Category Archives: Events Attended

eLearning@ed and LTW’s Learning Design and Engagement Team present Professor Gilly Salmon: Higher Education 1.0 to 3.0 LiveBlog

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This afternoon, in my eLearning@ed Convener hat, I’m at a seminar with Professor Gilly Salmon which is being co-hosted by eLearning@ed and the University’s Learning, Teaching and Web Services team and Fiona Hale, who introduced Gilly’s talk.

This is a liveblog so, as usual, comments, corrections, etc. are welcomed. 

I have an interesting job, I’m Pro Vice-Chancellor (Education Innovation) at the University of Western Australia in Perth. It’s a long way away but it had a lot of similarities to Edinburgh – it is a research intensive university, it is very selective, and it has a very beautiful location. It’s perpetual summer – so not like Edinburgh in that respect! Our winter is warmer than Edinburgh’s summer!

And we have some of the same challenges as Edinburgh around teaching. We were doing well but we were a little behind in understanding C21st students and where they were going. So, it’s about innovation – the application of new ideas, new ways to do things.  I’ll talk a bit about this, and my background is in pedagoguey. But I’ve also turned amateur

  • Those who wonder about what happened – what was that?
  • There are those who try to take us to a past gone by
  • And then there are those who actually try and create it – rather than predict it!

Predicting the future can make you look silly, but it’s better than just letting it happen to you. I won’t tell you the way things are, but try and give you a spark to start that dialogue.

So, first of all I’m going to invite you to take a bit of hindsight – if you don’t have that you are doomed to repeat history…

The University of Western Australia is about 100 years old – not as old as Edinburgh, but very very old for Australia. But my hindsight here is that we pretty much deliver a model that is 1000 years old. So I’m going to pull apart some of the components of higher education, and how those are changing. And you can chop education up into many different components… I’ve made an attempt but I hope you’ll take this and critique it and expand upon it. So I have divided it into:

  • Learning
  • Teaching
  • Academics
  • Graduate-ness
  • Learning Locations
  • Knowledge
  • Technology

So, what is Learning? Someone from the audience suggests learning from experience, learning from mistakes. There are neurological aspects. Someone from the audience talks about it being about making connections – in a literal but also information sense. Another: learning is adapting to environment, where you are, when you are. Another: behavioural change, and modify behaviour. We could go on… We don’t know all that much about learning, although these are all valid ways of thinking about this. It’s complex, adaptive, systems, cognitive, physiological, all kinds of approaches…

So, I’m distinguishing between Learning and Teaching. No-one mentioned teaching just now. Traditionally it is thought of as being about someone informing a learner. There is the traditional one to many face to face context, also the Oxford tutorial model which is more discursive. Audience member suggests: it’s traditionally patriarchal or matriarchal. That’s a knowledge based hierarchy. There are also aspects of technology. We have a rough idea of the role of the teacher…

What about the role of the Academic? Audience member: create and share new knowledge. To add to the corpus of knowledge – I would argue that that “share” is important so good to see that there. Audience member: reevaluating old knowledge. Another: to model behaviour in a particular space. Yes, whether professional or academic – applies to medics, lawyers etc.

What about the idea of “Graduateness”? It’s the idea of if you go through Higher Education, maybe even later, is there something different about you? Audience member: it’s a badge in a way. Another: it’s a way to speak to other people in a group perhaps. It’s about being able to be part of particular communities. Audience member: it’s also suggestive of behaviours having changed. Another: and a warranty of your skills. Another: can also enable social mobility. Sure, career or personal development. Another: part of your identity, of being part of that. Another: for particular disciplines there is specific knowledge, but there are the transferable skills, the critical thinking, research skills, technical skills. Another: it’s also about the ability to learn… In Biology students have the ability to get into a subject they didn’t do when they started. If you tell students that they aren’t interested but that is something they would recognise. Has that idea of Graduateness always been a thing? I think the badging certainly has.

So what about Learning Locations? Why are we here? Historically people travelled to university… I’m not sure if you’ve been to pre-modern university. I went to ruins of a 3000 year old unviersity in India and the structure was very familiar – you could almost see your own university in their library/scroll area, the refectory, the rooms… That model of the space, of living, working, spending time together. Anything else? Audience member: I was thinking of location almost as a brand, as why you would go to a particular place. Another: I think that there is a sense of normalised locations – that it is less distracting, it is a space where it is normal to focus and study amongst others like you. I think that’s really critical.  That’s an interesting idea – in Australia many students live at home and attend their nearest university so that’s fairly different from here.

What about knowledge? Historically there was a shift from belief towards knowledge, and the focus on “proper knowledge”… The whole idea of what is “valid knowledge” is very complex. Audience member: Different disciplines have very different ideas of what valid knowledge is. Yes, and that’s part of inducting you to that discipline.

I left technology until last… We’ve always had technologies – the abacus is a mobile technology! I love using technology, like wearables, in my own teaching. Technology isn’t new to higher education… It’s useful to remember as our students fret about Audience member: I think technology also ties into the Learning Locations, in that it’s the only space that you can access some things. 

