Summary of technologies in use in the JISC Developing Digital Literacies Programme

Posted on by

The JISC Developing Digital Literacies programme is now well underway. As I reported from the programme start up meeting last October , the aim of this 2 year programme is too

” . . .promote the development of coherent, inclusive and holistic institutional strategies and organisational approaches for developing digital literacies for all staff and students in UK further and higher education.”

with projects:

” . . .working across the following stakeholder groupings in their plans for developing digital literacies: students, academic staff, research staff, librarians and learning resources and support staff, administrators and managers and institutional support staff . . .”

As part of the programme support project, over the last couple of months I’ve conducting our usual technical audits with the projects to get a picture of what technologies and standards they are using/considering to use at this stage. The results of these conversations are recorded in our PROD database.

The projects are due to complete their baselining phase at the end of January, so it has been timely to discuss some of the wider issues around using various technologies with each of the projects. The rest of this post gives a snap shot of the range of technologies the projects are currently using. NB Unfortunately I haven’t been able to speak with the UCL team, but once they have completed their baseline report we will be meeting and I’ll update the data, however don’t expect the general trends outlined in this post to change much.

The map shows the locations of the 12 projects, with links to the prod entry for each. As the programme progresses, I’ll be adding a links to the design studio pages for each project too.

Map showing locations of DDL projects

Map showing locations of DDL projects

The mindmap below gives an alternative view of the data entries for each project (if you click on the picture it will take you to a live version, NB the mind map will be open so you may find it easier to close nodes before exploring it in full).

Mind map of PROD entries for DDL programme

Mind map of PROD entries for DDL programme

The focus of the programme is more on the effective use of technology rather than as with other JISC funded work, the development of technology. On saying that, there are a couple of projects who are planning to develop some mobile applications and there are strong links between the work of the W2C project at MMU in relation the provision of mobile services, particularly with the SEEDPod project, University of Plymouth who have been working with MMU in conducting surveys of students uses of mobile devices. There are a number of approaches to mobile provision. The Developing Digital Literacy as a Post Graduate Attribute project is providing students with ipods to record and share their learning journeys, and to some extent leaving it to the students to find what works/doesn’t work for them. Whereas other projects (SEEDPod, InStePP) are developing more holistic, device and location agnostic approaches to provision of services/content.

So far we have 94 individual technologies and standards. The wordle below gives an overview.

Wordle of technologies & Standards in DDL progamme (Jan '12)

Wordle of technologies & Standards in DDL progamme (Jan '12)

This bubblegram gives another view of the range and instances of technologies and standards. Again if you click on the picture you’ll go to a larger, interactive version.

Bubblegram of technologies and standards in DDL, Jan 2012 (v4) Many Eyes

The projects area all blogging (you can access aggregated feeds here) and WordPress is top of our chart with 8 projects using it, the majority of these are also using institutionally hosted versions. What is also noticeable, is the (relatively) high instances of non- institutionally based services such a social networking sites – particularly twitter and Facebook. At the moment the main (and anticipated) use of both is for general project dissemination, however a number of projects are both to communicate with staff/students e.g. to get people involved in focus groups. The PADDLE project are planning to use existing facebook groups as collaboration/communication point with some of their focus groups.

Other external services such as drop-box (for document sharing), doodle for arranging meetings and a range of google apps (docs, calendar etc) are also being widely used. For the later there is a mix of institutional provision and more general use of, for example google docs for sharing project team related information. As with other programmes and the following a general sector wide trend, Moodle comes out as the most common VLE across the programme.

In terms of standards, the main focus was on packing formats with IMS CP, IMS CC and SCORM all getting one mention each. As we are still in early days, most projects haven’t got a clear idea of what format they will release any content in, however there was an overall interest in, and indeed knowledge of OER (i.e. the DIAL project is building on experiences from a previous UK OER project) and most projects expressed an desire to release any relevant content as OERs.

A number of projects (e.g. The Exeter Cascade Project, InStePP) are looking at greater integration of digital literacies into wider competency frameworks through for example making more explicit curriculum links to institutional graduate attributes; and also through working with other wider programme related stakeholders such as SCOUNL and ALT.

As mentioned earlier, projects are just coming to the end of their baselining work, and at this stage they are keen not to be prescriptive about the technologies they will be using, as they want to be as flexible as possible. Also, key to number of the projects is the exploration of the how, what, where and why of technology use (both hardware and software) of staff and students and then making appropriate interventions/recommendations for wider institutional policies.

