Author: dougclow

Data scientist, tutxor, project leader, researcher, analyst, teacher, developer, educational technologist, online learning expert, and manager. I particularly enjoy rapidly appraising new-to-me contexts, and mediating between highly technical specialisms and others, from ordinary users to senior management. After 20 years at the OU as an academic, I am now a self-employed consultant, building on my skills and experience in working with people, technology, data science, and artificial intelligence, in a wide range of contexts and industries.

Digital scholarship: Advanced technologies for research (3)

Third (and final, you’ll be pleased to learn) set of liveblog notes from Digital scholarship: Advanced technologies for research – a JISC-sponsored roadshow held on 10 March 2010 in the Ambient Technology Lab, Jennie Lee Building, The Open University.

Martin Weller launched the OU’s DISCO site – a hub for digital scholarship in the OU. Alas, is currently restricted to OU users. Then Graham Pryor giving an introduction to the Digital Curation Centre.

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Digital scholarship: Advanced technologies for research (2)

Second set of liveblog notes from Digital scholarship: Advanced technologies for research – a JISC-sponsored roadshow held on 10 March 2010 in the Ambient Technology Lab, Jennie Lee Building, The Open University.

This one is Colin Smith on Institutional Repositories: Helping to bridge the gap between traditional and digital scholarship.

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Digital scholarship: Advanced technologies for research (1)

First set of liveblog notes from Digital scholarship: Advanced technologies for research – a JISC-sponsored roadshow held on 10 March 2010 in the Ambient Technology Lab, Jennie Lee Building, The Open University.

Lots of examples of resources and projects doing new and exciting things with electronic resources supporting research from David Ferguson. Then presentation of a project at the OU researching and promoting digital scholarship from Nick Pearce and Martin Weller.

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Google Apps for Education

Many people have already mentioned that the Open University has adopted Google Apps for Education (including the OU official announcement, Will Woods, Niall Sclater, Tony Hirst, John Naughton). My department – the Institute of Educational Technology – hosted a workshop exploring the possibilities on 3 February. These are some notes I made in the discussion.

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Google is out of the (consumer) hardware market

There’s plenty of comment around on the implications of Google’s announcement about China. Some of these are pretty big geopolitical issues. (For a route in, you can’t do better than John Naughton’s recent posts on what it reveals about business ethics, censorship, and the Chinese Government.)

There’s also the impact on technology specifically. Much has been made of the possibility that Google taking a stronger moral stand on censorship will reflect well on it outside China.  There’s also been some commentary considering what the likely impact will be on the future of Google’s phone – the Nexus One – in the growing Chinese market, and on Google’s place as a search engine in China (summary: probably pretty bad). As the more informed commentators have noted, the way Google is behaving might be seen as reasonable hardball negotiating tactics in the West, but is far more damaging as an approach to the Chinese Government. I think it’s safe to say that Google will henceforward find it very, very hard to negotiate with them.

However, I’ve not (yet) seen any commentary pointing out what seems to me the obvious impact of that relationship breakdown: the likely end of Google’s future as a hardware manufacturer.

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Seeing how people really use online technology with the Tobii eye-tracker

Liveblog notes from an IET Technology Coffee Morning, 16 December 2009.

Presenters: Patrick McAndrew, Graham Healing, with input from Elpida Makriyannis and Anne Adams

We have a Tobii eye-tracker in the labs, which isn’t used as heavily as it could be. Aim for today is to show how easy it is to use, and explore some of the ways it could be developed.

History – a few years ago, Graham and Patrick were trying to improve the OpenLearn website. It was hard to know whether their worries about its effectiveness were real. Used an eye tracker to do a brief study of what actually happens. It was amazingly revealing, and very efficient – just a few minutes of recording and playback showed them the interactions on the site. That then grew in to quite a study, with analysis. At that point, the technology was hard work – took many extra hours. But now have bought more recent kit, with software upgrades, which make it very easy to use.

Some classic research in to how people read pages – like Jakob Nielsen’s classic (2001) work showing an F-shaped reading pattern for web pages. But is it still true?

Has been around since the 1950s! Now more up to date – see e.g. this presentation, which is about the machine we have:

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Enabling Greater Accessibility

Live notes from IET Technical Coffee Morning – Robin Stenham on accessibility.

Accessibility is one of the things I particularly care about so it’s good to have this session.

Robin is Manager – Curriculum Access in Disabled Student Services. Two main areas of responsibility: single enquiry point for students (or their intermediaries) about the interface between their assistive technology and the OU’s products and services – particularly courses. Has a team, has backup from IET staff, but it’s literally one man plus half another one and half of his dog! The other area of responsibility is policy development, again working with IET and LTS, affect and effect policy. Wants to rebalance and embed accessibility in to the mainstream.

Things are changing quite quickly – announcements on Monday folded in to talk at the last minute.

He talked broadly about the issues around accessibility, and specifically for the OU, and then about the new focus on embedding accessibility across the OU, which promises a step-change in the way we manage making our products and services accessible to all. Continue reading “Enabling Greater Accessibility”

Literacy in the Digital University

Liveblog notes from a presentation by Robin Goodfellow. Part of an ESRC Seminar Series on Literacy in the Digital University, which has its own blog. Of course. Also has an ordinary dull website.

(Robin’s notes and PowerPoint are available – to OU people – on the Knowledge Network)

Update: Andreia Santos also liveblogged the session.

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OLnet regular meetings

As well as iSpot, one of my big current projects is OLnet, which aims to research Open Educational Resources (OER) and the OER community, and to support the OER community in developing its research capabilities.

We want to model being open in what we’re doing, so we’ve decided to liveblog our regular team meetings – you can see my notes from our first trial today over on the OLnet site. I probably won’t crosspost everything here and there, so if you’re interested, you’ll need to track the OLnet news as well as my blog!