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.
Picture of Edinburgh castle taken by me from the balcony of Evolution House. No rights reserved.
Next year in April 2016 University of Edinburgh will host 3 major digital education conferences back to back. The city will provide a stunning back-drop for leading educators, policy makers and learning technologists to meet, share ideas and present their research. The calls for papers for each of the conferences is open now and the lists of keynote speakers and themes offer a tempting menu for anyone interested in open educational resources, learning analytics or the challenges of learning at scale.
Picture taken by me. Copyright on LEGO Ada belongs to Stewart Cromar.
Ada Lovelace Day at University of Edinburgh was a great success this year. The LTW, USD and L&UC teams outdid themselves. We had a lifesize Lego Ada in the Main Library, and the complete Ada and Baggage Lego set in Hugh Robson Building. We taught students and colleagues how to code music, edit wikipedia, build lego rasperry-pi cases, add metadata, colour-in and celebrate women in tech, all in the name of Lovelace.
Votes for Lego Women Stewart Cromar’s on going campaign to get his Ada lego set on to the shelves of stores worldwide was embraced by #adalovelaceday enthusiasts. LEGO Ada has now passed the 4.5K vote mark and is currently the #1 project on the Ideas homepage.
Picture taken by me. Copyright on LEGO Ada belongs to Stewart Cromar
Social Media Reaction
Our Ada Lovelace Day website took over a 1K page views in the week, with the OER content being particularly popular. In addition to the many tweets from participants using the #ALD15eduni hashtag we had several official Tweets and RTs from both Raspberry Pi and Sonic Pi and messages of support from similar events at other universities.
Commodore Grace M. Hopper, USN (covered) By James S. Davis [Public domain], via Wikimedia CommonsQuote usually attributed to Grace Hopper.
You may or may not be aware that ISG is pumping money into innovation projects designed to improve the services and offerings we make to the University.
We issued a call out to our staff for ideas- below are the winning projects I have funded from LTW.
All these projects are due to complete by August ’16, so if you see the name of an LTW person you know, or an idea you like, please do get in touch so that we can let you know what we are working on. The outputs of all these projects will be licenced CC-BY ( as far as practicable).
A comparative study between a low-cost capture agent and mobile devices -Marc Jennings
Augmented Reality and Learning (Microsoft Holo Lens) -Myles Blaney
Beacons of Knowledge: working with students to co-create geolocated virtual campus tours-Jo Spiller
Build a 3d Printer -Anne- Marie Scott
Developing student digital skills in the community -Amy Woodgate
Diversifying the curriculum with student-led remix and reuse OER- Jo Spiller
Drones: innovative media production -Amy Woodgate
Evaluating frameworks and toolkits for leading Learning Design Practice at University of Edinburgh -Fiona Hale
Exploring accessible Photogrammetry and 3D scanning -Stuart Nicol
Feedback on Feedback -Robert Chmeileswki
Learning Dashboards for professional development- Jenni Houston
Live Interactive Point of View Video -Euan Murray
Self-directed learning resources for spatial literacy -Gavin Inglis
Twitterbot – Pilot Service – Martin Morrey
Virtual Edinburgh Maker Platform Proof of Concept- Martin Morrey
We have invested in a new media asset management service for the University. Our vision is to enable the University to meet the full breadth of learning and teaching, assessment, research and engagement activities, by providing usable tools for making, editing, storing, sharing and disseminating video and audio files.
The new media asset management system will be delivered using the Kaltura video platform. Kaltura is a market leader in this space and the University has made a significant long-term investment in order to deliver our learning and teaching vision, and our strategies around distance education and research engagement. We will provide a central service to support the efficient use and management of media assets from all across the university. All staff and students will have access to the service.
The new service will support a wide range of activities, and we will be developing a suite of training and awareness opportunities over the next 3 months to promote these. Some of the most popular activities include:
Flipping the classroom – desktop recording tools can be used to pre-record media for students to watch in advance of contact time.
Enhancing feedback – use the service to record personalised video feedback and share with students either individually or to a group. Ask students to record and share with their peers or tutors, or use commenting tools to crowdsource feedback.
Using Video for assessment: Stimulate our student’ creativity and develop digital skills by tasking students to record their own media and submit it for feedback or assessment through our VLEs.
Showcasing our best – a web based video portal with curated channels of content will allow us to share within our University community, or with the wider world.
Strengthening the link between research and teaching – find high quality outputs from research projects in the video portal and use web based editing tools to clip out the best bits for use in teaching and learning.
Best of breed editing tools – web-based editing tools will make it simple to reuse, adapt and update learning materials.
At your desk recording – built in desktop recording tools allow you to create and share media quickly and easily.
Multi-platform broadcast strategy – publish to appropriate audiences simply and quickly through our VLEs, the University website, and other platforms such as YouTube and iTunesU.
Support accessibility and inclusion – use recording tools to easily provide information in an alternative format, and use transcripts, subtitles to make our content as accessible as possible.
Create Open Educational Resources – using built in copyright and publishing workflows you can make open learning resources widely available online.
Gaining insight and understanding – analytics will allow us to understand exactly what media is engaging to our audiences and what impact it is having.
Be present elsewhere – stream a lecture or presentation to a remote location, for example a remote conference.
Student revision – holding a library of recorded lectures and other content that can be used for revision and ‘listen again’ will better support our students.
Timescales
We plan to make the service available in late Semester 1 with a more limited set of features and training available, as an ‘early-adopters’ pilot phase. We will use Semester 2 to refine the service and continue training, awareness and community building activities ready for full scale launch in May 2016. This will allow us to check that our procedures, support and training are effective.
Please do sign up to our mailing list for regular updates on progress.
Do you have an eye for detail and a love of facts? Are you an experienced Wikimedian with experience working with the Wikimedia community? What would you do to engage our staff and students in editing, contributing and sharing open knowledge? We are recruiting a Wikimedian in Residence to work in Information Services alongside our learning technologists, archivists, librarians and information literacy teams. Following our first successful editathon events we now need your help to establish a network of Wikimedians on campus and to embed digital skills and open knowledge activities in learning and teaching across the University.
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