There seems to be a whole spate of papers, blogs and reports published lately around MOOCs, Learning Analytics and the use of Labour Market Information. One possibly reason is that it takes some time for more considered research to be commissioned, written and published around emerging themes and technologies in teaching and learning. Anyway I’ve spent an interesting time reading at least some of these latest offerings and will try to write up some notes on what (I think) they are saying and mean.

One report I particular liked is ‘A murky business: navigating the ethics of educational
research in Facebook groups” by Tony Coughlan and Leigh-Anne Perryman. The article, published in the European Journal of Open, Distance and e-Learning, is based on a reflection of their own experiences of researching in Facebook. And as they point out any consideration of ethical practices will almost inevitably run foul of Facebook’s Terms and Condition of Service.

Not withstanding that issue, they summarise the problems as “whether/how to gain informed consent in a public setting; the need to navigate online disinhibition and confessional activity; the need to address the ethical challenges involved in triangulating data collected from social media settings with data available from other sources; the need to consider the potential impact on individual research participants and entire online communities of reporting research findings, especially when published reports are open access; and, finally, the use of visual evidence and its anonymisation.”

Although obviously the use of social networks and Facebook in particular raise their own issues, many of the considerations are more widely applicable to Learning Analytics approaches, especially to using discourse analysis and Social Network Analytics> This discussion came up at the recent EmployID project review meeting. The project is developing a  number of tools and approaches to Workplace Learning Analytics and one idea was that we should attempt to develop a Code of Practice for Learning Analytics in the workplace, similar to the work by Jisc who have published a Code of Practice for Learning Analytics in UK educational institutions.

As an aside, I particularly liked the section on “confessional’ activity’ and ‘online disinhibition’ based on work by Suler (2004) who identified six factors as prompting people to self-disclose online more frequently or intensely than they would in person:

• Dissociative anonymity – the fact that ‘when people have the opportunity to separate their actions online from their in-person lifestyle and identity, they feel less vulnerable about self-disclosing and acting out’;

• Invisibility – overlapping, but extending beyond anonymity, physical invisibility ‘amplifies the disinhibition effect’ as ‘people don’t have to worry about how they look or sound when they type a message’ nor about ‘howothers look or sound in response to what they say’;

• Asynchronicity – not having to immediately deal with someone else’s reaction to something you’ve said online;

• Solipsistic introjection – the sense that one’s mind has become merged with the mind of the person with whom one is communicating online, leading to the creation of imagined ‘characters’ for these people and a consequent feeling that online communication is taking place in one’s head, again leading to disinhibition;

• Dissociative imagination – a consciously or unconscious feeling that the imaginary characters “created” through solipsistic interjection exist in a‘make-believe dimension, separate and apart from the demands and responsibilities of the real world’ (Suler, 2004 p.323).

• The minimization of authority (for people who do actually have some) due to the absence of visual cues such as dress, body language and environmental context, which can lead people to misbehave online.

Suler, J. (2004). The Online Disinhibition Effect. In CyberPsychology & Behaviour,
7(3), (pp. 321-326). Available from http://www.academia.edu/3658367/The_online_disinhibition_effect. [Accessed 10 September 2014]

I used to post on this blog almost every day. Lately I haven’t been posting much. I am not worrying too much about it, but have been thinking about why.

I think it is largely to do with changes in my work. In the past, I was primarily a researcher, working on all manner of reports and projects, mostly in the field of elearning and knowledge development. My primary mode of work was desk research: in other words I read a lot. I can remember twenty years ago when I first moved to Bremen in Germany I used to travel about once every four months to the University of Surrey at Guildford (which was the easiest UK university to get to from Gatwick airport). I would spend thirty pounds on a photocopying card, spend an entire day in the university archives and travel back with photocopies of 60 or 70 research papers. I kept these for years before I realised I never looked at them. By 2000 of course, access to research was moving to the web. One of the big changes this heralded was the arrival of grey literature. Interestingly this term which was much used at the time, seems to have gone out of fashion, as it has slowly become accepted that web based materials of all kinds have at least some validity in the research process. So called grey literature gave access to a wider range of thinking and ideas than could be gained from official journal papers alone, although the debate over how to measure quality is far from resolved.

And to bring this up to date, the emergence of Open Educational Resources, Open Journals and specialist networks like the excellent ResearchGate, have increased the discoverability of research ideas and findings.

I used to enjoy the research work. And it was easy to blog. There would always be something in a paper, on a web site, in a network to comment on. I wrote a lot about Personal Learning Networks, a popular subject at the time, and through speaking at conferences and seminars got new ideas for more blog posts. But there were some frustrations to this work. Although we talked a lot about PLEs and the like, it was hard to see much evidence in practice. Our ideas were often just that: ideas which had at best limited evaluation and implementation in the field. Most frustratingly, few of the projects were

In the first week of September, I attended two conferences – the Association for Learning Technology Conference (ALT-C) at Warwick University in the UK and the European Conference on Educational Research (ECER) hosted by Porto University in Portugal.

I guess there were some 500 people at ALT-C. Most seemed to be juggling two devices online at most times. And there were literally thousands of tweets using the Alt-C hashtag. the ECER conference was mush bigger with over 2600 registered delegates. I didn’t see too many onine. And there were very few tweets using the ECER hashtag. It was suggested to me this was because a singly hashtag is too broad to encompass the woide range of topics covered in ECER’s different networks. But I don;t think that was the reason. Although for those of us working with technology, online immersion has become a way of life, the culture of educational researchers has not yet embraced such an idea. Of course most – if not all 0 educational researchers are computer literate and of course teh internet is a key tool for accessing documents and for communication. But for most that is it.