You’ve all been doing some hindsight there… Some of these things feel unthinkable to change… And actually we can see this image of the University of Bologna in the 14th Century – you’ll have seen it before – which does look like a university lecture now, it’s very recognisable. In surfing you have the idea of the “seventh wave” – a wave that knocks you back, that changes everything, bigger, better, more powerful than what we’ve got. Most of us agree that movable type on the printing press (the Gutenberg press from around 1440) would be one of those. So, you need to look for the seventh wave things that will be the spark for a massive change.

So, we’ll look to where a lot of this has gotten to. So I’m going to start with the World Wide Web – developed around 25 years ago. Our students have never been in the world without it but many of us in this room will remember a world without it. And that has been a huge change, and has also changed the tools and challenges for the students. So we now need to think about creative and publishing aspects, information management, a thinking pedagogy (and learning journeys), learning environments (not lecture theature), web access, building a new paradigm, skills set for the 21st century…

So, lets have a look at those components we talked about, and think about where we might be in terms of Education 2.0… After the idea of Web 2.0. The technical part of the web didn’t change for Web 2.0, but the way it was used that change, hence adopting that rough idea here.

So, for example, learning is starting to change. We now know that informal learning is at least as important, if not more so, than formal learning experiences. Anyone who has held a newborn baby you can see that that baby is looking at everything you do. That’s how they listen and they learn. You just have to look at the literature in early education. So we really aren’t the only game in town when we are at University, there is so much more taking place. Students have always sat out on the grass in summer, only now are we really waking up to that.

And teaching, all of a sudden we’ve realised that peer encouragement, peer support, peer exchange, is important. And it doesn’t only have to be the teaching staff that do that. It might be teaching staff, but others too.

Academics, how many of you have started a research project, done it entirely on your own, and published it on their own. There must be some… But actually understanding, redefining knowledge has be to done as a team. The role of the academic is very much as a team leader. Years back when I moved from being a Senior Lecturer to my first chair I didn’t know exactly what that would mean. I had a professor emeritus as mentor who advised only that “you speak truth to power”, and that should be the only change. I’ve done a lot of that and always keep it in mind. You have to do a lot of that to innovate.

In terms of Graduateness…. Well the idea of licensing practice is much newer… We have moved from a graduation certificate as proxy for skills, to being much more about licensing for practice. And about the fact that those skills etc. need to be updated.

Learning Locations are also changing, from static spaces towards much more blended and flexible environments, often fully integrated. Every so often on campus I queue for the ATM and I ask students whats in their pockets – it’s my informal ATM survey – and the record so far was 19 devices on one student… But it’s rare to have fewer than 2 devices, often more. Students are constantly connected no matter what else they are doing. In our futures laboratory, where we look at new devices, technologies, approaches, we are looking to see where those devices might have learning and teaching possibilities.

Let’s see about Knowledge and what it is. For hindsight we had quite an academic view of knowledge, and around the transmission of knowledge. Audience member: we have more metadata about knowledge, to find knowledge. Another: isn’t that about finding knowledge – that it’s about understanding how to find knowledge, rather than having knowledge. Another: it’s not sufficient to be able to recite knowledge, but to be able to use and apply knowledge in their own field – hence discussion of whether exams are useful. Another: And anyone can have knowledge, not just academics. Another: it’s about volume too… And it’s about the ability to manage that, to interrogate it critically. In my area where I’m trying to change practice I have as many librarians and information specialists working with me as learning technologists. I think it’s a fascinating area, and we all need that insight as we create the future.

And what about Technology? I think we are at the point where technology is cautiously adopted. We need tools to manage that information but it is changing everything about the way that we gain information and knowledge. And those with true insight will see that almost every other sector, industry, area of the social world is transformed… And we are not at the forefront of that which is shocking. Audience: I think the way it has been cautiously adopted makes sense… There is choice and decisions to be made. There is a lot that can be done, and that has to be navigated… No matter what you pick, someone will think you are wrong. Another: there is a tension between individual and organisational choice. I agree, institutions have put huge investment in technologies to make them safe and accessible. Another: there is a tension between what the teacher gives out, and what the student uses… And student has preference there that doesn’t always align. Comment: I think that that cautiousness is about critical engagement with technology, and that is something that industry would sometimes do well to take note of. Not always… Another: And there are issues of accessibility, and that can. Comment: I think that some of that cautiousness is about the role of gatekeepers… Is cautiousness a good, critical, I’m not sure what sort of term. 

I am about innovation, and want my institution to be leading.. Comment: cautiously? Not particularly! Audience member: I think that many of our comments are about scale… About how you support work at scale. I see that. We are doing work at scale. Our futures observatory has 50 projects to see how technology impacts on teaching and learning, and in new technologies. Audience members: any insights into the winning technologies? I think that the leading edge virtual reality especially in medical teaching contexts, some of the robotics work, some of the 3D printing projects. We work with MIT and we have some big stuff… We’ve done a lot with holographics… But all they want to do is to put the teacher in front of the class…! But you just have to do stuff.