When I repeat this exercise next year, I have a suspicion that there may be a subtle shift to more institutionally based services as more content will have been created and being used/shared within VLEs/repositories. As any changes to curriculum provision, and institutional policies, if not in place, will be fairly well scoped by then too. I am wondering if we will see, similar to the Curriculum Design programme, an increase in the use of Sharepoint for more formal documentation and a decrease in use of more informal sharing services such as drop box. At the moment there the project teams are using drop box primarily for the convenience of any time/where/device access.

One of the things I was curious about was if these projects would be more “literate” in their choices of technologies to use, and what would be the balance between use of institutionally based services and more general web based services. I don’t think I have an answer to the question, but I have seen a healthy sense of pragmatism displayed by all the projects in terms of their approaches.

I’ve had some really interesting discussions with projects (particularly Digitally Ready) around the definition of technology and what it was I really wanted to record i.e. everyday /commonplace technologies like email, calendars etc; was I interested in what the project team were using for project management or more what they were using for stakeholder engagement? In fact it’s all of the above – which probably goes some way to explaining the number of different technologies recorded to date. I feel it’s also worthwhile every now and again just stepping back and reflecting on how our expectations of peoples and projects use of technologies (JISC programme digital literacy perhaps?) have evolved. A few years ago, we’d be lucky if we got all projects to have a blog with more than 2 or 3 entries by the end of a programme – now, it’s one of the first things on a projects to do list, and most institutions provide some kind of hosted blogging service.

When we were developing PROD originally it was to record the tools, standards outputs and development processes of very technically focused projects. However as we’ve started to use it more widely across the JISC elearning programme, we’ve used it not just to record what projects are building, but the what, how and when of technologies projects are actually using. In the not so development focused projects such as DDL this is central. I think that this is starting to give us some real evidence of the diversity and commonality of approaches within and across programmes, and give us greater understanding of how actual use of technologies is being enabled and embedded both from the bottom up and top down.

As they move into the next phase of the programme it will be fascinating to see how the projects start to use the findings from their baselining and how that will impact on their next phase of development.

Programme Maps ( or even more maps . . .)

Posted on by

Following on from David’s post on Getting Useful Data out of Prod and its linked data store this post shows a couple of examples of creating programme level maps.

David and I have spent a bit of time over the past week going through some of Martin Hawksey’s ideas, working out what we felt were useful queries to use with the linked data store, and creating some simple how to guides. As someone who is not at all familiar with writing queries, we reckoned if I could it, then just about anyone could :-)

To prove that this does all work below is a screen shot of map of the JISC Curriculum Design Projects including links to their individual PROD entry pages and to their Design Studio pages (which includes links to outputs/further information for each project).

Curriculum Design Projects map

Curriculum Design Projects map

You can view the interactive version by following this link.

We found a few issues when we were trying things out. As well as deciding on what mapper template to use, I found things to be a bit temperamental when cutting and pasting data between sheets. In fact at one point I had to download a google spreadsheet containing the data I needed to my desktop and then cut and paste data from it back into the template spreadsheet, as I couldn’t seem to cut and paste data from sheets within the template. However, I have now got it all down to a matter of tens of minutes minutes instead of what felt like tens of hours.

Whilst were were working on this, Wilbert Kraan also reminded us of work he had been doing with Sgvizler using data from PROD to create visualisations (including maps). Here’s another map example, again of the Curriculum Design programme.

Curriculum Design projects map (sgvizler)

Curriculum Design projects map (sgvizler)

If you follow this link, you can see the map and the query used to generate it.
If you wanted to create a map for another programme e.g. Curriculum Delivery, then you would just change the name in this line of the query:

?Link prod:programme “Curriculum Design” to

?Link prod:programme “Curriculum Delivery”

which would give you a map showing the Curriculum Delivery projects.

As we were exploring these approaches, and particularly when I was doubting my sanity and my ability to undertake simple cut and paste actions, we did have a number of “is this really all worth it?” moments. But on the whole, we think that it is. As well as providing us with another example of how we can re-present data in PROD (other examples are available here and here), it does give another example of how having openly available (linked) data allows for this kind of data manipulation.

Once you have a query, the sgvizler approach is very quick, however you do need to have server hosting facilities to use it (Wilbert has used his own). We are discussing if it is worth us setting up something a bit more permanent for our own uses. The google KML template approach (based on Martin’s work), doesn’t need any server side set up, just a google account. Although creating maps is a bit more time consuming at moment, imho, it gives slightly more attractive results in terms of map layout.

