As part of our Collective Intelligence R&D, for the last few months we've been developing the concept of an Evidence Hub, learning user experience lessons from the first example we developed for the Hewlett Foundation on the Open Learning Network project, generifying the shell into one that can be customized for the different communities who have been excited by the concept, and moving to an open source release shortly.
If you want to read more about the rationale behind the Hub's design, check out:
De Liddo, Anna; Buckingham Shum, Simon; McAndrew, Patrick and Farrow, Robert (2012). The open education evidence hub: a collective intelligence tool for evidence based policy. Presented at Cambridge 2012: Joint OER12 and OpenCourseWare Consortium Global 2012 Conference, 16-18 April 2012, Cambridge, UK. Eprint: http://oro.open.ac.uk/33253
To learn more about the underlying concept of Contested Collective Intelligence, and how this can be supported through human annotation such as this, combined with machine annotation, check out:
De Liddo, Anna; Sandor, Agnes and Buckingham Shum, Simon (2012). Contested Collective Intelligence: rationale, technologies, and a human-machine annotation study.Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), 21(4-5), pp. 417-448. Eprint: http://oro.open.ac.uk/31052
EnquiryBlogger: open source Learning Analytics for blogging
The EnquiryBlogger project has just released a suite of plugins turning Wordpress into a social learning journal with learning analytics. Wordpress is the world's most popular open source content management system and blogging platform. EnquiryBlogger plugins add Dispositional and Enquiry-Based Learning Analytics. EnquiryBlogger is a collaboration between the Open University's Knowledge Media Institute (Simon Buckingham Shum & Rebecca Ferguson), and University of Bristol's Centre for Systems Learning & Leadership (Ruth Deakin Crick). LearningEmergence, where EnquiryBlogger is hosted, is a global network of researchers and practitioners working at the intersection of deep learning, complex systems, transformative leadership and knowledge media. See the website for details, downloads, webcasts and publications...
The Paris OER Declaration was formally adopted at the 2012 World Open Educational Resources (OER) Congress held at the UNESCO Headquarters in Paris from 20 - 22 June 2012. Over 550 delegates including representatives of Government, educators, NGOs, and universities attended the Congress which was organized in full partnership with the Commonwealth of Learning (COL) and supported by a generous grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation (USA). Teresa Connolly and Ale Okada attended the event on behalf of KMi. A poster was displayed in the exhibition area about the Responsive Open Learning Environments (ROLE) project as well as one about their recently published (as editors with Peter Scott) "Collaborative Learning 2.0: Open Educational Resources" book. The ROLE poster promoted two recently created OER courses (developed with Alex Mikroyannidis): one introducing the project itself and one focusing on Self-Regulated Learning (SRL). Take-away materials about ROLE proved to be very popular!
New OPENLEARN course about Reusing Open Educational Resources
Ale Okada and Teresa Connolly have prepared in collaboration with other ICOPER partners, a new ICOPER course about Reusing OER. The course, which is available in OpenLearn, provides an overview of the concepts behind OER and also offers an opportunity to use a selection of learning tools that have been developed by the ICOPER project. The learner is introduced to OER through a series of learning scenarios and examples that are accompanied by the relevant learning activities. These learning activities enable the learner to use the ICOPER tools in order to apply the OER principles to their own learning, as well as assess their OER skills. Like all other OpenLearn courses, the ICOPER courses are open educational resources that can be downloaded, reused, repurposed, and republished under the Creative Commons licence.
One of the research fields which KMi leads is Computer-Supported Argumentation, in particular, Argument Mapping -- the visualization of the structure of an argument or debate for greater comprehension, better analysis, and collaborative sensemaking. A great example of knowledge transfer to the OU's frontline is the ArguEd project led by Paul Piwek (Maths, Computing & Technology Faculty), an OU strategic project aiming to provide "evidence-based improvement of VLE-based formative assessment of students' argument analysis and evaluation skills." To quote the site's summary: "CONTEXT: The ability to analyse and evaluate arguments is a key transferable skill. Firstly, it is an indispensable skill for study at Higher Education level. From the University's point of view, retention is likely to be better for students that have mastered it. Secondly, it is central to many employability skills such as "negotiating/persuading, contributing to discussions", "analysing facts and situations" and "the ability to produce clear, structured written work and oral literacy". Finally, it is a skill that helps citizens to assess their own and other people's arguments both on issues of personal importance and questions about the society they live in. RESEARCH QUESTION: The presentation of TU100 ("My Digital Life"), which includes a part (Part 5, Block 5) dedicated to argument analysis skills, presents an opportunity to collect data from relevant iCMAs and TMA questions for answering the question: Which mistakes do students make when analysing arguments and how can we help them avoid these mistakes?" Paul showed me the introductory tutorial on argument mapping in the OU's Moodle-based VLE (using the OU's OpenMark formative assessment technology), and the integrated drag+drop interface for students to complete simple argument map templates, in their analysis of a target text. The screens show how the learner drags the statements into the template in order to demonstrate their ability to parse the text into the top level claim, and supporting/challenging premises/sub-premises. Learners can then check their map, which preserves the elements in the correct place, but leaving them to try again with those they got wrong. Fabulous to see this in use by 2000 students, and hopefully something that will spread to other faculties, now that the infrastructure is in place within the OU's VLE. Kudos to Paul for all his hard work!
