LARC rise

Chicken analytics © The University of Edinburgh http://images.is.ed.ac.uk/luna/servlet/s/17q3tn — No pictures of larks available so you’ll have to make do with chicken analytics
© The University of Edinburgh http://images.is.ed.ac.uk/luna/servlet/s/17q3tn

I am delighted to be chairing the project steering group for the University of Edinburgh LARC ‘Learning Analytics Report Card’ project.

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.

December 6, 2015

speak, friend, and enter

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

The full 3 day symposium was a great success.

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.

November 6, 2015

media hopper

When people ask me why the new media asset management system at University of Edinburgh will be called Media Hopper I reply:

‘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.

November 6, 2015

an Edinburgh festival of digital education

Picture taken by me from Evolution House. No rights reserved. — 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.

The conferences are: the 7th Open Educational Resources: Open Culture. OER16 https://oer16.oerconf.org/, the 6th International Learning Analytics and Knowledge (LAK) Conference. LAK16 http://lak16.solaresearch.org/ and the 3rd annual meeting of the ACM Conference on Learning at Scale L@S http://learningatscale.acm.org/las2016/

Where else would you want be?

October 21, 2015

all in the name of Lovelace

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.

Open educational resources
In celebration of Ada and just because it’s a good thing to do we released several open educational resources for you to enjoy. These include the instructions for our workshops, how to make your own raspberry pi case and a super on-trend grown-up colouring in sheet designed by Jackie Aim.

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.

On Tour

Stewart and I will both be giving papers in Oxford in December as part of the Ada Lovelace bicentennial celebrations hosted by the Bodleian and Somerville College.

October 21, 2015

the most dangerous phrase in the language is ‘we’ve always done it this way.’

Quote 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

October 12, 2015

media management

Female Faces, Lips and Dots. Hughes, Jennifer M. © The University of Edinburgh http://images.is.ed.ac.uk/luna/servlet/s/186b57

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.

Read more about the vision for the service at: https://www.projects.ed.ac.uk/project/mft001/page-0
Read more about Kaltura at: http://www.kaltura.com

Receive project updates by subscribing to: is-media-info@mlist.is.ed.ac.uk
(Info on subscribing to a mailing list: http://edin.ac/1Kw3Vsd)

Supporting new uses of media

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.

October 1, 2015

be our Wikimedian in Residence

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.

Media coverage:

The Student Newspaper

Edinburgh Evening News

The post is offered on a fixed-term (12 months), part-time basis (17.5 hours per week).

Closing date: Thursday 29 October 2015 at 5pm

September 17, 2015

Ada Lovelace Day, Edinburgh

Donate_lego — (c) Stewart Cromar 2015 Vote now to make it real https://ideas.lego.com/projects/102740

The University of Edinburgh will be hosting Ada Lovelace Day on Tuesday 13th October 2015 – an international celebration of the achievements of women in science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM). You are all welcome, please join us.

Our provisional schedule includes:

composing music with algorithms
building Raspberry Pi enclosures with LEGO
metadata games in University of Edinburgh’s Library and University Collections
Wikipedia training session and edit-a-thon
Ada buns
guest speakers
and much more!

Book now.

Schedule:
Morning (booking link)
11:00-11:30 Introduction to the day with speakers on Lovelace, research using LEGO, programming and games (Melissa Highton, Katya Krasnopeeva & Judy Robertson)

11:30 – 14:00 Fun with data, algorithms, and Pi: hands-on sessions (drop-in)
•        compose your own music with algorithms – sessions running at these times: 11:30 – 12:15; 12:15 – 13:00; 13:00 – 14:00
•        build your own Raspberry Pi enclosures with LEGO – sessions running at these times: 11:30 – 13:00; 13:00 – 14:00
•        play and compete in metadata games (University of Edinburgh’s Library and University Collections division) – sessions running at these times: 11:30 – 13:00; 13:00 – 14:00

Afternoon (booking link)
14:00 – 17:00 Wikipedia Editathon
Join us to raise profile of women in computer science & inspire a new generation! Receive expert advice and training so that you can, edit and publish articles for Wikipedia. Then publish new articles or improve existing articles about prominent Edinburgh University women, past and present, who are under-represented within Wikipedia.
·         14:00-15:00 Wikipedia training
·         15:00 Afternoon tea (catering provided)
·         15:15-17:00 Wikipedia Editing and Publishing: Edinburgh’s women in Computer Science

*You are welcome to bring your own topics of interest to write Wikipedia articles about too.

#ALD15 #ALD15Eduni

September 13, 2015

set in stone

Two weeks ago I presented the story of our Women in Science and Scottish History editathon at the Wikipedia Science conference in London at the Wellcome Trust*.

This week Surgeon’s Hall unveiled a plaque to commemorate the Edinburgh Seven and the Surgeon’s Hall riot. I am very pleased to be able to draw a direct line from the fun we had on the web at our wikipedia editahon to the fixing of a permanent plaque. it’s nice when the physical and the virtual keep up with each other.

The Wikipedia Science conference was a good place to discuss the contribution of women to the telling of science stories and disseminating research. Peter Murray-Rust described Wikipedia as our greatest achievement in the 21st Century. I reminded the audience that less that 15% of the people who edit Wikipedia are women and we discussed whether or not this was a problem. One delegate suggested that women aren’t interested in facts and another that women have ‘other’ things to do. We wondered how Wikipedia would be different, and Wikipedia science would be different, if more women contributed. We wondered what might be done to find out.

The Edinburgh Seven had a tough time when they tried to break into the male world of university medicine, but they were working within historical, established structures. Surely Wikipedia is designed from the start to be more open, more democratic, more participatory? Wikipedia is only 15 years old. It seems like it is work worth doing to try to recruit more editors and a good place to start would be amongst information professionals and women in tech.

It seems to me that the kinds of initiative we may need to get more women using wikipedia for science, are very much in the same vein as those more generally for women in STEM workplaces. We need women to want to join, and want to stay.

The presentation I gave described the research I am involved in with the Open University to identify the workplace learning outcomes for university staff and students in developing digital skills, information literacy skills and understanding of copyright in an open knowledge environment. The research team have surveyed and interviewed. Interviewees describe rich learning experiences, learning a range of skills and knowledge, for example:

technical knowledge (how to create a Wikipedia page, how to edit, how to cite other sources etc),
factual knowledge around the topic (names, dates, locations of historical events),
relational knowledge (how to interact with archivists and materials, how and where to source information, how to plan work with others),
socio-cultural knowledge (how to operate within a network of people with a common purpose).

Which all seem like good skills worth investing in. I am particularly interested in how editathons, if run well, can develop not just tech knowledge but also workplace cultural capital and networks. These are the things women need in STEM workplaces.

Watch this space for further research results, and for the next Edinburgh editathon.

The hashtag for the conference was #wikisci . I recommend the conference as a top value for money event. Less than 30 quid for access to the most up to date thinking in wikiscience.

*great venue