We’ll be doing some more experimentation over the coming weeks, but in the meantime if you want to have a play, then just follow the how to guide and we’d love to hear your thoughts and see any examples you come up with.

A conversation around what it means to be a digital university

Posted on by

Over the past 18 months I’ve been having a series of discussions with Bill Johnston (a colleague of mine here at Strathclyde) around notions information and digital literacy and of what it means to be a digital university.

We moved from a series increasingly long, and wide ranging ad hoc “in the kitchen/pub” chats to slightly more formal meetings with the idea of writing a paper. However, as the months have passed, we’ve actually come round to the idea of extending our conversation in a more informal way, and (hopefully) to a wider audience via this blog.

In this post, I’d like to introduce you, dear reader, to Bill and the some of the key questions and issues we’ve been been working on.

Bill Johnston is recently retired, but he is still an active Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Strathclyde. Bill has spoken, researched and published in the areas of critical thinking, educational perspectives on the student experience, curriculum design, and information literacy. Together with Sheila Webber, he developed a credit bearing Information Literacy class for Business School students at Strathclyde University. They also completed the ground breaking and influential study of UK academics conceptions of information literacy.

Early on in our discussions we agreed that using an information literacy framework would provide a unique lens to explore a number of internal and external drivers for institutional change and to explore notions of the term “digital university”. We felt that exploration of this overarching term offered the potential to act as a catalyst for fundamental change throughout an institution from administration to teaching and learning. We deliberately chose not to use the term “digital literacy”, as we felt that at the institutional level, the more holistic notion of a digital university was more encompassing. It was also a term we were both hearing being used both in our own institution and by others. However, we both found it was being used in a very narrow context, mainly relating to digital technology like repositories and/or VLEs. Digital literacy, is also a term that although increasingly being used in HE (e.g. the JISC Developing Digital Literacies Programme) it is still not commonplace, and digital literacy is often seen as narrow, computer science related skills, as exemplified by Michael Gove’s recent speech, and not as a developing set of wider ranging competencies as identified by Josie Fraser’s excellent response. Bill and I also believe that digital literacy is an extension of information literacy, and that one cannot exist without the other. So, the “literacy” of the digital university is the literacy of information. This in turn raises wider social issues of digital inclusion and the role universities can play in the wider community, but more on that angle in a future post.

We felt that information literacy could act as a gateway to creating dialogue at the institutional level as it provides the means, knowledge and skills needed to allow meaningful interactions between people, digital content and technological systems. In other words, it affords a way to allow optimization of digital participation and measure progress. Furthermore, in true abstract writing style ;-) , using an information literacy lens provides us with a means to produce a coherent outline of a digital university and suggest strategic developments of the digital infrastructure, learning environment and management culture required to fully achieve the potential of the digital technologies. We are also both convinced that a truly digital university only occurs where there is a fusion between technology and staff/student developments driving innovation and creativity.

The diagram below shows an integrated view of the topic areas of a matrix we have been developing. We feel that these areas are key for strategic conceptualization of provision of the required functionality for any 21st Century University.

Information literacy based planning matrix

Some key questions we’ve identified around these topic areas include:
• What constitutes an information literate learning environment? The physical campus? The VLE? A mix of both? What are the common understandings of information literacy ?
• How can we understand the requirements for the provision of institutional learning environment for the next 10 years?
• What are they key operational requirements from digital infrastructure? To support:learning, teaching, research and management? What balance is required?
• What type(s) of infra-structure is actually needed?
• Is key data about courses easily available for a variety of purposes including marketing, formal reporting requirements such a HESA, KIS?
• Is there ubiquitous, stable wifi connection; refurbished physical teaching and learning spaces as well as state of the art research facilities?
• What are the key digital literacy skills needed by both staff and students currently?
• What are the key digital literacy expectations for/from students and staff?
• What will be the key digital literacy skills needed by both staff and students in 10 years time?
• How can institutions begin to distinguish their unique features and make them explicit to increasingly demanding student (customer) requirements?

Over the next few posts, we’ll begin to expand more of our thoughts behind the matrix, organisational issues and digital inclusion. We’re also very interested in hearing other views, so please, share any thoughts you may have in the comments section.

*Part 2
*Part 3
*Part 4
*Part 5

Mega mash-ups and personalising learning environments: DVLE Virtual Brown Bag session now available online

Posted on by

Over the past 18 months the projects funded through the JISC DVLE (Distributed Virtual Learning Environments) programme have been exploring ways to extend their provision of teaching and learning services. The W2C and SLEP projects joined for an virtual brown bag session to give an overview of the work they have been undertaking – particularly around developing access to greater and more personalised information for students.

