Category Archives: cetis

Who is using LRMI metadata?

Posted on by
facebooktwittergoogle_plusredditpinterestlinkedinmail

One question that we always get asked about LRMI is “who is using it?” There are two sides to this, use by search service providers and use by resource providers, this post touches on the latter.

In phase 2 of the LRMI project, various organizations were given small amounts of money to implement LRMI in their systems and workflows. Those organizations are listed on the Creative Commons web site, and Lorna is in the process of gathering together the lessons they learnt which will be reported back shortly. Perhaps more importantly, at least from the point of view of sustainability, are implementations that arise spontaneously, either by organizations with learning resources to disseminate who make a conscious decision to use LRMI, or those who in using schema.org markup find that one of the properties that LRMI added is appropriate.  Of course no one doing this is under any obligation to inform us of what they are doing, so it is harder to keep track of such use. Fortunately the Google Custom Search Engine Wilbert and I cobbled together  can be used to discover such implementations. It’s a bit hit-and-miss, you need to search for common topics (Math, English) and trawl through the results for new sites,  but it’s better than nothing.

Open Education, Open Scotland – report & presentations

Posted on by

(Originally posted at Open Scotland)

Last week the ALT Scotland Special Interest Group hosted the second Open Scotland event, Open Education, Open Scotland at the Informatics Forum at the University of Edinburgh.  This free and open event was attended by sixty colleagues, and speakers represented every sector of Scottish education including schools, further education, higher education and government.

Announcing “What is schema.org?”, a new technical briefing paper from Cetis

Posted on by

As part of my work with Cetis  for Creative Commons on managing the Learning Resource Metadata Initiative (LRMI), Cetis today publish a new technical briefing paper “What is schema.org?”.  LRMI is built on and expands schema.org so that it can be used to describe educationally significant characteristics of resources. I often find when explaining LRMI at a technical level, mostly I am explaining schema.org, hence this briefing as the first of a series coauthored by me and Lorna M Campbell, planned to explain LRMI.

Open Scotland at CILIP Scotland Conference

Posted on by

Earlier this week I was invited to present about Open Scotland at the CILIP Scotland Conference in Dundee. This is the first time I’ve attended the CILIPS conference and it was a really lively and engaging event with over 300 participants and an inspiring keynote on “Challenges, Choices and Opportunities” from Martyn Evans, Chief Executive of the Carnegie Trust.  My Open Scotland presentations seemed to be well received and I was very encouraged to have a couple of questions about the potential role of public libraries in opening access to educational resources, particularly for the school sector.  When we held the first Open Scotland Summit in Edinburgh in 2013 it occurred to me that the education sector potentially has much to learn from the public library sector in terms of open practice.

What is Learning Analytics?

Posted on by

Our research department is currently housing a student from a different institution who is interested in mobile learning. She has just finished her doctorate in a Spanish university and is about to head home to China. During a welcome meeting our guest proclaimed an interested in mobile learning and Learning Qnalytics. One of our departments professors then singled me out, “David knows all about Learning Analytics”.

I really should know about Learning Analytics. I’m currently involved in a EU project with the term Learning Analytics in the title. I helped write a paper on tools for learning analytics and have read many papers coming out of our department on it.

The student looked at me, raised an eyebrow. I waved my hand, said that we can catch up later, worried that I still don’t haven’t a clue about Learning Analytics. I just don’t have an answer to the question: ‘what is Learning Analytics?’. I can’t claim that data informed decision-making is a new thing, I don’t suppose it’s even new in the context of applying it to education. Also, how does it differ to educational data mining? I’ve never really understood that; I read somewhere that education data mining included academic analytics in it’s scope, I guess because academics aren’t learning anything they can’t be included in learning analytics, who knows.

The trouble is that when it comes to Learning Analytics I don’t think there is a good snappy sound bite on learning analytics to spurt out when your professor drops you in it at the meeting. Fortunately there a list of 5 things in a Cetis briefing paper by my colleagues that I always return too whenever I am lost in learning analytics. These 5 areas of learning analytics are

Open Practice and Open Policy at the Cetis Conference

Posted on by

The theme of this years annual Cetis Conference at the University of Bolton is Building the Digital Institution, and once again there is a strong focus on openness.  In addition to Audrey Watters keynote,  and parallel sessions on open knowledge (Open Knowledge: Wikipedia and Beyond) and open source (Web Services or Cloud, Open Source or outsourced?),  there are two open education sessions:

Open Education: a New World Order? facilitated by Li Yuan and Stephen Powell
Open Education: From Open Practice to Open Policy by Lorna M.Campell and Li Yuan.

Open Education: From Open Practice to Open Policy is very much a natural progression from open education parallels we’ve run at previous Cetis Conferences.  The first open education session we ran at the Cetis Conference was the UK OER Scoping Session way back in 2008 and since then we’ve progressed through the OER Technical Roundtable, Building Collections of OERs, to Open Practice and OER Sustainability, so it seemed natural that this year’s session should focus on moving from open practice to open policy.

Why I’m Looking Forward to the Cetis 2014 Conference

Posted on by

About the CETIS 2014 Conference

Audrey Waters will speak at the Cetis conferenceThis year’s Cetis conference, Cetis 2014, will be held at the University of Bolton on 17-18 June. The theme of this year’s event is “Building the Digital Institution“. As described on the conference web site:

This year’s conference focuses on the digital institution and explores how technology innovation can support and develop every aspect of university and college life, for teachers and learners, researchers and developers, service directors and senior managers.

The Biggest Barrier to WebRTC Adoption is Lack of Awareness!

Posted on by

How Appear.in Led Me To WebRTC

The appear.in Tool Back in January 2014 in a guest post published on Sheila MacNeill’s How Sheila See IT blog I reported on our experiments with the appear.in tool. This service provides a lightweight video conferencing tool. As I described in the blog post “unlike Skype, no software needs to be installed and unlike Google Hangouts you do not need to sign up to the service“.

Although the blog post and subsequent discussion on Twitter generated some interest in the appear.in service of potentially much more significance is the emerging standard on which the service is based: WebRTC.

OKF Open Education Working Group Advisory Board

Posted on by

Earlier this month I was delighted to be invited to join the Advisory Board of the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Open Education Working Group. The aim of the group, which is led by Marieke Guy, is “to initiate global cross-sector and cross-domain activity that encompasses the various facets of open education.”  Marieke has invited all Board members to write an introductory blog post for the group so here’s mine. It was published over at Open Education Working Group site last week.

okf_edu3

OKF Open Education Working Group