Breadlines
February 7th, 2019 by Graham Attwell
This poem by Matt Sowerby was the first prize winner in the 16-18 age category in the End Hunger UK challenge on Young Poets Network.
Archive for the ‘Multimedia’ Category
Indigenous Knowledge Systems, Cognitive Justice and Restorative Action
January 25th, 2019 by Graham Attwell
In reply to a comment by Cristina Costa on the Social Theory Applied Facebook site, Randolph Presisinger Kleine wrote “I recommend to get in touch with Prof. Catherine A. Odora Hopper. She’s one of the most influential thinkers in Africa. Some years ago she founded an African think tank, whose mission is to build a African paradigm, that shall overcome the shortcomings and pitfalls in Western social theory.” Randolph pointed to this video. It goes a long way to explaining my unease around strategies for overcoming teacher shortages in Sub Saharan Africa through the se of Technology Enhanced Learning. Nothing wring with that per se but are we just transporting knowledge paradigms not only from the rich countries, but from the tech industry in those countries?
The worst online learning ever?
August 28th, 2018 by Graham Attwell
This video has gone viral in the last week. Donald Clark, on his blog ‘Donald Cark Plan B’ explians “PewDiePie is a legend among his 65 million YouTube followers. He lives in my home town, Brighton, and has built his reputation on videos that praise, review and sometimes eviscerate games. Unusually, this piece of US gamified, elearning was his target and he nails it.” “Could this be the worst piece of online learning ever?”, Clark asks. “Let me explain why it may well be…”
Barcelona in 1908
August 14th, 2018 by Graham Attwell
We have a new project starting soon on informal learning and smart cities (more details in next few weeks). I am particularly interested in how we might be able to use video in such a project. Anyway I stumbled on this video of Barcelona from 1908 and was thinking both how familiar the different places in the video look and at the same time how different.
Identity transformation and Industry 4.0
August 8th, 2018 by Graham Attwell
Creating social online spaces to facilitate learning for identity transformation from Graham Attwell
Here are the slides from a presentation I gave at the Bundeswehr BildungsKongress In Hamburg last autumn. The theme of session was Industry 4.0. I think the ideas we have developed on identity transformation in the EmployID project which fosused on work with Public Employment services meet the challenges being posed by German Vocational Educati0n and Training researchers aorund moves towards Industry 4.0.
Open Educational Practices
May 28th, 2018 by Graham Attwell
Conceptualising OEP: A review of theoretical and empirical literature in Open Educational Practices from Catherine Cronin
Good presentation at Open Education Global Conference, April 24th, 2018 – based on a paper by Catherine Cronin & Iain MacLaren (2018), Open Praxis, 10(2). They define Open Educational Practices (OEP) as the Use/reuse/creation of OER and collaborative, pedagogical practices employing social and participatory technologies for interaction, peer-learning, knowledge creation and sharing, and empowerment of learners. Open Educational Practices.
Catherine Cronin has also posted References and Links from the presentation in an open Google document.
Learning Design
May 11th, 2018 by Graham Attwell
Grainne Conole talks about the promise and reality of using technology for learning. She asks “is technology changing learning and teaching? Social media, she says offer new ways to communicate and collaborate. There is a wealth of free resources and tools but they are not being fully exploited. The presentation focuses on Learning Design as a pedagogically informed approach to design that makes appropriate use of technologies and provides a wealth of practical examples.
Designing Learner Dashboards
May 2nd, 2018 by Graham Attwell
The UK Jisc are really good at producing on line reports of workshops and meetings (something which I am not!). This is one of the presentations from the Student Experience Experts Group meeting, two of which events held every year to share the work of the student experience team at Jisc and to offer opportunities for feedback and consultation on current activities. The Jisc web page provides a brief summary of the meeting and all of the presentations. I picked this one by Liz Bennett from the University of Huddersfield because the issue of how to design dashboards is one which perplexes me at the moment.
Open Education
May 2nd, 2018 by Graham Attwell
According to OER Commons…
“The worldwide OER movement is rooted in the human right to access high-quality education. The Open Education Movement is not just about cost savings and easy access to openly licensed content; it’s about participation and co-creation.”
Thsi presentation by Lorna Cambell from her keynote at the FLOSS UK Spring Conference provides a great overview of the Open Education landscape. A transcript of her speech is available on her blog.
Another one bites the dust
February 14th, 2018 by Graham Attwell
A reminder of the problems of so called ‘free’ software and services. It is way past time for new sustainable models. Alan Levine says “A salute to just 59 once vibrant free web sites that have bitten the dust or were sent to the dead web cemetery when purchased.”
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News Bites
Cyborg patented?
Forbes reports that Microsoft has obtained a patent for a “conversational chatbot of a specific person” created from images, recordings, participation in social networks, emails, letters, etc., coupled with the possible generation of a 2D or 3D model of the person.
Racial bias in algorithms
From the UK Open Data Institute’s Week in Data newsletter
This week, Twitter apologised for racial bias within its image-cropping algorithm. The feature is designed to automatically crop images to highlight focal points – including faces. But, Twitter users discovered that, in practice, white faces were focused on, and black faces were cropped out. And, Twitter isn’t the only platform struggling with its algorithm – YouTube has also announced plans to bring back higher levels of human moderation for removing content, after its AI-centred approach resulted in over-censorship, with videos being removed at far higher rates than with human moderators.
Gap between rich and poor university students widest for 12 years
Via The Canary.
The gap between poor students and their more affluent peers attending university has widened to its largest point for 12 years, according to data published by the Department for Education (DfE).
Better-off pupils are significantly more likely to go to university than their more disadvantaged peers. And the gap between the two groups – 18.8 percentage points – is the widest it’s been since 2006/07.
The latest statistics show that 26.3% of pupils eligible for FSMs went on to university in 2018/19, compared with 45.1% of those who did not receive free meals. Only 12.7% of white British males who were eligible for FSMs went to university by the age of 19. The progression rate has fallen slightly for the first time since 2011/12, according to the DfE analysis.
Quality Training
From Raconteur. A recent report by global learning consultancy Kineo examined the learning intentions of 8,000 employees across 13 different industries. It found a huge gap between the quality of training offered and the needs of employees. Of those surveyed, 85 per cent said they , with only 16 per cent of employees finding the learning programmes offered by their employers effective.
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