Mark Stubbs (W2C project) started the session giving an overview of what they now call their Core+ DVLE model, aka their “mega mash-up”.

W2C Megamashup diagram

W2C Megamashup diagram

With their VLE (Moodle) at the centre the team have developed a number of web services from a range of institutional systems. This is now allowing students to access a number of services such as timetabling, PC availability, reading lists etc from mobile devices. Taking this web service approach has allowed the team to use the “develop once, deploy often” approach. Consistent tagging (based on existing commonly used tags such as course IDs etc) has also been key for integration. Mark also took us through some very interesting stats around usage of the services, and the students use of mobile devices.

Hugh Davies, Dave Millard and Yvonne Howard the took us through developments from the SLEP project. There are a number of similarities to be drawn to the mega mash-up approach of W2C. However a key difference being that Southampton don’t have a VLE at the centre, instead Sharepoint is at the centre of their developments, with new UIs being developed for students to access information. Using Sharepoint hasn’t been without it’s challenges, as the team did highlight, it hasn’t been as flexible as they first thought, however they are using the project to try and introduce more agile and user centred development processes into the mainstream of institutional provision of services.

Being Southampton the team have also be investigating ways to increase the use of open data, and so have been spending time working with internal groups such as the Data Access Group, to try implement and develop policy around the use and sharing of data.

The actual apps/services which each project has/is developing are pretty unique to each institution, however the over-arching principles and techniques could be applied to many institutions and shows that it is possible to create more distributed learning environments through the greater integration of existing systems allowing access from multiple devices. To find out more, a recording of this highly informative session is available online.

More information about the DVLE programme, including links to previous online sessions is available on the CETIS wiki.

DVLE programme virtual brown bag session, 13 January

Posted on by

Beat the January wet and windy blues by joining us from the comfort of your own desk, for a free “virtual brown bag lunch” session next Friday (13 January). The W2C project (MMU) and the SLEP (Univeristy of Southampton) will give an overview of the work they have been doing in creating mobile web services and apps for staff and students as part of the JISC Distributed Virtual Learning Environments (DVLE) programme.

Starting at 12 o’clock and lasting approximately an hour this session will give delegates an insight into the underlying technical approaches the projects have taken to providing mobile services which integrate with existing institutional systems, and also their ongoing requirements and student engagement processes. To get an overview and some background to the programme, this post gives a summary of project activity based on the last set of interim project reports.

As ever the event is free to attend, and you can register your interest by using the form below.

De-regulation, data and learning design

Posted on by

Data,to coin a phrase from the fashion industry, it’s the new black isn’t it? Open data, linked data, shared data the list goes on. With the advent of the KIS, gathering aspects institutional data is becoming an increasing strategic priority with HE institutions (particularly in England).

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been to a number of events where data has been a central theme, albeit from very different perspectives. Last week I attended the Deregulating higher education: risks and responsibilities conference. I have to confess that I was more than a bit out of my comfort zone at this meeting. The vast majority of delegates were made up of Registrars, Financial Managers and Quality Assurance staff. Unsurprisingly there were no major insights into the future, apart from a sort of clarification that the new “level playing field” for HE Institutions, is actually in reality going to be more of a series of playing fields. Sir Alan Langlands presentation gave an excellent summary of the challenges facing HEFCE as its role evolves from ” from grant provider to targeted investor”.

Other keynote speakers explored the risks, benefits exposed by the suggested changes to the HE sector – particularly around measurements for private providers. Key concerns from the floor seemed to centre around greater clarity of the status of University i.e. they are not public bodies but are expected to deal with FOI requests in the same way which is very costly; whilst conversely having to complete certain corporation tax returns when they don’t actually pay corporation tax. Like I said, I was quite out of my comfort zone – and slightly dismayed about the lack of discussion around teaching, learning and research activities.

However, as highlighted by John Craven, University of Plymouth, good auditable information is key for any competitive market. There are particular difficulties (or challenges?) in coming to consensus around key information for the education sector. KIS is a start at trying to do exactly this. But, and here’s the rub, is KIS really the key information we need to collect? Is there a consensus? How will it enhance the student experience – particularly around impact of teaching and learning strategies and the effective use of technology? And (imho) most crucially how will it evolve? How can we ensure KIS data collection is more than a tick box exercise?

Of course I don’t have any of the answers, but I do think a key part of this is lies in continued educational research and development, particularly learning analytics. We need to find ways to empowering students and academics to effectively use and interact with tools and technology which collect data. And also help them understand where, how and what data is collected and used and represented in activities such as KIS collection.