A personal reality check

Its several years since I have been to the AltC conference in the UK. And I have missed the chance to catch up with friends and colleagues workings in Technology Enhanced Learning in the UK. One reason I have not been going to the conference is it usually takes place in September, the high season of conferences, and there always seem to be clashes with something else. The main reason is simple though – the cost. With a conference fee of something over £500 excluding accommodation and travel, without a sponsor it is pretty hard to justify so much expenditure. The saddest thing about that cost is I suspect it excludes many young and emerging researchers, unable to meet the fee from their own pocket and with institutions increasingly limiting conference expenditure. My daughter tells me that, albeit in a different field, her university provides her conferences fees of just £500 a year!

Anyway, this year I am lucky enough to have a project to pay and have submitted, together with my colleagues working on the project the following abstract. You can find out more about the LMIforAll project at www.lmiforall.ork.uk

The challenges of open data: emerging technology to support learner journeys

Authors: Attwell, G., Barnes, S-A., Bimrose, J., Elferink, R., Rustemeier, P. & Wilson, R.

Abstract 

People make important decisions about their participation in the labour market every year. This extends from pupils in schools, to students in Further and Higher education institutions and individuals at every stage of their career and learning journeys. Whether these individuals are in transition from education and/or training, in employment and wishing to up-skill, re-skill or change their career, or whether they are outside the labour market wishing to re-enter, high quality and impartial labour market information (LMI) is crucial to effective career decision-making. LMI is at the heart of UK Government reforms of careers service provision.

Linking and opening up careers focussed LMI to optimise access to, and use of, core national data sources is one approach to improving that provision as well as supporting the Open Data policy agenda (see HM Government, 2012). Careers focussed LMI can be used to support people make better decisions about learning and work and improve the efficiency of labour markets by helping match supply with demand, and helping institutions in planning future course provision. A major project, funded by the UK Commission for Employment and Skills, is underway led by a team of data experts at the Institute for Employment Research (University of Warwick) with developers and technologists from Pontydysgu and Raycom designing, developing and delivering a careers LMI webportal, known as LMI for All.

The presentation will focus on the challenge of collaborating and collecting evidence at scale between institutions and the social and technological design and development of the database. The database is accessed through an open API, which will be explored during the presentation. Through open competition developers, including students in FE, have been encouraged to develop their own applications based on the data. Early adopters and developers have developed targeted applications and websites that present LMI in a more engaging way, which are targeted at specific audiences with contrasting needs. The web portal is innovative, as it seeks to link and open up careers focused LMI with the intention of optimising access to, and use of, core national data sources that can be used to support individuals make better decisions about learning and work. It has already won an award from the Open Data Institute. The presentation will highlight some of the big data and technological challenges the project has addressed. It will also look at how to organise collaboration between institutions and organisations in sharing data to provide new services in education and training. Targeted participants include developers and stakeholders from a range of educational and learning settings. The session will be interactive with participants able to test out the API, provide feedback and view applications.

Reference

HM Government (2012). Open Data White Paper: Unleashing the Potential. Norwich: TSO.

Always on the lookout for practical ways to use technology in the classroom, Pontydysgu were scoping out new ideas at Bett 2014.

We liked the new Lego storytelling kit. One set gives you a tray of Lego bits, there are minifigs, cats, frogs, brooms, Christmas trees and more.  You also get a book of lesson plans and ides and the accompanying software. There’s also a spinner to help choose a genre or character for storytelling inspiration.  The idea is that children work in groups to tell a story, each group has a kit with enough lego bits to recreate the same scene 5 times only each one is slightly different as their stories progress.  They then take photos of their scenes and upload them to a computer where they can drag and drop the photos into a comic strip style template, add backgrounds and captions and print their story.

The software is nice and simple to use, the lego kit has been carefully selected for optimum storyline coverage and it has the lego brand – guaranteed to spark some interest in even the most reluctant of storytellers.

Now, here at Pontydysgu we like a good idea, but what we like even more is a free idea.  So in the tradition of those catwalk-fashion at highstreet-prices magazine articles I bring you “BETT on a budget”

To create your own comic strip you will need;

A collection of small-world-play or dolls house characters and accessories.

A camera/ webcam/ cameraphone with the ability to transfer your photos to a computer.

Internet access.

An app or web based tool for comic strip creation using photographs.

Here are some I’ve been trying out this week;

Web based

Toondoo – Free- You need to create account but it is easy to do. Upload photos, edit, cut shapes out and save, then go to  cartoon creator, choose comic strip layout and you can put your own images into a cartoon, choose layout template, drag and drop backgrounds and cliparts, callouts and thought bubbles to create a story.

Downloads

Lego Storystarter software – for creating comics, and other styles Newspaper, old manuscript £107.99 inc VAT (the whole kit based on a class of 30 is £779.99 in VAT)

Comic Life – Cost £11.99 for a single user license or £1,049 for a site license.

Apps for iOS/Android

Comic touch – Free – From the creators of comic life this App cartoonises one photo at a time with no comic strip mode so you would have to print them and reassemble into a comic strip or download the pictures after editing and then use a different tool to put your story together.