Pontydysgu are working with the UK Data Service to open up three datasets under an open data license and then run an Open Data App Challenge during late spring/summer 2015. This a ESRC (Economic Social Research Council) innovation fund project.

Last Friday I went to a UK Data Service panel session and networking event at the Open Data Institute in London talking about our work and the issues around opening up data under an open data license. The audience was mostly App Challenge members and data owners. This event was held as part of the ESRC Festival of Social Science Week and we invited along some other experts as well.

The session included Ralph Cochrane (App Challenge), Louise Corti (UK Data Service), Jonathan Raper (Transport API), Olivia Ely (UKCES), Moeen Khwaja (Thingful)

Ralph has wriiten about the event on the Open Data Challenge web site. “The UKCES and their LMI for All programme have one of the best developed government APIs for accessing open data around jobs, careers and employment statistics)” he says.

“Transport API is the leading provider of open transport data in the UK. Anyone can sign up to their API on a pay per use basis. They have data relating to trains, roads, construction and even Heathrow airport.

Thingful is a discovery or search engine for the Internet of Things. There are many sensors and devices out there that publish their state and if you can link these as a data stream they can enrich many other datasources and services. For example, there are weather sensors on top of most high rise buildings in London. Could they be connected to the Met Office to help with weather based planning?

Louise is the project leader for the Open Data App Challenge project and is based at the University of Essex campus in Colchester.

Ralph Cochrane moderated this panel session and is the founder of App Challenge. He’s a crowdsourcing expert and runs the developer community day-to-day working with many of the world’s leading companies.”

Much of the focus of the open education movement has been on Open Educvational Resources and MOOCs. But just as important, in my humble opinion, is opening up research to a wider public. This is not only confined to opening up access to the results of research but allowing access to a wider audience than acandmicsx to raw research data. And there are a growing number of web sites that are doing this. One of the sites i am loving is the Understanding Society website based on the UK Households survey and run by designed and managed by a team of longitudinal survey experts at the Institute for Social and Economic Research (ISER), at the University of Essex.

The sudy says that “while girls have more positive aspirations and attitudes than boys, the impacts of gender on children’s attitudes and aspirations vary significantly with parental education level, parental attitudes to education, child’s age and the indirect cost of education.

Boys are more responsive than girls to positive parental characteristics, while educational attitudes and aspirations of boys deteriorate at a younger age than those of girls.

Girls also acknowleged the impact of the recession and increased youth unemployment by working harder. Boys however appear unresponsive to the business cycle. This might reflect misplaced confidence where they believe they will be able to find a job independently from the economic climate. Policies targeting boys with more information on the benefits from investing in education will increase their awareness about the consequences of an unfavourable youth labour market, which may improve their educational attitudes and aspirations and consequently their educational attainment.”

I’m not sure what is make of all this. But I wonder if there is any comparative data from other countries? No doubt it would be a chnallenge to norm such data, but it could greatly help in understanding why boys in the UK are underperforming. If you know of such data plese just add a comment or drop me an email.

As promised, a post on our stand and presentation at Alt-C on the LMIforAll Labour Market Data project, sponsored by UKCES. Working together with the Institute for Employment Research at Warwick University and Raycom, we have developed a database and APi providing access to a range of data about a wide variety of different occupations in the UK including data about:

• Pay
• Gender
• Numbers employed
• Future employment projections
• Occupational profiles
• Skills and competences
• Job vacancies
• University destinations

The API is self documenting and is available free of charge to both for profit and not for profit organisatio0ns and developers. Working with Loud Source we have run a competition for Apps built on the API and together with Rewired State we have organised a series of Hack Days and Mod Days. We are currently redesigning the website to provide better access to the data and to the different applications that have been built to date.

One strange thing that took people visiting our stand some time to understand was that we were not selling anything (I think ours and Jisc were the only non commercial stands).  The second thing was that we were not trying to ‘sell’ them a shiny out of teh box project. To get added value from our database and API requires some thought and development effort on the part of organisations wanting to use the data. We provide the tools, they provide the effort to use them. But when people got that concept they were enthusiastic. And most interestingly they were coming up with completely new ideas for where the data might be valuable. As you can see in our presentation above, we have largely focused on the use of LMIforAll for careers planning. University and Further Education researchers and developers saw big potential using the API as a planning too for future courses and curriculum. Others saw it as a valuable resource for measuring employability, a big agenda point for many UK institutions. It was also suggested to us that the labour market data could be mashed together with data derived from learning analytics, providing possibly a more learner centred approach to analytics than has previously been deployed.

If you are interested in any of these ideas have a play on the LMIforAll web site. And feel free to get in touch if you have any questions.

