[stub] Home office - A while ago I was asked how I’d setup my home office, as people struggle to get things that work for their space. So, in case useful (or useful for me to refer to later), this is that. I had...
New Output: Why do experts disagree? The development of a taxonomy - I’m very happy to share our just published (online first) article: Deroover, K., Knight, S., Burke, P. F., & Bucher, T. (2022). Why do experts disagree? The development of a taxonomy. Public Understanding of Science. https://doi.org/10.1177/09636625221110029 ABSTRACT: People are increasingly...
Getting outputs into RMS (and giving up on ORCID) - This is a bit of a niche post, but it might be useful to other researchers applying to the Australian Research Council (ARC) via RMS. For anyone familiar with BibTex this is likely to be very very obvious and dull,...- Algorithms can decide your marks, your work prospects and your financial security. How do you know they’re fair? - Kalervo Gulson, University of Sydney; Claire Benn, Australian National University; Kirsty Kitto, University of Technology Sydney; Simon Knight, University of Technology Sydney, and Teresa Swist, University of Sydney Algorithms are becoming commonplace. They can determine employment prospects, financial security and...
- Scraping ARC College of Experts members (R snippets) - From time to time I forget that I neither particularly enjoy coding or am much good at it, especially web scraping (and maps, why are maps so hard?!). So I decide I’ll remind myself by picking an “oh that should...
New talk: Who to believe? Conceptualising and navigating disagreement - I recently gave a talk at the University of Minnesota Learning Informatics Lab, which is a really interesting lab focusing on the research, design, and mobilize of information technology and data analytics to improve learning and conditions for learning. Many...
New output: How to provide automated feedback on the writing process? A participatory approach to design writing analytics tools - New paper out led by Rianne Conijn based on a collaboration supported by an Australia Awards Endeavour Research Fellowship, to explore the kinds of features and constructs different stakeholders are looking for from writing analytics tools. A nice piece of...
Global Summit on the Ethics of AI in Education - Last night I joined The Institute for Ethical AI in Education‘s one off virtual summit on the Ethics of AI in Education, centred on discussion of key ethical questions surrounding the use of AI in education and practical steps required...
CiteLearn - an academic tool for learning to cite sources - Citation practices — the provision of reliable external warrants for claims — are central to trust and credibility not only on Wikipedia, but in journalism, science, scholarship, and other genres of research and writing. The aim of the CiteLearn project is to build learning tasks for the improvement of information literacy and credibility practices for scalable use across teaching contexts.
New chapter: Augmenting Assessment with Learning Analytics - A new piece on augmenting assessment with learning analytics (or, sort of old, edited books can take a looonnggg time to go through the process – and my thanks to the editors who have stewarded this collection through!). You can...- New output: Developing a Text-Integration Task for Investigating and Teaching Interdisciplinarity in Science Teams - Knight, S., & Thompson, K. (2020). Developing a Text-Integration Task for Investigating and Teaching Interdisciplinarity in Science Teams. Research in Science Education. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11165-020-09937-7 Abstract: Integrating information from across multiple sources is an important science literacy skill that involves: identifying intra...
- New output: AcaWriter: A Learning Analytics Tool for Formative Feedback on Academic Writing. - New paper out in the Open Access Journal of Writing Research: Knight, S., Shibani, A., Abel, S., Gibson, A., Ryan, P., Sutton, N., Wight, R., Lucas, C., Sándor, Á., Kitto, K., Liu, M., Mogarkar, R., & Buckingham Shum, S. (Accepted)....
New AARE post: Using evidence to help build and evaluate good ideas in education technology - This article was originally published on EduResearch Matters. Read the original article. Based partly on my sabbatical visit to UCL Knowledge Lab, and recent Internet and Higher Education papers on implementing learning analytics, and educator perspectives. Using evidence to help...- New output: Educator Perspectives on Learning Analytics in Classroom Practice - New piece based on Shibani’s PhD work on writing analytics, and the perspective of the educators in adopting and adapting a writing analytics technology and learning design to their contexts. You can download the author version here. Shibani, A., Knight,...
