Inspire Research

Visualising evaluation

2009-02-23T10:54:00.005Z

We ran two evaluation workshops last month. Starting each day by exploring what evaluation is. This included some some visual representations of how individuals thought of evaluation. Various themes emerged, some related to the overall process of evaluation, with several people referring to evaluation as a journey, some along twisting roads or with occasional diversions along dead-ends that may

The cats sat on my keyboard

2009-02-05T16:09:00.003Z

Having failed miserably to maintain any kind of consistent blog output, I'm going to try out the new toys route. I've just installed Scribefire, which is an add-on for Firefox. Looking quite easy so far, just click on the button and the lower half of the browser window becomes a blog posting panel. Hmm, no success in linking to my blog account... back to posting from blogger.I'm also going to try

TweetMinster - the place where real life and politics tweet!!

2009-01-20T10:28:00.001Z

In another step towards global domination, Twitter has reached the UK parliament! TweetMinster has a (small) number of MPs registered (including the one for my area), and now boasts its first Lord! This could be one to watch... a demonstration of how technology can engage and involve Joe Average in the details of the political process, or just a short lived fad for some publicity?

Trees not Christmas cards this year

2008-12-01T16:44:00.007Z

Rather than sending out company Christmas cards, we are going to give a little time (and money) to help distribute Caring Christmas Trees on behalf of Impact Arts. We'll be helping out at a local distribution point on the afternoon of December 11th.I'm just about to order my tree, and look forward to collecting it hassle free. What a brilliant idea! If you are based in Dundee, Edinburgh,

Our new obsession.....

2008-11-25T09:32:00.004Z

I love gadgets. After a tough week of waiting, and tracking their every movement from order to processing, from delivery centre to courier, our shiny new Samsung NC10 netbooks have arrived at last!Spec-wise, they seem to be market leaders - bigger hard drives (160gb but not SS), proper battery life (we're read reviews which suggest 6 hours unlike the Acer Aspire One's 2 hours), along with all the

Beanbags - the future of meetings

2008-11-20T16:43:00.002Z

Last week I attended the JISC Curriculum Delivery projects start-up meeting. JISC InfoNet are leading the support project that organised the meeting, and there were quite a few differences from the usual JISC programme meeting. The seating arrangements were perhaps a bit more relaxed than the norm, and the meeting itself was arranged on a seventies TV theme.One of the highlights on day one were

Transformational change without control?

2008-11-10T16:43:00.003Z

Update from Innovating e-Learning 2008The closing days of JISC online conference saw some deep discussion. The session we were facilitating asked whether we should free the maniacs (or students!). Prof Mark Stiles was interested in the reasons education tended to be "controlling". He saw a downward spiral where embedding innovation led to regulation, which could act as a barrier to further

JISC Online Conference: Innovating e-Learning 2008

2008-11-06T23:58:00.005Z

Day three of the JISC online conference sees the opening of the second theme - "Going boldly into the dark". The session we are facilitating ('Achieving Transformational Change - making it happen') features presenters Mark Stiles from Staffordshire University and Peter Bullen from the University of Hertfordshire. Some really interesting and varied discussion has started on this first day about

European Comission public consultation on ICT research & innovation strategy

2008-09-09T09:08:00.002+01:00

This news item on PublicTecnhology.net reports that the European Commission has launched a public consultation to search for the best strategies to boost Europes ICT research and innovation until 2020. The Commission believes that Europe is underperforming in both the level and intensity of its research and innovation investments, with only 33% of research and innovation in developed economies

Seven degrees away

2008-08-04T13:03:00.007+01:00

There's been lots of UK media coverage over the weekend of a Microsoft research study that used traffic on Microsoft's Instant Messenger (IM) to investigate global communication (See articles in the Guardian, Telegraph, and BBC.)The study captured anonymised data from June 2006 - specifically properties of 30 billion IM conversations (not messages, conversations!) among 240 million people. Of

Cuil - cool knowledge?

2008-07-29T10:43:00.005+01:00

Just trying out Cuil - a new search engine developed by former Google software engineers. It claims to index three times as many web pages as Google and ten times as many as Microsoft. Cuil uses this in ranking pages based on their content, concepts, inter-relationships and coherency, rather than how often pages are linked to or 'popularity metrics'.The whole interface is very different, just

See you in Edinburgh on 30th October

2008-07-01T12:35:00.003+01:00

Although details aren't yet available on the eLearning Alliance site, the next annual conference sounds to be a must attend event! Entitled Jock Tamson's Bairns (a reference to a Scot's saying meaning "underneath we're all the same"). The conference aims to question whether Web 2.0 marks a transformation in approaches to learning. Will this present further challenges in providing access across

Word arrays as a tool for consultation analyses?