It is the end of the holidays and time to return back to work. And of course with September starts the autumn conference season. This week I am at the ALT C Conference at Warwick University and then at the European Conference for Educational Research in Porto. More on The ECER conference later.

At Alt C we are organising a workshop on the UKCES open data project (abstract below). And we will also have an exhibition stand. So if you are coming to the conference make sure to drop by the stand – No 16 in the Arts Centre – free coffee and sweets! and say hello.

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

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 focused 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 focused 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.

As I wrote in an earlier post, I am signed up for a MOOC on Digital Curation. I will post each assignment on the Wales wide Web as well as in the course forum. This weeks assignment is to introduce ourselves. And I though I had better explain what I was doing lurking in a community of expert librarians, museum staff and the rest.

“I work for Pontydysgu, a small company based in Pontypridd in Wales. Most of our work focuses on the use of new technologies for learning in a range of different contexts including in primary schools, in the community and in work. I am especially interested in informal learning and how informal learning can lead to knowledge development and sharing.

One of the projects we are currently involved in s called Employ-ID. Funded by the European Commission’s Seventh Research Programme it is looking at the chafing professional identities of worker in Public Employment services in Europe and how new technologies can be used for professional development for instance through online coaching.

We are planning to run a series of MOCCs as part of this project and the project partners have agreed themselves to do a MOOC as part of our won learning project.

So why did I choose to do a course of digital curation? I have spent a lot of time working on the development of Open Educational Resources (OERs). Open Educational Resources are resources for learning and teaching that are open to use. But resources means not only content and materials but also tools for content creation and sharing as well as intellectual property licenses for using these resources freely and openly.

Open Educational Resources include: Open courseware and content; Open software tools; Open material for e-learning capacity building of faculty staff; Repositories of learning objects; Free educational courses. C Central to the idea of Open Educational Resources is not only should they be freely available for use but teachers should be able to themselves edit and change these resources to meet their needs and the needs of learner.

It strikes me that many of the digital objects being grated by participants in this course could be a very rick source of learning. more than that it also seems that many of the issues in digital cur action are very similar to those sound OERs – for example

• how do we classify and structure resources
• how do we ensure digital resources are discoverable
• how do we measure the quality of resources
• how can we encourage people to interact with resources.

And finally I think that the best answers to these questions may come through an interdisciplinary dialogue. So I am looking forward to learning from you!”

I seem to be spending a lot of time looking at the potential of various technologies for supporting learning at work. I am not talking here about Virtual Learning Environments. In the construction industry we are looking at how mobile devices can be used to support learning and knowledge sharing between the different contexts of the vocational school, the industrial training centre and the workplace. And through the Employ-ID project we are looking at how to support continuing professional development for workers in public employment organisations across Europe.

None of these is particularly easy. Pedagogically we looking at things like co0counselling and at MOOCs for professional development. And another target on our horizon is Learning Analytics. Like so many things in technology advanced learning, Learning Analytics launched with a big fanfare, then seems to haver sunk under the surface. I was excited by the potential of using data to support learning and wanted to get in there. But there seems to be a problem. Like so often, rather than looking to use the power of Learning Analytics to support learners and learning, institutions have hijacked the application as a learning management tool. Top of the list for UK universities at least is how to reduce drop out rates (since this effects their funding). Rather than look at the effectiveness of teaching and learning, they are more interested in the efficiency of their approach (once more to save money).

So we are back where we have been so many times. We have tools with a great potential to support learners, but institutional managerialism has taken over the agenda. But perhaps I am being overly pessimistic and looking for information in the wrong places. If anyone can point me to examples of how to use Learning Analytics to support real learning please post below.

NB. Another issue concerning me is how to tell users what data we are collecting and how we are using it. Once more, does anyone have any pointers to good practice in this respect

First the official stuff (from the press release).

“Talented UK students have won three out of four prizes in a worldwide competition to create a new app to help people develop their career.

The CareerHack open data contest was launched in November last year by the UK Commission for Employment and Skills (UKCES), and asked developers around the globe to build an app based on the UK Commission’s “LMI for All” open data, which contains information on the UK labour market, including employment, skills and future job market predictions.

First prize winner for the competition was Tomasz Florczak from Logtomobile in Poland, who won £10,000 for his innovative Career Advisor app, while 16-year-old school student Harry Jones, from Bath, took home a £5,000 prize for his Job Happy entry.

The contest also had a special prize specifically for entrants aged 16-24 in Further Education. In this category 22-year-old IT apprentice Phillip Hardwick won the £5,000 prize for his entry, Career Path. And judges were so impressed with the quality of entrants from the category that they introduced an additional runner-up prize of £2,500, which went to a team effort from students at Barking and Dagenham College in London.