So, where do you think Edinburgh is? Audience member: I think it depends where you are here as we are a huge organisation… Some are way beyond “education 2.0”. Another: I think especially in postgraduate education. I won’t answer the question myself, but I want you to use this model as some sort of spark to have those conversations.

So… We are at “education 2.0” so what happens as we move to “education 3.0”? Well I think we already agree that learning is lifelong, that what we do here is a small part of the whole. As we live to 100/110, we will need to keep learning. And expectations are shifting with each generation. Teaching will have to change as a result, to be co-constructed and created. There is a kind of move towards co-constructed teaching. Our students go to Google so we have to ensure that they can interpret and understand the information they find. And we need not just to adopt and disseminate knowledge but to also be learning designers.

As we think about graduateness we have to be prepared for multiple futures. Australia has had a recent report on professions… Australia has a very strict immigration policy only accepting … the vast majority of non-professional jobs will be changed hugely, we have to enable students to be ready for that. And in terms of Learning Locations we need to enable our students, to blend in the right ways, to know how to put things together that support people in their purpose. And knowledge? We know it will be hugely available… It has to be available, contextualised, and reinvented. It’s a wider way of looking at things. And technology? It’s definitely going to be digital, definitely multimedia, definitely mobile, and definitely personal. And that will be hard in big undergraduate classes. The other thing that I’d put under education 3.0, following Tim Berners-Lee and web 3.0, it’s the coming of the semantic web… A different way to understand yourself and your role in the world.

So, I’ll leave you to invent education 4.0… But that’s 3.0. Do we all want to be part of this? (indications of things in the room is that we do).

If you want to look at what is coming… The NMC Horizon Report 2016 Higher Education edition are quite useful. They are built on a Delphi model, so it’s limited to what people already know, but you can look at these, look back at these. Right now we see near-term issues of Bring Your Own Device, Learning Analytics and Adaptive Learning; mid-term we see Augented and Virtual Reality, Maker Spaces, etc. You need to be aware of these if you want to make the future, rather than letting it happen to you.

So, what have I forgotten about? Audience member: I think the student perhaps, they are not fixed in space and time. Students now are very different from just five years – they are part of the c components really. For me, it’s embedded in what is already there, in learning etc. Audience member again: I think you could argue that that is an aspect you can’t control for…  Although I know I can’t control the other factors either! Another: I think there is the issue of globalisation, internationalisation, competition, and the many many ways in which our students are different from each other. It’s a change in the idea of cohorts – they aren’t neatly divided, they vary greatly. And they are more like consumers. Audience member: And that’s a big issue for the UK especially, of it being a market. Comment: And there is the issue of what the university is for, the motivations, the reasons for choosing that route rather than other options. Another: The role of Higher Education is changing – that is about consumers and catering to their needs… I think “service” is important because of that. Another: I think that when we look at scale the campus is very limiting… We no longer talk about a small proportion of learners at undergraduate level, but a large group for undergraduate, then post graduate and beyond… That is much more at scale.” That is the case that scale has increased, since the 1960s but also more recently… And in countries such as India there are vastly more people qualifying for higher education. I think many of these issues are very much where I see “education 4.0” sitting, and mobile sitting.

Comment: I don’t know where the role of teachers of students, and institutions and students sits, where support lies. I was wondering for a moment if you were talking about moral and ethical education… But you are thinking about the whole benefit. Comment: pastoral support really… That seems to have changing. My university has found that social media has entirely overtaken the counseling service (note: that is very much the case here). Audience member: there is also that issue of cost and travel, and the holistic experience of learning in context, which is important otherwise why would you be an international student given the cost. 

So, I am going to bring this to a close. You can have a copy of these slides of course, but also hopefully lots of sparks for ideas and discussions here too. Also you’ll find some references here as well.

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Belated Liveblog: eLearning@ed 2016

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Last week I was delighted to be part of the team organising the annual eLearning@ed Conference 2016. The event is one of multiple events and activities run by and for the eLearning@ed Forum, a community of learning technologists, academics, and those working with learning technologies across the University of Edinburgh. I have been Convener of the group since last summer so this was my first conference in this role – usually I’m along as a punter. So, this liveblog is a little later than usual as I was rather busy on the day…

Before going into my notes I do also want to say a huge thank you to all who spoke at the event, all who attended, and an extra special thank you to the eLearning@ed Committee and Vlad, our support at IAD. I was really pleased with how the event went – and feedback has been good – and that is a testament to the wonderful community I have the privilege of working with all year round here at Edinburgh.

Note: Although I have had a chance to edit these notes they were taken live so just let me know if you spot any errors and I will be very happy to make any corrections. 

The day opened with a brief introduction from me. Obviously I didn’t blog this but it was a mixture of practical information, enthusiasm for our programme, and an introduction to our first speaker, Melissa Highton:

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CSCS Network Event: Citizen Science and the Mass Media (Belated) Liveblog

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This is a very belated LiveBlog post from the CSCS Network Citizen Science and the Mass Media event, which I chaired back on 22nd October 2015. Since the event took place several videos recorded at the event have been published by the lovely CSCS Network folks and I’ve embedded those throughout this post.