As these thoughts were mulling in my head, I was at the final meeting for the LDSE project earlier this week. During Diana Laurillard’s presentation, the KIS was featured. This time in the context of how a tool such as the Learning Designer could be used to as part of the data collection process. The Learning Designer allows a user to analyse a learning design in terms of its pedagogical structure and time allocation both in terms of teaching and preparation time, as the screen shot below illustrates.

Learning Designer screenshot

The tool is now also trying to encourage re-use of materials (particularly OERs) by giving a comparison of preparation time between creating a resource and reusing and existing one.

The development of tools with this kind of analysis is crucial in helping teachers (and learners) understand more about the composition and potential impact of learning activities. I’d also hope that by encouraging teachers to use these tools (and similar ones developed by the OULDI project for example) we could start to engage in a more meaningful dialogue around what types of data around teaching and learning activities should be included in such activities as the KIS. Simple analysis of bottom line teacher contact time does our teachers and learners an injustice – not to mention potentially negate innovation.

The Learning Designer is now at the difficult transition point from being tool developed as part of a research project into something that can actually be used “in anger”. I struck me that what might be useful would be tap into the work of current JISC elearning programmes and have one (or perhaps a series) of design bashes where we could look more closely at the Learning Designer and explore potential further developments. This would also provide an opportunity to have some more holistic discussions around the wider work flow issues around integrating design tools not only in the design process but also in other data driven processes such as KIS collection. I’d welcome any thoughts anyone may have about this.

(Open) Educational practice and (digital) literacy

Posted on by

I’ve been dipping in and out of the JISC online conference this week. As usual, there has been a great mix of live presentations and asynchronous discussion. Two themes have risen to the top of my mind, (open) educational practice and (digital) literacy. I also recently attended the Mainstreaming Open Educational Practices Forum co-hosted by the OPAL and Concede projects and UNESCO. So this post is a sort of summary of my reaction and reflections to issues raised during both these events. Apologies, this maybe a bit of rambling rant!

When working in any new or niche area, terminology and or jargon is always an issue. I’ve always disliked the term “e-learning”, and prefer to talk about “learning”. However I do realise that there are valid reasons for using the term, not least political ones. During both events, the disconnect between practitioners knowledge and understanding of both OER and Open Practice was “openly” recognised ad and discussed. Both terms have meaning in the research world, and in funded projects (such as UKOER, OPAL etc) but for the average teacher in FE/HE they’re pretty meaningless. So, how do we move into mainstream practice? Answers on a postcard, or tweet please :-) The work being done by the UK OER synthesis team on Open Practice is one way of trying to address some of these issues, and sharing experiences of developing practice and use of open, or indeed any, content in teaching and learning.

I was somewhat surprised at the UNESCO event that an assertion was made that open educational practice is mainstream, and I was equally reassured via my twitter network that it isn’t. Marion Manton made a really good point “I think it is like the OER use, aspects have always happened but not necessarily called OEP”. This distinction obvious and is crucial as it’s often forgotten. I think we in the educational research and development field too often alienate ourselves from reality by our insistence on using unfamiliar acronyms, jargon etc, and looking at small parts of the picture. Instead of focusing on “open” educational practice, why aren’t we looking at general “educational” practice? “Again, I know there are reasons for doing this, and there a lots of people (and projects) doing excellent staff development work to try and close the gaps. But I keep coming back to questions around why we continue to need to have these false constructs to allow us to get funding to investigate teaching and learning practice.

During the discussion session on digital literacies at the online conference, the notion of empowerment was raised. Increased digital literacy skills were recognised as a key tool to empower staff and students (and indeed everyone in our society). At the open education practice session this morning, the notion of OER literacy was raised. Now this isn’t the first time I’ve heard this and I have to say I kind of feel the same about OER literacy as I do about e-learning. I see the literacies needed for using/creating/sharing OERs as being part of a wider set of digital literacies, which have much wider application and longevity.

Learning objects also came up during today’s discussion, in the context of “does anyone use the term anymore ?” Now, I’m not going to open up that particular can of worms here, but actually the fundamental issues of sharing and re-use haven’t changed since the those heady days. I think the work done by the open community not only has made great developments around licencing materials but has allowed us to look again at the core sharing/reuse issues and, more importantly engage (and re-engage) with these more challenging issues of educational practice.

