Earlier this week I was invited by Jisc RSC Scotland to attend their Open Education Joint Forum which took place at the Informatics Forum at the University of Edinburgh. It was a very well attended event that featured a packed programme of thought provoking and engaging presentations that highlighted a range of really inspiring open education developments. I’ve put together a storify of the event’s lively twitter back channel here
Category Archives: cetis
Spotlight on the Digital: Technical Focus Group
Last Friday I attended the Spotlight on the Digital technical focus group led by David Kay, of Sero Consulting and Owen Stephens, of Owen Stephens Consulting. The workshop was attended by institutional repository and archive managers, together with representatives of a wide range of bodies including the Welcome Trust, EDINA, the Archives Hub, Knowledge Integration, the Wikimedia Foundation and the British Library.
OKFN Glasgow and Edinburgh Meetups
Two Open Knowledge Foundation Meetups are taking place in Scotland next week. Meet-ups are friendly and informal evenings for people to get together to share and discuss all aspects of openness. The meetings are free and open to all, so come along and join the discussions around open knowledge, open data, open education, open government, open badges, open architecture, open galleries, libraries, archives and museums.
Topic Models to explore and compare communities
Recently I’ve been playing with an R wrapper for a machine language library called Mallet to generate lists of topics from a series of text documents. The technique is called Topic Modelling and I have gotten to grips with it from Ben Marwick‘s readings of archaeology papers which has some excellent reusable code. A topic in my model is simply a collection of words that make up the topic. Mallet can do all sorts of fancy things with the words and topics, it can tell me how likely a word is to appear in the topic, analyse text and tell me how much of that text belongs to which topics.
Facilitating a Wikipedia Editing Session; the #solo13 Experience
The Wikipedia Editing Workshop Session at the SpotOn 2013 Conference
This has been my second extended week of conferences. As described in a post on my Reflections on the EduWiki 2013 Conference on Friday and Saturday, 1 and 2 November 2013, I attended the EduWiki 2013 Conference. On last Friday and Saturday, 8 and 9 November I attended SpotOn 2013, the Science, Policy, Outreach and Tools Online conference.
Reflections on the EduWiki 2013 Conference
My First Event as Innovation Advocate at Cetis
On Friday and Saturday, 1 and 2 November 2013, I attended the EduWiki 2013 Conference. This was the second EduWiki conference organised by Wikimedia UK; EduWiki 2012 was held at the University of Leicester in September 2012.
Innovation in the eighth generation
According to Wikipedia there are eight generations of video game consoles, each generation defined by the consoles that are released and the innovations they make. We are at the start of the eighth generation with the PS4 and Xbox one about to hit the shelves this month.
Releasing a console is such big business that the money made from the console purchase itself is negligible. Often sold at a loss console developers will instead be hoping to cash in on much more, including licensing fees, monthly subscriptions, video steaming rental and advertising.
I finished a MOOC!
I’m feeling really chuffed with myself, I got to the end of a MOOC.
So what did I learn from the experience? If you haven’t already guessed I picked up a little bit about Weka. Still, I don’t feel much like a Weka expert, I’m not even sure I can remember where all the buttons are. What was more important for me was getting involved in learning new stuff with people who are outside of my usual work circle.
Back Aboard
I’m very pleased to be able to announce that, as of last week, I am once again gainfully employed as Cetis Assistant Director at the University of Bolton. I’ve been rather in limbo since the University of Strathclyde terminated all Cetis contracts in July so I’m more than a little relieved to be back aboard. However I’m also little sad to be rejoining Cetis without my former Strathclyde colleagues Sheila MacNeill and Martin Hawksey who have taken up new posts at Glasgow Caledonian University and ALT. I wish them all the very best in their new roles and hope that we’ll have opportunities to work together again in the future.
Starting A New Job!
I’m really pleased to announce that I’ve got a new job. As announced on the Cetis Web site today I started work at Cetis as an Innovation Advocate (great job title!)
I’m looking forward to working at Cetis. I’ve worked closely with Cetis over the years.