About the Event

This session looked at how media and communications can be used to promote and engage communities in a crowd sourcing and citizen science project. This included aspects including understanding the purpose and audience for a project; gaining exposure from a project; communicating these types of projects effectively; engaging the press; expectation management; practical issues such as timing, use of interviewees and quotes, etc.

I was chairing this session, drawing on my experience working on the COBWEB project in particular, and I was delighted that we were able to bring in two guest speakers whose work I’ve been following for a while:

Dave Kilbey, University of Bristol and Founder and CEO of Natural Apptitude Ltd. Natural Apptitute works with academic and partner organisations to create mobile phone apps and websites for citizen science projects that have included NatureLocator, Leafwatch, Batmobile, and BeeMapp. Some of these projects have received substantial press interest, in particular Leafwatch (along with the wider Conker Tree Science initiative), and Dave will talk about his personal experience of the way that crowd sourcing and citizen science and the media work together, some of the benefits and risks of exposure, and some of the challenges associated with working with the press based on his own experience.  @kilbey252

Alastair (Ally) Tibbitt, Senior Online Journalist at STV, where he has been based since 2011 working both in journalism and community engagement. Aly’s background lies in community projects in Glasgow and Edinburgh, experience that informs his work writing both for STV and Greener Leith. He has particular interests in hyperlocal news, open data and environmental issues, giving him a really interesting insiders’ perspective on the way that citizen science and crowd sourcing can engage the press, some of the realities of media expectations, timings, etc. and an insight into effective ways to pitch a citizen engagement story. @allytibbett

My notes from the talks were captured on the day but, due to chairing, I wasn’t able to capture all of the discussion or questions that arose in the session. The video below captures the talks, with my notes from these below. 

Click here to view the embedded video.

Musings on Media and Communications for Citizen Science Projects – Dave Kilbey, Natural Appitude

I’m not an expert but I have been working in this area for some time so these are some musings informed by my work to date.

I’ve worked on a variety of projects, which started with a project called NatureLocator – all basically mobile apps, but also website. We try to make it as simple as possible for people to take part in these projects, and we try to do that working with experts so that the data we collect is useful and purposeful. So our projects include work on invasive species, work with the biological monitoring centre. So effectively we work with researchers, organisations, and engaging the public in what we do. And we do that with design of bespoke smartphone apps and websites. In theory Innovative but actually much of this is established – although BatMobile is an exception – as was never really good enough to launch. And public engagement is central to what we do, and from that naturally comes much of our engagement with media.

We spend a lot of time and money on design and usability, because if they aren’t easy to use and appealling then participants won’t use them or use them again. The apps are for contribution, the website is for looking at the data – that’s more of an unprovoked engagement…

So the content on media on communications is this bit, which I’m calling “Smurfs… and the wrong kind of conkers”.

So I thought about why we want media coverage in the first place? It’s obvious but it matters… And these are selfish through to altruistic…

We want this to get the project (and us) noticed – we want to share what we do, and to get the project out there (important for a business too). You want to engage an army of volunteers – you can’t have citizen science without citizen scientists, you need people engaged. You want to attract more funding – crucial in a university context. Success metrics – which include impact – we are measured on how many people took part, engaged etc. and as researchers we are also measured on media presence to an extent. But there is also the aspect of personal satisfaction, and that matters.

On a more altruistic basis is increase knowledge of a concept or problem – we’ve really had that feedback on our invasive plant species work. Citizen science is increasingly about finding solutions to problems – there are all sorts of things like examination of proteins being gamified, so participants contribute regardless of knowledge. We also want to inspire interest, perhaps even the next generation of researchers – we are all passionate about what we do, and want to share that…

But the crux of the matter is that media isn’t always as important in the ways you’d expect.

If your project isn’t ready, the media coverage will be a real pain. There is a project called Ash Town done more of less as a media stunt… The organisation using the data wasn’t ready, the data wasn’t ready… and they had a backlog of verification and that disillusioned participants… The feedback loop wasn’t there but they had to take advantage of that moment. So I tend to be quite conservative about when I share projects, I want them ready.

Quite a few of our projects have had mass media interest and that can be brilliant but they cause a big spike and are largely unfocused… Normally you want a focused set of interested participants. It can be helpful but long term it’s less clear how it is helpful for finding those participants. By contrast micro media and focused marketsing and events, such as conferences, lead to better engagement – and the data from targeted audiences tends to be much better. For example there was a big issue of giant hog weed in the media this summer – we had more records than ever before… but 80% of that data was incorrect. Normally the data in Plant Tracker is 90% accurate. That was due to lots of people finding out about giant hog weed and recording lots of false positive. NOt neccassarily a problem, but an issue for data centric projects.