On reflection, I think my attitudes and leanings towards the wider, general use of terms such as practice and literacy, are really down to my own development and practice. I am an unashamed generalist, and not an academic specialist. When I actually created educational content it was always openly (in one form or another) available. When I’ve been involved in staff development it has always been centred around sharing and (hopefully) improving practice and enabling teachers to use technology more effectively. And I hope that through my blogging and twittering I am continuing to develop my open practice. I do feel though that right now it would be timely to step back and take a look a the bigger picture of educational practice and literacies, not least so we can truly engage with the people we ultimately want to benefit from all this work.

Enhancing and creating student centred portfolios in VLEs webinar

Posted on by

This week has been designated “activity week” for this year’s JISC Innovating E-learning conference. There are a number of pre conference online activities taking place. I’m delighted to be chairing the “enhancing and creating student centred portfolios in VLEs” webinar, this Friday (18th November at 11am).

The session will demonstrate a number of portfolio centric integrations and widgets being developed as part of the current JISC DVLE Programme from the DOULS, DEVLOP and ceLTIc projects. Below is a short summary of each of the presentations.

DOULS
Portfolio redevelopment at the Open University has focussed on incorporating some of the enhanced functionality available within Google, e.g., a document repository, facilities for sharing, collaboration and reflection. The DOULS project (Distributed Open University Learning Systems) has been tasked with delivering integration between the Moodle learning environment and Google. The presentation by the Open University will focus on these integrations and what it means for the student experience.

DEVELOP
Part of the University of Reading’s DEVELOP Project has been to look at e-portfolio provision and use, and to develop three widgets to assist staff and students in the creation and maintenance of e-portfolios. The University uses Blackboard as its VLE and widgets have been designed using HTML/JavaScript to interact, in pilot studies, with Blackboard’s very basic e-portfolio tool. One widget, now fully developed for Blackboard, enables students to build a portfolio with all the pages as specified by their tutors/lecturers. This widget also guides the user through the various steps needed to share and maintain their portfolio. A feedback widget is at this moment being developed to allow tutors to provide feedback on specific parts of the students’ portfolios while an export widget is planned to allow students to download their portfolio in a standards-compliant form.

ceLTIc
Stephen Vickers from the ceLTIc project will demonstrate how the IMS Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) specification can offer a simple and effective mechanism for integrating learning tools with a VLE. The session will also illustrate how LTI can enable learners from Moodle and Learn 9 to collaborate together in a shared space within an external tool such as WebPA or Elgg.

Information on registration and how to access the webinar can be found at the conference website, and remember to follow @jiscel11 and the #jiscel11 hashtag on twitter for updates.

A recording of the session is available by following this link.

Crowd sourced open source alternatives to SPSS

Posted on by

This morning I was having a PROD call with Peter Kilcoyne from the WORDLE project (part of the current JISC Developing Digital Literacies programme). One area that came up during our discussion was open source alternatives to SPSS for data analysis of their baselining interviews with staff and students.

Peter and his team have done a bit of research and have been looking at SOFA, and some other other possibilities. Statistical analysis is not one an area I know that much about, but I know a lot of people who do have expertise, so I decided to take the tried and tested “lazy web” approach to see if there were any other recommendations from my twitter community. And once again the power of the crowd came through. I even got some email with more detailed information and suggestions of labs I could use in my university.

Below are the collated responses to my initial tweet. R was the most popular choice by far, but if you know of any other alternatives, then please let me know.

[View the story “Open source alternatives to SPSS” on Storify]

Exploring learning in transition, latest JISC Radio Show

Posted on by

In the run up to this years JISC online conference, a selection of the key note speakers have contributed to the latest JISC radio show, JISC Online Conference explores learning in transition. As well as giving some insights into their views on some of the key topics the conference, during the show keynotes also share some of their experiences of being a participant in an online conference.

Touching on topics from open education and the use and development of OERs to curriculum design to increasing learner engagement, the podcast gives a tantalising taster of some of the issues these keynote speakers will be raising. For example, Ewan MacIntosh poses the challenge to universities and colleges of providing learning maps, compasses or ulitmately GPSs for students for their learning journeys, whilst Mike Sharples highlights the importance of the “co-evolution of learning and technology” to create truly engaging and effective learning experiences. All in all a great way to warm up and get thinking about the discussions and debates which will take place during the conference week.

The podcast (and transcript) is available from the JISC website, and it’s not too late to register for the conference itself, more information is again available from the JISC website. If you’re still in two minds about participating in an online conference, there’s also a nice little video from past participants sharing their experiences at the bottom of the main conference page.