- Three new pieces at the International Conference of the Learning Sciences around ethical and epistemic concerns - Three new bits (a short paper, a workshop, and a symposium) to be presented at the International Conference of the Learning Sciences, based on some of the reading and thinking I’ve been doing around epistemic injustice and the intersection of...
- New output: Implementing Learning Analytics for Learning Impact: Taking Tools to Task - My most recent paper with Andrew Gibson (now at QUT) at Shibani Antonette (now at my Faculty in UTS, moving from CIC), thinking about implementation and the significance of the task in that, using our work in writing analytics to...
Sabbatical - Brief thoughts from the airport… As many people who know me will be aware, I’ve been on sabbatical (called PEP, professional experience program) for the last 6 months. This is a period of paid leave from teaching and other administrative...
Graduate certificate in higher education teaching and learning - One of the things new academics are often encouraged to do is a course in higher education teaching. These grew in focus with the advent of fees in the UK, and increasing pressure to think about the way we teach...- New output: Handbook section introduction on Dialogic education and digital technology - I was asked to write a section introduction (/editorial) for the new Handbook of Research on Dialogic Education, which has just come out: Mercer, N. (Ed.), Wegerif, R. (Ed.), Major, L. (Ed.). (2020). The Routledge International Handbook of Research...
New Talk at NYU: Aligning Learning Analytics with Classroom Practices & Needs - New talk at NYU, blurb from their website below, and then the slides (on slideshare). Learning Analytics Research Network (LEARN) invites you to join us for a talk about the exciting ways in which the University of Technology Sydney is...- New output: Practical ethics for building learning analytics - New piece in the British Journal of Educational Technology with Kirsty Kitto, accepted version available here. This one draws on our experience in developing learning analytics, the kind of practical ethics associated with virtue theories, and tensions in existing ethics...
- New output: Calibrating Assessment Literacy Through Benchmarking Tasks - Download the open access paper versionKnight, S., Leigh, A., Davila, Y.C., Martin, L.J., & Krix, D.W. (forthcoming). Calibrating Assessment Literacy Through Benchmarking Tasks. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education. https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2019.1570483 Feedback: is it working? How can we get it right...
Vaccinations and misinformation - A couple of years ago I was playing with different forms of writing (i.e., not just papers), and so wrote a few pieces responding to media events (including around ‘fake news’ and evidence evaluation). I pitched this one to The...- We Need to Talk About Search: Searching Together - Another piece I wrote a couple of years ago, unsuccessfully pitched (a shorter version) to a magazine. I’ve been watching my parents’ eyebrows for 6 months now*. A weekly ritual of Skype calls, London to Sydney, and we haven’t quite...
- Who to believe: How epistemic cognition can inform science communication (keynote at Australian Science Communicators conference, 2018) - Did a keynote at the Australian Science Communicators conference in Sydney a few weeks ago. Slides embedded below. The speaker notes are pretty content rich (references, and roughly what I said in the talk for most of them, plus some...
Two new posts on making learning visible - I’ve got a couple of new posts up on the UTS Futures blog on making learning visible. The core idea is that we need ways to make visible to both students and teachers whether students understand/have grasped what they’re learning....
Some tools to help us understand multiple-source comprehension and integration - One of my areas of interest is how people understand and integrate information from across multiple sources, particularly where those sources aOre divergent in stance and varied in credibility. I wrote a bit about how I see this issue (epistemic...
Privacy preserving personal data dashboard - Now that more companies (e.g. Facebook, Google, Twitter) are letting you download at least partial dumps of the data they hold on you, I’m hoping we’ll start to see more desktop based (or, local browser based) tools that support people...- New Output: Distributed learning: Educating and assessing extended cognitive systems - Writing this article was a bit serendipitous really, I worked on the extended mind thesis and its implications in education in my Philosophy of Education MA at (what is now) the UCL Institute of Education (dissertation here). When I moved...