So we find drip feeding/organic networking works best for us. But as they say “Any publicity is good publicity?”… Maybe…. Mostly we’ve had good coverage,

To use a fishing analogy I see the mass media as ground bating – causing a general feeding frenzy, but then you have to think about how you are baiting your hook to make use of this… So it’s all about how you follow up…

So, with our first app, Leaf Watch, we had loads of media coverage. This project was small scale before with maybe 500 records a year, without the photos or georeference. So we set up a smartphone app with that sort of data for verification interested… And we had 5000 records… But also a lot of noise… 3 bottom pictures, and worse… even a smurf!

So, how to attract publicity… Again, I’m no expert… Often it’s about finding an interesting story to tell that has relevance at this point in time – is there a hook to draw people in, trigger their imagination. For the Uni of Bristol it was often our Public Relations Office that often got us the gig. Me, on my own using my Twitter feed, is going to get the Times interested… So utilise your existing resources in your organisation, they have some great powerful contacts etc. to call on. And I have a colleague who does a good job of researching likely journalists and contacting them directly…

Really much of this feels random, but it’s about a lot of events coming together, and stuff in the outside world… Looking for those opportunities to tell your story to an audience that’s ready to listen… (And do get in touch).

Engaging the Media – Ally Tibbett, STV

I work at STV, and have a background in community projects and volunteering activities. I currently work at STV, also setting up a fledgling news site.

So I wanted to set the context of engaging with media… ANd I wanted to set the scene. Many newspapers are losing 10% circulation, broadcast TV are doing better, but still online transition. But most media company websites are booming – our STV pages collectively reach a few million people a day. So still a lot of reason to get word out there. And it’s worth planning that as you do your citizen science project. You need to think about where you will find the people you do want to engage with. More and more people get their news via social media. Many read news via mobile device. It’s getting more visual with vides, images, infographics. Big interactive graphics are great, but hard to scale to a phone so many media companies keep it simple..

So I’ve tried to set this up as a timeline… How you might engage the media… Before your project. When recruiting participants – who do you want to reach, is it a specific geography? Age greoup? demographic? that should influence both the scial media platfors and media companies you use. What is the benefit for participants? What is the long term goal. Is ther ean interesting back story – and what change will it bring about. And plan out a communication calendar – can you hook into, e.g. International Authors day. Editors are always looking for a new angle on events, or a local angle on a national news story. And even if that doesn’t fit your timing it can be helpful. The other thing to think about is what digital assets can you share/produce. A press release is nice, but a press release with bangs and whistle, with infographics or images etc. That is brilliant – helps journalists know why they should engage now. It’s about the infotainment, not just the data. And it could be as simple as a slideshow, or animated gifs, or data we could map. Thinking about citizen science projects I’ve already worked on, I thought of a project on happiness on different neighbourhoods – we persuaded them to share some data. If you do want help producing maps etc, then there are skilled journalists who can help. We’ll need a Shapefile. And we need that data to be open to support more open interactive stuff…

So, assuming you had a nice launch and a little publicity boost… How do you engage dring th eproject? Well citizen engagement can be more than just research – can they promote project fro you on social media. You need a #hashtga to generate social media buss and help you collate conversation. Can you give progress reports to journalists who covered the launch and those you hope will cover final results. And building that buzz from the outset, can mean there is a story, and help show th eimpact of your prokect. Also, thnk about things that cannot be shared – could be copyright or child protection etc. issues. And as you aggregate content around the hashtag and curate the best, remove anything with an issue. Tools like STorify let you do this.

From my point of view one of the best ways to engage the press is when there is a result, a discovery… The media thrives on a wee bit of controversy etc. So Neive Short from CRESH at Edinburgh looks at mapping alchohol etc. and social issues – she is a campaigning academic, taking her studies to policy makers, and that, for instance, is always of interest. So air quality or air pollution crowd sourcing project would certainly have some of those qualities, those cases to engage policy makers. Too often we get press releases about “we did a study… we might be able to do something in the future…” but we need a concrete story really…

A note on press releases… They are fundamentally quite useful. Do send them out. Keep them short. Include multiple short quotes. have a clear top line, be clear about what you’ve done. Comes with a variety of visuals in different formats – landscape, portrait, infographics, animated films etc. And supplying images in multiple formets – making our job to package it easier – makes a big difference. Is the story important enough for us to send someone out to take new images? Maybe not. BUt actually don’t send 6MBs of materials is not good – so send a press release linking to resources.

So, journalists. Do send releases etc to a generic news email addresses. Use tools like Twitter and LinkedIn to find journalists with an interest in your subject, message them direct. Provide advance warning, reminders, photo and filming opportunities. Don’t do it at the weekend – no TV will come. Do it at a lunchtime on a weekday… PRactical stuff. If no one shows up, don’t worry about it, do send them pictures etc. And if there is one place that you really really want to be featured in, offer it as an exclusive and see it works. Obviously I’d like that to be me… BUt that’s something useful to hold back ni that way…

And, lastly, humour works. If you can find something daft, and can present it in a funny way… Our story “What if Back to the Future was set in Glasgow” is the second most ready story on our website having gone up yesterday. Most read story in the last year on STV was a very tall man who using the bathroom had a hand dryer calamity – that did great and almost made the front page of Reddit. We can be too serious… Be fun. Share the 15 things that happened in this project that were most funny, say… Humour works.