2008-06-26T21:08:00.005+01:00

I keep seeing blog posts with colourful word arrays. So, thought I'd join in. Here's Wordle's take on our delicious bookmarks.Essentially, this is a visual representation of what we have posted about the most, or at least the tags/labels we have used. It reminds me of some of the ways that cluster analyses are presented. There are some examples of these in Edial Dekker's slideshare on data

Free mobile broadband is looking 'inevitable'

2008-06-13T12:22:00.002+01:00

According to Top 10 Broadband, mobile broadband will be offered free with mobile phone packages as soon as 2009. This will increase the availability of cheap access to mobile broadband. It will also potentially make it more accessible for harder-to-reach groups, who sometimes have access to a mobile phone but not a fixed phone, as required for standard broadband.

New FE improvement body is named

2008-06-11T09:33:00.002+01:00

The new Learning and Skills Improvement Service (LSIS), as it was named yesterday, will bring together the work of the CEL (Centre for Excellence in Leadership) and the QIA (Quality Improvement Agency for Lifelong Learning). This new body is a sector-owned organisation dedicated to supporting excellence and leadership development in the further education and skills sector.(See full

Samaritans aim to roll out SMS service

2008-06-10T09:19:00.005+01:00

PublicTechnology.net report on the Samaritans' plan to roll out a text service to improve their reach to the most vulnerable young people.A pilot of the scheme was carried out during which over 10,000 texts a month were received, "with 63% of contact from people aged 10-24-years-old". They believe once rolled out nationally there could be a "rise of up to 1,000 texts a day by 2010 - that's one

Comparability in assessment

2008-05-27T14:00:00.004+01:00

It was a week for assessment events - the e-Assessment Association Glasgow seminar, and a joint Assessment meets Enterprise meets Portfolio CETIS meeting. While the eAA is perhaps more focused on schools and colleges, and CETIS relates more strongly to HE, there was still some interesting links between the two events.Helen Ashton and Cliff Beevers gave a presentation at the eAA that covered some

Engaging with your "clients" in health and education

2008-05-26T16:16:00.009+01:00

I've just come across two interesting news items - one about the use of Web2.0 in the Health sector and another about using online games to encourage children to respond to a consultation about play spaces.Although the full text is not available without paying a hefty sum, the Executive Summary of the E-health 2.0 report is available. The report offers an overview of twenty "leading e-health 2.0

Is the world open?

2008-05-16T10:46:00.003+01:00

This short extract in elearning papers from an article by Richard Straub discusses how "The idea of 'openness' is emerging as a dominant attribute of key developments in our economic and social fabric" and how with the emergence and increasing dominance of Web 2.0, we now have "the infrastructure and tools to operate in new ways in open systems".Yet collaborative, open souce, open access is not

Online conferencing and learning in other worlds

2008-05-14T13:06:00.007+01:00

I've just come across an interesting post from Rowin Young of CETIS about using World of Warcraft (WoW) for online conferencing. It is an interesting idea and follows on from work looking at using virtual worlds in an education context (for example see the video Rowin points out about the use of WoW, or check out a recent article in Escalate news by Sian Bayne and Fiona Littleton about the use

From washing machines to Web 2.0

2008-05-08T11:24:00.004+01:00

Just been dipping into the Eduserve symposium on 'Inside Out: What do current Web trends tell us about the future of ICT provision for learners and researchers?' It's all streamed, which is nice for those of us who couldn't make it to London in person, especially with the linked live chat. I particularly like the way the chat is set up alongside the video stream - sounds obvious and simple, but

Games on the curriculum - we can't wait

2008-04-16T12:20:00.002+01:00

As the parent of a child who's been keen on computer games from the age of three(!), I welcome the Scottish Government's plans for teaching schoolchildren how to design and develop their own electronic games. Apparently, pupils will use software to create their own games, and be taught how to use computer software to create animations and feature films. While this is at least partly intended to

OpenSocial update

2007-11-02T14:25:00.000Z

The BBC report that MySpace have agreed to collaborate with Google using their OpenSocial platform. The involvement of the largest social network will be a major boost for OpenSocial, increasing its appeal to application developers.Facebook, MySpace's biggest rival recently joined forces with Microsoft, and have not indicated that they will join with the OpenSocial group.

Google OpenSocial

2007-10-31T14:53:00.000Z

Google have announced their open social networking platform will enable developers to create applications that work across different networking sites that have joined forces with OpenSocial (already including LinkedIn, Ning and Friendster). This should streamline development processes, meaning that applications are compatible across sites. See ZDNet.com for some more detailed analysis of the

New Literacies for the 21st Century Citizen

2007-10-26T09:49:00.000+01:00

Yesterday I attended an interesting presentation by Ewan McIntosh (his edublogs site is worth checking out) run as part of the Urban Learning Space seminar series (a podcast of it will be available soon). What I found refreshing was his discussion of how emerging technologies (social software in particular) is really just another development in a long line of 'in-things' (from sliced bread in