Competition judge Dr Deirdre Hughes OBE, Chair of National Careers Council and a Commissioner for UKCES, said:

“As judges we were all highly impressed at the outstanding contributions made by our winners, and of the talent and ability being displayed by the next generation of up-and-coming developers and programmers.

“The quality of the submissions was so high we felt the need to introduce an additional prize, but all those that entered should be extremely proud of their efforts.”

The judging panel was made up of technology experts from Google, Ubuntu and HP, alongside representatives from the UK Commission and John Lewis. Judges made their decision based on how innovative the entry was, how viable it was as a working app, the potential it had for making an impact on society and the overall quality of the packaged app.

CareerHack judge Matt Brocklehurst, Product Marketing Manager at Google UK said:

“At Google we’re well aware of the importance of making data open and encouraging young, creative talent. CareerHack was a fantastic example of this and we were very impressed by the high standard of entries from everyone who entered – the fact that three of the four winners are young people at the start of their careers is fantastic news.  We hope these prizes will enable them to get a head start down whichever career path they choose to follow.”

Fellow CareerHack judge Cristian Parrino, Vice President of Mobile and Online Services at Ubuntu, added:

“The CareerHack competition demonstrated how an set of open data can be used to cater to the needs of people at different stages of their career paths. It was wonderful to see the different flavours of high quality applications and services built on UKCES’s data.”

LMI for All has been developed by the UK Commission for Employment and Skills, working with a consortium led by the Institute for Employment Research at Warwick University and including Pontydysgu, RayCom and Rewired State.”

Pontydysgu’s bit in all this is managing the technical side. I have to say I was a bit sceptical of producing an APi and then opening it up and encouraging contributions through a competition, but having looked at the videos I am gobsmacked by the inventiveness of teh programmers who entered. We will be looking in more depth at what has been produced. We are also seeking feedback from all those who participated and planning more events later in the year. If you would like to know more (and particularly we would be interested in similar approaches to Open data for Labour Market Information in other countries) please contact me at graham10 [at] mac [dot] com.

This clipping is from an excellent article in the Guardian newspaper about OpenStreetMap. With Geocoding and mapping becoming central to many of the apps we use today – especially on mobile, stopping the commercialisation of location data is important.

Why do we need a project like OpenStreetMap? The answer is simply that as a society, no one company should have a monopoly on place, just as no one company had a monopoly on time in the 1800s. Place is a shared resource, and when you give all that power to a single entity, you are giving them the power not only to tell you about your location, but to shape it. In summary, there are three concerns: who decides what gets shown on the map, who decides where you are and where you should go, and personal privacy.

via Why the world needs OpenStreetMap | Technology | theguardian.com.

I don’t normally post press releases on this site. Too much corporate speak. But I make an exception in this case. Regular readers will know that for the last three years I have been playing with the possibility of using open data for people to make choices about their future jobs and careers – whether it be moving to a new area to seek work, changing careers or selecting a university or college course. For the past two years we have been working with Warwick University and Raycom on the UK Commission for Education and Skills sponsored LMI for All project. the project has developed a database and APi providing access to a range of Labour Market Information. The work has proved challenging in terms of negotiating access to different data sets, ensuring the data is non disclosive and cleaning the data and in developing the technical infrastructure to provide easy access but at the same time ensuring the security of the data.

The beta vesrion of the APi was released in June this year. Whilst we provide access to a web based data explorer we do not provide apps. Instead the idea os to  Over the autumn we have been upgrading the infrastructure and adding more datasets including the US O*Net data. Whilst we provide access to a web based data explorer we do not provide apps. Instead the idea to encourage third party developers, including careers web sites, to themselves develop web and mobile applications based on the API.  And yesterday UKCES, working together with together with Loudsource have launched a CareerHack competition for apps based on the API.

The press release says:

A NEW competition launched today is calling on developers from across the globe to create an app to help people hack into a new career and win a share of £20,000 in the process.

The CareerHack contest, run by the UK Commission for Employment and Skills (UKCES), is asking developers to find innovative and inspiring ways of using data made available through its LMI for All data site. This is a unique portal containing Labour Market Information (LMI) on employment, skills and future job market predictions, which for the first time makes the different sources of information compatible with each other and available in the same place.

The winner will be given £10,000 to spend as they wish, with £5,000 going to the runner-up.  A special £5,000 prize is available to college students aged 16-24, giving the opportunity for the tech-leaders of tomorrow to showcase their talents and skills.

Michael Davis, Chief Executive of UKCES said:

“We wanted to find a way to allow as many people as possible to benefit from our open data approach to careers and jobs intelligence. An open innovation contest for developers is the perfect solution and we’re delighted that there is a special category for young people studying in college. I’m looking forward to seeing the creativity of app developers from across the world.”

The LMI for All data portal brings together extensive careers intelligence providing a single point of access to the data needed to answer common career questions such as how many people currently work in a particular job, average salaries and the skills needed for certain careers or roles.