And with that we turned to some really interesting questions and discussion – huge thanks to all who came along and took part in this.

Whilst he was in Edinburgh for this event Dave Kilbey was also able to give an interview for the CSCS Network website, which you can watch there, or in the embed below:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Huge thanks to Dave and Ally for making the time to come along and speak to the CSCS network who I know really appreciated their presentations and sharing of experience. Huge thanks too to the lovely CSCS network team for providing a space for this event and support for our speakers and their travel. 

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Data, Design & Society, Final Presentations

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Today I attended the University of Edinburgh Data, Design & Society (DDS) course’s final presentations session, having been invited by Ewan Klein, who is the course organiser.

Data, Design & Society is an innovative programmes across three departments of Edinburgh University: the School of Informatics; the School of Social and Political Studies; and Design Informatics. Students on this programme (which is a 20 credit bearing Level 8 course) have been focusing on specific real world projects which, this time, have been focusing on food and food sustainability. All of the course materials are available publicly online, along with more information on all of the projects.

The format for this session was group presentations of the projects and for each of these I’ve captured the group name and comments, but not all of the students names. If you are interested in following up with any of these do feel free to contact the teams via Ewan (ewan [AT] inf.ed.ac.uk).

Please note: I took these notes live during the presentations so please do be aware that there may be some corrections to come, and that there is much more information about all of the challenges and responses on the DDS site.

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Supporting Digital Scholarship within the College of Humanities and Social Sciences

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Back on 2nd December 2015 I attended a Digital Scholarship event arranged by Anouk Lang, lecturer in Digital Humanities at the University of Edinburgh.

The event ran in two parts: the first section enabled those interested in digital humanities to hear about events, training opportunities, and experiences of others, mainly those based within the College of Humanities and Social Sciences; the second half of the event involved short presentations and group discussions on practical needs and resources available. My colleague Lisa Otty and I had been asked to present at the second half of the day, sharing the range of services, skills and expertise EDINA offer for digital scholarship (do contact us if you’d like to know more), and were delighted to be able to attend the full half day event.

My notes were captured live, so all the usual caveats about typos, corrections, additions, etc. apply despite the delay in me setting this live. 

The event is opening, after a wee intro from Anouk Lang, with a review of various events and sessions around Digital Humanities, starting with those who had addtended the DHOxSS: Digital Humanities Summer School at Oxford in summer 2016.

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Edinburgh Apps Final Pitch Event

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This afternoon I’m at the EdinburghApps Final Pitch event, being held at the University of Edinburgh Informatics Forum. As usual for my liveblogs, all comments and edits are very much welcomed.

EdinburghApps, is a programme of events organised by Edinburgh City Council (with various partners) to generate ideas and technology projects addressing key social challenges. This year’s Edinburgh Apps event has been themed around health and social care (which have recently been brought together in Scotland under the Public Bodies Joint Working Bill for Health and Social Care Integration).

The event has run across several weeks, starting with an Inception weekend (on 6th & 7th Feb, which I blogged some of here), then a midway catch up/progress day (held on 27th Feb – you may have seen me tweet from this), and culminating in today’s final pitch event, at which we’ll hear from previous winners, as well as this year’s teams. The challenges they have been addressing around health and social care challenges fall under five headings (click to see a poster outlining the challenge):

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Jisc Digifest 2016 – Day Two Live blog

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Today I am in Birmingham for day two of Jisc Digifest 2016 (catch up on Day One here). I’m particularly hear wearing my Jisc’s 50 most influential higher education (HE) professionals using social media hat, helping to share the event with the wider sector who aren’t able to be at the ICC.

There is also an online programme so, if you aren’t here in person, you can not only follow the tweets on #digifest16 and the various blogs, you can also view special online content here.

As usual, this is a liveblog so all corrections, additions, comments, etc. are very welcome. 

At the moment my expected schedule for day one (this will be updated throughout the day) is:

9.00 – 10.00 Plenaries – the power of digital for teaching and learning

The chair for this session is Sarah Davies, head of change implementation support – education/student, Jisc.

Heather MacDonald, principal, Loughborough College

I have missed the beginning of Heather’s talk, so catching up as she addresses the issue of Area Reviews in FE… Heather is talking about the uncertainty of mergers, and of needing to be confident going forward, ready to embrace a technology led future.