A great success story for KMi technology transfer: our Compendium knowledge mapping tool was customized by the OU's Learning & Teaching Solutions team for a groundbreaking OU course U101 "Design thinking: creativity for the 21st century". I met with U101's chair Peter Lloyd several years ago when the course was in conception, and we discussed the potential role that Compendium might play and the kinds of customisations it would need. Well, Peter and his team ran with it, and the results are impressive. They produced a special edition called CompendiumDS (for Design Studio) which provides a radically new way for design students to share their projects, submit them as multimedia Compendium maps (the OU's assignment system was extended to handle Compendium XML files), and tutors marked them by annotating the maps. U101 secured the Institute of IT Training 2011 Gold Award, with specific mention of CompendiumDS (news story). The simplified CompendiumDS user interface is introduced in this JISC Design Studio briefing with a couple of screencasts, and a research paper documents the process including some CompendiumDS template examples: Lloyd, Peter (2011). Does design education always produce designers? In: Researching Design Education: 1st International Symposium for Design Education Researchers, May 18-19, 2011, Paris, France. Eprint: http://oro.open.ac.uk/32291
OER evidence Hub
As part of our Collective Intelligence R&D, for the last few months we've been developing the concept of an Evidence Hub, learning user experience lessons from the first example we developed for the Hewlett Foundation on the Open Learning Network project, generifying the shell into one that can be customized for the different communities who have been excited by the concept, and moving to an open source release shortly.
For info and demos go to Evidence-Hub.net
If you want to read more about the rationale behind the Hub's design, check out:
De Liddo, Anna; Buckingham Shum, Simon; McAndrew, Patrick and Farrow, Robert (2012). The open education evidence hub: a collective intelligence tool for evidence based policy. Presented at Cambridge 2012: Joint OER12 and OpenCourseWare Consortium Global 2012 Conference, 16-18 April 2012, Cambridge, UK. Eprint: http://oro.open.ac.uk/33253
To learn more about the underlying concept of Contested Collective Intelligence, and how this can be supported through human annotation such as this, combined with machine annotation, check out:
De Liddo, Anna; Sandor, Agnes and Buckingham Shum, Simon (2012). Contested Collective Intelligence: rationale, technologies, and a human-machine annotation study. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), 21(4-5), pp. 417-448. Eprint: http://oro.open.ac.uk/31052
EnquiryBlogger: open source Learning Analytics for blogging
The EnquiryBlogger project has just released a suite of plugins turning Wordpress into a social learning journal with learning analytics. Wordpress is the world's most popular open source content management system and blogging platform. EnquiryBlogger plugins add Dispositional and Enquiry-Based Learning Analytics. EnquiryBlogger is a collaboration between the Open University's Knowledge Media Institute (Simon Buckingham Shum & Rebecca Ferguson), and University of Bristol's Centre for Systems Learning & Leadership (Ruth Deakin Crick). LearningEmergence, where EnquiryBlogger is hosted, is a global network of researchers and practitioners working at the intersection of deep learning, complex systems, transformative leadership and knowledge media. See the website for details, downloads, webcasts and publications...
