I’ve finally released version 2.9 of HtmlCleaner!

This month I also had to answer my first ever official support request for HtmlCleaner in my “day job” – it appears a researcher at the University of Oxford is using it as part of a project analysing legislation passed by the State Duma of the Russian Federation :)

At the Cetis conference 2014, Stephen and I facilitated a session on “Open Education and MOOCs”. We began with two very interesting presentations from Audrey Watters, a freelance journalist, and Amy Woodgate from The University of Edinburgh. They offered two different perspectives: MOOCs as teaching machines vs MOOCs as teaching experiments.

Audrey shared some insights on how the ideas and principles developed by the founder of Udacity, Sebastian Thrun, and used to build Google’s self-driving car have been applied to MOOCs to make teaching and learning scalable and standardized. Audrey argued that with AI (artificial intelligence) mind-sets, MOOCs have been developed as teaching machines that use students’ data as the new oil that drives learners to automated education!,

A few tweets from the second day of the Cetis conference in Storify. I’ve added a couple of additional tweets at the end with were no longer available on Storify.

The Cetis Conference is over for another year. Being the conference organiser means I don’t get to focus on one session for long. I’ve captured my favourite tweets in a storify, I hope they give an impression of the event.

…this is the last blog post I shall make here, comments are closed.

I will continue blogging about my Cetis work from my general work blog, “Sharing and learning” This is so that I don’t have to maintain separate sites for Cetis work, other projects and reflections on teaching. My posts about Cetis work will still be aggregated into the Cetis blogs site which is probably how most of you get here, but if you’re used to coming direct to this page please change your bookmarks / feed settings:

As I said, Wilbert and I are building a Google custom search engine for LRMI-tagged pages. We got a basic search that finds pages that have an educational alignment and matches a search term. Next step is using the properties of the educational alignment to filter the search result based on things that teachers care about. Our friends at a11y showed us how to do the filtering based on properties with their search demo which uses the search modifier
more:p:videoobject-accessibilityfeature:captions
to filter results that have schema.org markup showing that they contain captions.

Wilbert and I are spending the day trying to create a search engine for finding learning resources by searching LRMI-tagged web pages. A bit of code sprint if you like.

First attempt: standard custom search engine hosted by Google.
1. Go to https://www.google.com/cse/ set up new search engine. Choose option to “Restrict Pages using Schema.org Types” to CreativeWork.

We’ll use “Declaration of Arbroath as a test search. By way of baseline, here’s the what we get just searching Google for that:

I had the pleasure yesterday to talk on the Mozilla Open Badges community call about how LRMI and Open Badges may intersect. Open Badges are a means of displaying digital recognition of skills and achievements, there’s a technical framework behind the badges that offers the means of providing data in support of the claimed achievement. A particular part of this technical framework is the assertion specification, which includes a pointer from each badge to “the educational standards this badge aligns to, if any”.  This parallels the LRMI alignment object  very closely: in short the educationalAlignment property that LMRI added to schema.org allows encoding of statements along the lines of “this resource [teaches|assess|requires|has level] X” where X is some point in an shared educational framework, e.g. of attainment standards, topics or educational levels or shared curriculum. Diagrammatically

Last week was a significant one for UK academics and those interested in accessing scholarship; the funding councils announced a new policy mandating open access for the post-2014 research evaluation exercises. In the same week, Cetis added its name to the list of members of the Open Policy Network, (strap-line, “ensuring open access to publicly funded resources”). Thinking back only 5 years, the change in policy is not something I could imagine would have happened by now and I think it is a credit to the people who have pushed this through in the face of resistance from vested interests, and to the people in Jisc who have played a part in making this possible.