Technology, however, is also a real and substantial job threat. But this intelligence is only artificial – until recently it took huge amounts of computation to recognise an image of a cat. We need to get out there and teach to create the next generation of creative and innovative future employees. We need to address the needs of this changing world through chnging pedagogies, through empowering students – perhaps to organise and teach themselves. But what would Ofsted say about that? Well, it matters, a good Ofsted report is very important for FE Colleges, but I would rather have creative and innovative teaching methods. That means we have to, as Tim Marshall said last night, bring the regulators up to speed more rapidly. We should be looking for solutions through the digital lens of technology

Professor John Traxler, professor of mobile learning, Institute of Education, University of Wolverhampton 

Prior to today some of what I will say has been pre-trailed on the blog. I was quoted as saying that “mobile learning” has stalled… But I essentially want to raise the issue of “mobile learning” and just the regular matter of learning with the tools that we have. I was making that distinction around a couple of issues… One is that the money had run out, and that money and that will had fuelled the rhetoric of what we did with innovation in the first decade of this century; the second is the developments and changes in mobile technology itself. About 15 years ago mobile was delicate, fragile, expensive, scarce, something for institutions, and to promulgate their solutions. But the money ran out. And we also focused too much on what we were building, less on who we were building it for… But meanwhile mobile has made the transition to cheap, robust, easy, universal, personal. It’s hardly notable anymore. And whatever constitutes mobile learning now is not driven from the top, but by our students. And the technology moves fast but social practices and behaviours moves even faster, and that’s the harder thing to keep up with. People share, disrupt, discuss… That happens outside the institution…Or inside the institution but on an individual basis.

This technology is part of this fluet, transient, flexible, partial world. It enables people to help each other to learn. And web access is significantly moving to mobile devices rather than desktop machines. But what does that do for the roles of educational designers, teachers, etc. What people call “phone space” is very different to cyber space. Cyber space is a permitted space, back to the world. Whereas phone space is multimodal, you are having conversations, doing other things, crossing roads, travelling… And this is a very different learning space from a student sat at a computer.

Now, looking back I’d consider “mobile learning” rather backward looking, something of the last decade. I think that we, as professional educators, need to look outwards and forwards… And think about how we deal with this issue of abundance – how do we develop the criticality in our students to manage that. And we should question why they still come to us for face to face experiences, and to think about what that mean. Hence, I’m not that bothered if mobile learning actually is dead.

Ian Dolphin, executive director of the Apereo Foundation

We are a registered not for profit in the US, we have been described as an Apache Foundation for Education – that’s not quite right but gives an idea of what we do. We provide software including SAKAI, Xerte, and OpenCast (capturing and managing media at significant scale). But enough about us…

Next generation digital learning environment… Lots to say there but I will be focusing on a conversation that has opened up in the United States, and the relationship of that conversation to developing the discussion around Learning Analytics.

That conversation was started by Educause, which looked at the VLE – the benefits but also the drawbacks of being inflexible, of being very course or teacher-centred. And that work highlighted what a new VLE might want to look like – flexibility for different types of courses, that it should support collaboration across and between institutions, that it should support analytics for advising, and that this new environment should be a much more personal environment than what has gone before.

The analogy here perhaps is of Groundhog day. These are issues we have heard before over the last 10 years. But why do I think the environment is different now? Well, we are are more mature in our technology. We have gotten smarter and better at lightly working tools in and out of different environments. We are pragmatic about bringing functionality in pragmatically. And, lastly, we are starting to learn and develop a practical use of big data and learning analytics as a potential tool for personalisation.

I just want to pause to talk about academic analytics – about institutional trends, problems, etc. versus learner analytics – which are specific and personal, about interventions, retention etc. And we are already seeing some significant evidence about the effectiveness of learning analytics (see recent Bricks and Clicks report), with examples from the UK and US here. If one looks at the ends of the continuum here we are starting from prediction for retention intervention, but moving towards predictions for personalised learning.

There are several approaches to learning analytics at the moment. One is to buy in a system. We are taking a very different approach, developing a platform that uses various flexible components. That helps ensure data can move between systems, and that’s an issue Jisc has been raising – a national and international issue. And I think yesterday’s opening session was absolutely right about the importance of focusing on people, on humans. And if you look at the work Jisc has done, on ethical issues and informed consent, that is having an impact nationally and internationally.

We work with the society of analytics research. And there is a Solar analytics maturity framework. We have partnered with Solar and Jisc on our work and, to finish, I’d like to make a shameless plug for our Solar colleagues for LAK’16 which takes place in Edinburgh this summer.

Chrissi Nerantzi, principal lecturer in academic CPD, Manchester Metropolitan University

We saw a number of colleagues yesterday

 

10.30 – 11.15 #HullDtn: a collaborative approach to digital pedagogies

or:

10.30 – 11.30 New directions in open research

11.45 – 12.30 Introducing the UK research data discovery service

Christopher Brown, senior co-design manager, Jisc

13.30 – 14.30 Plenaries: the power of data

What can data mining the web tell us about our research?

Speaker: Euan Adie, CEO, Altmetric 

 

14.45 – 15.45 Responsible metrics for research

 

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Jisc Digifest 2016 – Day One LiveBlog

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Today and tomorrow I am in Birmingham for Jisc Digifest 2016 which I’ll be liveblogging here. I’m particularly hear wearing my Jisc’s 50 most influential higher education (HE) professionals using social media hat, helping to share the event with the wider sector who aren’t able to be at the ICC.

