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 …

ITC Distance Education Survey Results #elearning2014

Here at eLearning 2014 Fred Lokken of Truckee Meadows Community College presented the results of the most recent ITC survey into distance education.  This is the 10th annual edition of the survey, which is the the primary college-focused distance education survey.  The results are sent to all college presidents as well as to key media outlets. …

A Battle for Open?

Martin Weller has a thought-provoking editorial in the latest issue of JiME.  He argues that many of the battles for open education have been won but that the movement now faces the challenge of balancing all kinds of different aims and aspirations.  Is openness about freedom?  Is this an argument about business models or a …

Liveblog: George Siemens at Open Ed 2013

David Wiley introduced George by noting that he wrote the course for which the term ‘MOOC’ was originally created.  George similarly paid tribute to David’s stewardship of the OER movement.  Here are George’s slides, helpfully made available ahead of time. The presentation started with a bit of a review of George’s experiences as a blogger …

Evidence of OER Impact

Here are my slides from today’s presentation at the Open Access Conference in San Jose.  There will probably be some tweaks to this before presentation at Open Ed 2013. OER Impact: Towards an Evidence Base from Robert Farrow

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.

JiME Reviews: September 2013

Fresh off the press, we have a new volume available for review at the Journal of Interactive Media in Education. If you’re interested in reviewing the following volume for us, please drop me a line. Marilyn Leask, Norbert Pachler (eds.) Learning to Teach Using ICT in the Secondary School – A companion to school experience (3rd …

Socratic Method, Mazur and ‘Peer Learning’

I realise I haven’t been keeping up with blogging here (the perennial blogging complaint), mainly because I’ve been contributing blogs to the OER Research Hub project.  But I think there should be a bit more activity here as well as a bit of cross-posting (oh for the ability to re-blog between .com and .org installs …