While LMI for All information is already being used in various ways by a number of websites, organisers hope the CareerHack contest will open the resource up to creative individuals from around the world – uncovering new and innovate ways to use data to help people map out their future career.

To help illustrate the ways in which the information can be used a Career Trax website has been created by the UKCES – highlighting just one of the ways the LMI for All data can be used.

All entries must be submitted with a brief YouTube video, showcasing how the app works and illustrating its potential. A panel of judges, including representatives from Google and Ubuntu, Further Education institutions and business leaders, will then pick the overall winner next February.

Both individuals and teams are eligible to enter.  You will need to be capable of developing a workable app using LMI for All data. For more information, please visit the contest website at http://careerhack.appchallenge.net

The closing date for entries is 5pm on Friday the 21^st of February 2014.

In times when academia debates about the openness and transparency of academic work, and the processes associated with it, more questions than answers tend to be formulated.  And as it usually happens, different approaches often co-exist. There is nothing wrong with that. It is only natural when trying to make sense of the affordances that the web, as a space of participation and socialisation, provides. Nonetheless, the latests news on the openness of research publications leave me slightly concerned regarding the misunderstanding between the Open Access Gold Route and the Gold Mine publishing houses are trying to maintain with their take on Open Access. This will however be content for another post as this post relates to some still unripe reflections of mine on the topic of online research ethics. …although one could argue that paying to access publicly funded knowledge also touches on some ethics…!

One of the big questions we are currently debating on twitter deals with the use of  data publicly available online. Given the current events regarding how governments are using information published online by their own citizens, we could conclude that no data is, or for that matter ever was, private! But as researchers interested in the prosumer phenomenon (online users who consume and produce content available on the web) a key issue arises when doing research online:

• Can we use information that is publicly available online, i.e., that can be accessed without a password by any individual, for research purposes?
• What ethics should we observe in this case?

Researching online data that is produced and made available online voluntarily, or involuntarily, by the regular citizen is so new, even to those in Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL), that we are still trying to make sense of how to go about this. Publications regarding this matter are still scare, and even those that I have had access to deal mainly with the issues of anonymity (Here is a recent example). A big issue indeed, especially in a time where participating online means to create an online digital footprint that not only allows information to be traced back to an individual; it also creates, to a certain extent, a (re)presentation of a given ‘self’, voluntarily or involuntarily… In TEL we call this “Digital Identities” (more on this in a forthcoming post).  Digital identities disclose personal, and sometimes private, information within the social environments that are created online and in which individuals interact, we assume, on their own will. But do they always do consciously of the publicness of the information they publish? Do they perceive their participation online as an form of creating and publishing information?

This then begs the question:

• Is, can or should such information be automatically converted into research data? In other words are we, as researchers, entitled to use any data that is publicly available, even if we claim that it is only being used for research purposes?

My gut feeling is that no, we cannot! Just because the information is made publicly online and therefore accessible to use, I, as a researcher, am not entitled to use it without previously seeking and obtaining consent from its creator. This, obviously, generates more obstacles than those researchers would probably like to experience, but the truth is that collecting publicly available information without the consent of its producers does not seem right to me for the following reasons:

1. We (people engaged in TEL) need to step outside of our own taken-for-granted understanding of online participation, and note that many people don’t realise, or at least have not given it considerate thought, that online communication can be public and that interaction online, by its very nature of written speech are more durable than equivalent forms of face-to-face interaction.
2. Anonymity and confidentiality are topics that need to be discussed with the research participant independently of the type of information we want to use. Just because the content is there available to the world, it doesn’t mean it’s available for the take. That is invading the public sphere of an individual, if that makes any sense(!), because as it becomes research data we will be exposing (transferring even!) it to other public spaces.   of its owner.
3. I truly believe that every research participants has the right to know he/she is one. This is not merely a courtesy on the part of the researcher, it is a right that they have! Content produced online, unless stated otherwise, belongs to its producer and should therefore be treated as such. (….maybe what we need is a creative commons license for research purposes! ]

Niessenbaum and Zimmer, amongst others, talk about contextual integrity, a theory that rejects the notion that information types fit into a rigid dichotomy of public or private.’ “Instead, there is potentially an indefinite variety of types of information that could feature in the informational norms of a given context, and whose categorization might shift from one context to another.” (Zimmer, 2008,  p.116)

Although I am very amenable to the argument of context, and that nothing is absolute, and everything is relative [getting philosophical now!], I think that the context of research practice begs for informed consent independently of the research data being publicly and privately available. In my opinion, converting online information into research data should always be an opt in, and not an opt out, activity involving those to whom the information belongs.

…but as usual, this is only my 2 cents and I look forward to other people’s views on this.