Do you want to learn how to write for the world’s largest encyclopeadia? Do you want to make knowledge available for the whole world to share? Do you like eating biscuits, meeting new people and having fun?
Building on the tremendous success of last year’s Innovative Learning Week Wikipedia editing extravaganza, we invite all to once again come along and join in.
The focus of this years’ event will be on the History of Medicine. You don’t need to know anything about the subject to participate. Suggestions of topics to create or edit, along with supporting resources will be available, and training will be provided by a professional Wikimedian. If you have a laptop or tablet, please bring it along.
Picture taken by me at Edinburgh Napier, Craiglockhart. No rights reserved by me.
After a quiet time in the last couple of years Girl Geek Scotland relaunched in considerable style last night with a keynote address by Nicola Sturgeon.
Edinburgh Napier University have offered them a home and the Principal, Andrea Nolan and the Dean of Computing, Sally Smith both spoke about the role women do play and should play in the tech sector in Scotland.
We are only 18% it seems, so even though there are no shortage of well paid, interesting, rewarding, professional jobs out there, the guys are still getting them all.
Booking is now open for #OER16 . More than 100 papers accepted, some fine looking speakers, and some of the funnest people with whom you could ever care to discuss the minutae of copyright law.
In this week we will also be launching our new Edinburgh University OER showcase website Open.ed, and celebrating the ratification of our OER policy by University of Edinburgh Learning and Teaching Committee.
Picture taken by me in my house. No rights reserved by me.
ISG is an organisation with a diverse workforce. As the first in our ‘PlayFair Steps‘ equality initiative seminars we invited Wendy Loretto, Deputy Dean and Professor of Organisational Behaviour at University of Edinburgh Business School to talk to ISG staff about ‘Understanding age in the workplace’. Wendy’s main research field is age and employment, with a particular focus on changes in employees’ and employers’ attitudes and practices in extending working lives. She gave us an overview of the issues, challenges and opportunities and brought critical insight to this topic questioning some of the rhetoric and assumptions that underpin much of the policy and mainstream management discourses. The session prompted group discussions amongst ISG colleagues and suggestions for real changes to move us towards working inclusively.
Picture taken by me in the street. No rights reserved by me.
Do you remember when we used to dream that MOOCs would disrupt traditional higher education? Bringing new ways of thinking, learning and interacting?
Today I sat for hours at a Futurelearn partnership event in a hot room balancing my laptop on my knee while a bunch of men presented from the front and ran over time. The group discussion slots were cut short and when a woman did finally speak from the front, her Q&A was cancelled completely.
I pointed out the notable lack of women on the programme to a couple of people. They looked surprised.
This project asks: ‘How can University teaching teams develop critical and participatory approaches to educational data analysis?’ It seeks to develop ways of involving students as research partners and active participants in their own data collection and analysis, as well as foster critical understanding of the use of computational analysis in education.
The ‘Learning Analytics Report Card’ captures data from an individual student’s course-related activity, and presents a summary of their academic progress in textual and visual form. However, rather than manifesting through hidden and inaccessible institutional data aggregation and analysis, the LARC offers students an opportunity to play with their data; to choose what is included or excluded, when the report is generated, and how it might be presented.
Rather than simply empowering the individual, this process reveals the functioning of the algorithms that increasingly underpin and govern educational decision-making. A pilot LARC will be developed for the MSc in Digital Education programme at the University of Edinburgh, with a view to producing a packaged system that might be used in other online provision.
The first draft of the Learning Analytics Report Card interface is now complete, and is ready for testing with Moodle data and the phase 1 analytics. The interface is behind the EASE login, which will restrict access to the identified pilot students, as well as facilitate login information for the data capture from Moodle. At present, the options available to students reflect the 5 categories of analytics constituting the fist phase of development: Attendance, Social Interaction, Engagement, Performance, Personal.
If you want to know more, contact Jeremy in the project team.
Picture taken by me in the street. No rights reserved by me.
This week I’ll be speaking at: Texts and contexts: the cultural legacies of Ada Lovelace Mathematical Institute, Woodstock Road, Oxford
A workshop bringing together graduate students and early career researchers to discuss the varied cultural legacies of this extraordinary figure. More information
I noted there were more women than usual at a Computer Science conference and I learned that maths saved Ada Lovelace from being known only as a mad cat lady.
“Nighthawks by Edward Hopper 1942” by Edward Hopper Licensed under Public Domain via Commons. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Nighthawks_by_Edward_Hopper_1942.jpg
‘because it will gather together all the mixed up multitude of video material from all over the University; bring it into one place; channel it into our VLEs, websites, portals and courses; apply standards and metadata ; and be very cool’.
You will know the following definitions of hopper:
hopper ( agric) : a container for a loose bulk material.
hopper ( minecraft ): a block that can be used to catch item entities, or to transfer items into and out of other containers.
channel-hopper( tv) : quickly changing from one channel to another to find something you want to watch.
Grace Hopper ( rolemodel) : an inspirational computer scientist. She developed the implementation of standards for testing computer systems and components and coined the term “debugging” for fixing computer glitches when she removed a moth from her computer.
Dennis Hopper (role model): just cool.
space hopper ( toy ): just orange and bouncy.
Handling your hopper
We plan to launch Media Hopper in pilot form before Christmas. In practical terms this means that whilst the service will be available for everyone to use, there will only be a basic set of help materials available, and no supporting training courses. We realise that there are a number of staff around the institution who are very experienced users of media and we want to make the service available to this early adopter community as quickly as possible. If you are a less experienced user of media, we invite you to take a look and send us your feedback, but if you plan to use it for core teaching and learning activities, we would advise you to wait until more support is available.
The project team will continue to work on the service over early 2016, expanding support materials, developing training courses and finessing the service based on early adopter feedback. The full Media Hopper service will be available from May 2016.
Over the next 2 weeks, we have scheduled open sessions across the University. We’re very excited about the new service, and we’d like to share more info about the rollout plans, as well as demo the basic service and hear your feedback. Don’t worry if you can’t make it along though – this is the first of many opportunities and we will be scheduling more in the New Year.
Search for Media Hopper in MyEd Events Booking (https://www.myed.ed.ac.uk) for details of a session near you.
We are currently targeting the week beginning 14 December 2015 for the Media Hopper pilot launch.
Do you want to learn how to write for the world’s largest encyclopeadia? Do you want to make knowledge available for the whole world to share? Do you like eating biscuits, meeting new people and having fun?