There is also an online programme so, if you aren’t here in person, you can not only follow the tweets on #digifest16 and the various blogs, you can also view special online content here.

As usual, this is a liveblog so all corrections, additions, comments, etc. are very welcome. 

At the moment my expected schedule for day one (this may change) is:

09:30 – 10:45 Plenaries: the power of digital for change – Dr Paul Feldman, chief executive, Jisc; Professor David Maguire, chair, Jisc; Professor Andrew Harrison, professor of practice at University of Wales Trinity St David and director, Spaces That Work Ltd; Andrew’s talk is entitled creating great digital spaces for learning; Professor Donna Lanclos, associate professor for anthropological research,UNC Charlotte

11:15 – 12:00 Improving digital technology skills in FE: the CPD service – Sarah Dunne, senior co-design manager, Jisc; Clare Killen, consultant; Peter Chatterton, consultant; Georgia Hemings, co-design support officer, Jisc

12:30 – 13:15 Build your own university app in under an hour (sponsor session from Guidebook) – Justin Lamb, product specialist, Guidebook

14:15 – 15:45 Jisc’s investment in digital content for humanities: understanding the impact on research outcomes – Paola Marchionni, head of digital resources for teaching, learning and research, Jisc; Peter Findlay, digital portfolio manager, Jisc; Professor Eric T Meyer, senior research fellow, Oxford Internet Institute; Dr Kathryn Eccles, research fellow, Oxford Internet Institute.

Or:

14:15 – 15:45 Why educators can’t live without social media – Eric Stoller, higher education thought-leader, consultant, writer, and speaker

15:30 – 16:15 Working with students to make the most of digital – Sarah Knight, senior co-design manager, Jisc;  Dr Kerry Gough, senior lecturer in learning and teaching, Centre for Enhancement of Learning and Teaching (CELT), Birmingham City University; Jamie Morris, associate lecturer in student engagement, Centre for Enhancement of Learning and Teaching (CELT), Birmingham City University; Charlotte Creagh, manager of innovation and digital, Harlow College; Dave Monk, e-learning co-ordinator, Harlow College; Dani Campion, student, Birmingham City University; Charlotte Gough, student, Birmingham City University

16:45 – 17:45 The case for learning analytics – Phil Richards, chief innovation officer, Jisc; Michael Webb, director of technology and analytics, Jisc; Niall Sclater, learning analytics consultant

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BL Labs Roadshow 2016

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1330  Introduction
Dr Beatrice Alex, Research Fellow at the School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh

1335 Doing digital research at the British Library Nora McGregor, Digital Curator at the British Library

The Digital Research Team is a cross-disciplinary mix of curators, researchers, librarians and programmers supporting the creation and innovative use of British Library’s digital collections. In this talk Nora will highlight how we work with those operating at the intersection of academic research, cultural heritage and technology to support new ways of exploring and accessing our collections through; getting content in digital form and online; collaborative projects; offering digital research support and guidance.

1405  British Library Labs
Mahendra Mahey, Project Manager of British Library Labs.

The British Library Labs project supports and inspires scholars to use the British Library’s incredible digital collections in exciting and innovative ways for their research, through various activities such as competitions, awards, events and projects.

Labs will highlight some of the work that they and others are doing around digital content in libraries and also talk about ways to encourage researchers to engage with the British Library. They will present information on the annual BL Labs Competition, which closes this year on 11th April 2016. Through the Competition, Labs encourages researchers to submit their important research question or creative idea which uses the British Library’s digital content and data. Two Competition winners then work in residence at the British Library for five months and then showcase the results of their work at the annual Labs Symposium in November 2016.

Labs will also discuss the annual BL Labs Awards which recognises outstanding work already completed, that has used the British Library’s digital collections and data. This year, the Awards will commend work in four key areas: Research, Artistic, Commercial and Teaching / Learning. The deadline for entering the BL Labs Awards this year is 5th September 2016.

1420  Overview projects that have used British Library’s Digital Content and data.
Ben O’Steen, Technical Lead of British Library Labs.

Labs will further present information on various projects such as the ‘Mechanical Curator’ and other interesting experiments using the British Library’s digital content and data.

1500 Coffee and networking

1530 BL Labs Awards: Research runner up project: “Palimpsest: Telling Edinburgh’s Stories with Maps�
Professor James Loxley, Palimpsest, University of Edinburgh

Palimpsest seeks to find new ways to present and explore Edinburgh’s literary cityscape, through interfaces showcasing extracts from a wide range of celebrated and lesser known narrative texts set in the city. In this talk, James will set out some of the project’s challenges, and some of the possibilities for the use of cultural data that it has helped to unearth.

1600 Geoparsing Historical Texts data
Dr Claire Grover, Senior Research Fellow, School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh

Claire will talk about work the Edinburgh Language Technology Group have been doing for Jisc on geoparsing historical texts such as the British Library’s Nineteenth Century Books and Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership which is creating standardized, accurate XML/SGML encoded electronic text editions of early print books.

1630 Finish

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