http://learningemergence.net/tools/enquiryblogger/
World OER Congress, 20-22 June, Paris
The Paris OER Declaration was formally adopted at the 2012 World Open Educational Resources (OER) Congress held at the UNESCO Headquarters in Paris from 20 - 22 June 2012. Over 550 delegates including representatives of Government, educators, NGOs, and universities attended the Congress which was organized in full partnership with the Commonwealth of Learning (COL) and supported by a generous grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation (USA). Teresa Connolly and Ale Okada attended the event on behalf of KMi. A poster was displayed in the exhibition area about the Responsive Open Learning Environments (ROLE) project as well as one about their recently published (as editors with Peter Scott) "Collaborative Learning 2.0: Open Educational Resources" book. The ROLE poster promoted two recently created OER courses (developed with Alex Mikroyannidis): one introducing the project itself and one focusing on Self-Regulated Learning (SRL). Take-away materials about ROLE proved to be very popular!
http://www.unesco.org/new/fileadmin/MULTIMEDIA/HQ/CI/CI/pdf/Events/Paris%20OER%20Declaration_01.pdf
New OPENLEARN course about Reusing Open Educational Resources
Ale Okada and Teresa Connolly have prepared in collaboration with other ICOPER partners, a new ICOPER course about Reusing OER. The course, which is available in OpenLearn, provides an overview of the concepts behind OER and also offers an opportunity to use a selection of learning tools that have been developed by the ICOPER project. The learner is introduced to OER through a series of learning scenarios and examples that are accompanied by the relevant learning activities. These learning activities enable the learner to use the ICOPER tools in order to apply the OER principles to their own learning, as well as assess their OER skills. Like all other OpenLearn courses, the ICOPER courses are open educational resources that can be downloaded, reused, repurposed, and republished under the Creative Commons licence.
OU rolls out Argument Mapping in its VLE
One of the research fields which KMi leads is Computer-Supported Argumentation, in particular, Argument Mapping -- the visualization of the structure of an argument or debate for greater comprehension, better analysis, and collaborative sensemaking. A great example of knowledge transfer to the OU's frontline is the ArguEd project led by Paul Piwek (Maths, Computing & Technology Faculty), an OU strategic project aiming to provide "evidence-based improvement of VLE-based formative assessment of students' argument analysis and evaluation skills." To quote the site's summary: "CONTEXT: The ability to analyse and evaluate arguments is a key transferable skill. Firstly, it is an indispensable skill for study at Higher Education level. From the University's point of view, retention is likely to be better for students that have mastered it. Secondly, it is central to many employability skills such as "negotiating/persuading, contributing to discussions", "analysing facts and situations" and "the ability to produce clear, structured written work and oral literacy". Finally, it is a skill that helps citizens to assess their own and other people's arguments both on issues of personal importance and questions about the society they live in. RESEARCH QUESTION: The presentation of TU100 ("My Digital Life"), which includes a part (Part 5, Block 5) dedicated to argument analysis skills, presents an opportunity to collect data from relevant iCMAs and TMA questions for answering the question: Which mistakes do students make when analysing arguments and how can we help them avoid these mistakes?" Paul showed me the introductory tutorial on argument mapping in the OU's Moodle-based VLE (using the OU's OpenMark formative assessment technology), and the integrated drag+drop interface for students to complete simple argument map templates, in their analysis of a target text. The screens show how the learner drags the statements into the template in order to demonstrate their ability to parse the text into the top level claim, and supporting/challenging premises/sub-premises. Learners can then check their map, which preserves the elements in the correct place, but leaving them to try again with those they got wrong. Fabulous to see this in use by 2000 students, and hopefully something that will spread to other faculties, now that the infrastructure is in place within the OU's VLE. Kudos to Paul for all his hard work!
CompendiumDS helps OU win gold
A great success story for KMi technology transfer: our Compendium knowledge mapping tool was customized by the OU's Learning & Teaching Solutions team for a groundbreaking OU course U101 "Design thinking: creativity for the 21st century". I met with U101's chair Peter Lloyd several years ago when the course was in conception, and we discussed the potential role that Compendium might play and the kinds of customisations it would need. Well, Peter and his team ran with it, and the results are impressive. They produced a special edition called CompendiumDS (for Design Studio) which provides a radically new way for design students to share their projects, submit them as multimedia Compendium maps (the OU's assignment system was extended to handle Compendium XML files), and tutors marked them by annotating the maps. U101 secured the Institute of IT Training 2011 Gold Award, with specific mention of CompendiumDS (news story). The simplified CompendiumDS user interface is introduced in this JISC Design Studio briefing with a couple of screencasts, and a research paper documents the process including some CompendiumDS template examples: Lloyd, Peter (2011). Does design education always produce designers? In: Researching Design Education: 1st International Symposium for Design Education Researchers, May 18-19, 2011, Paris, France. Eprint: http://oro.open.ac.uk/32291