Connecting your student data - As educators, we want to use the various tools available to us – from Blackboard, to Google Forms, or maybe even Twitter – to support student learning. By using these tools, we can get data on what our students are...- Fake News – A Multifaceted problem - I wrote this about a year ago and for some reason never hit publish…anyway, here: There is an increasing concern regarding the prominence of claims of dubious credibility on the internet, and students’ abilities to make these credibility judgements....
Data cleaning in OpenRefine and R - One of the things I do in my Data Science for Innovation class is illustrate some of the issues we face in working with real datasets. Unlike many sample datasets, many datasets we encounter in authentic contexts are messy in...- New Output: Artificial Intelligence in Education? - This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article. Artificial intelligence holds great potential for both students and teachers – but only if used wisely Data big and small have come to education, from creating online platforms...
- New output – Bursting the bubble - Wrote an op-ed for Australasian Science magazine, arguing that focusing too much on ‘bursting the filter bubble’ is a red herring in terms of improving public discourse, and might in fact make matters worse. You can access the piece from...
The evolution of an article - How do writers produce their works? How does this vary by profession – journalist, academic, poet, etc. – and how do we induct students into that? A concern I’ve had for some time is that we (academics) don’t do enough...- New Output: Epistemic Cognition – A lens onto fake news - Interested in how psychology helps inform how we find, evaluate, and use evidence? I’ve got a new piece out at the British Psychological Society’s magazine site The Psychologist on ‘Epistemic cognition: a lens onto fake news‘. The piece is freely...
New output: The Orchestration of a Collaborative Information Seeking Learning Task in a Special Issue of IR on Search as Learning - Another article from my PhD research shortly to appear in a special issue of Information Retrieval on ‘Search as Learning’. Knight, S., Rienties, B., Littleton, K., Tempelaar, D. T., Mitsui, M., & Shah, C. (2017). The Orchestration of a Collaborative...- Tools for analysing learning texts - I’ve been thinking for some time about how I could use various tools that analyse text and social media data to do interesting things with our learning data. Of course, R has a set of Natural language processing tools https://cran.r-project.org/web/views/NaturalLanguageProcessing.html...
- New output: The relationship of (perceived) epistemic cognition to interaction with resources on the internet - New output from my PhD work, in which we analyse self-report and trace data around a task that required students to find, evaluate, and synthesise web resources. Many thanks to my co-authors at the OU (Bart and Karen), Maastricht (Dirk,...
- New Output: Socialising Epistemic Cognition - Exciting news, Karen Littleton and I have just had our paper ‘Socialising Epistemic Cognition’ accepted for publication in Educational Research Review, (5 year impact factor > 5). People who know me will know I’m not particularly effusive about lots of...
Using ifttt and diigo bookmarks to feed facebook - In the undergraduate subject I’m coordinating this semester (Arguments, Evidence, and Intuition – a quantitative literacy undergrad module) we’re really interested in getting students dealing with numbers in real world contexts. How do you critique a newspaper article, see behind...- ‘Bad summary’ task – using known text deficits to probe epistemic cognition - My work at the moment focuses on student writing practices,which I’m particularly interested in linking to other features of learning such as epistemic cognition. There are a rich set of methods in exploring epistemic cognition, including self reports (surveys items,...
2016 in review - It’s the end of 2016, and I’ve been in post for ~14 months now. Mostly for my own memory, I thought I’d collate the key achievements (by the metrics – linking to fuller blogs where I have them) of the...
Students creating their own OER through Wikipedia - This is a post almost entirely using material from Wikimedia advocates :-), the first is an abreviated version of an email circulated (which I now can’t find, or a web-version – so apologies, happy to attribute), and the 2nd an...- Some resources for writing support at UTS - The library’s ‘Heads Up‘ resources (“giving you a head start at uni”) include resources on academic writing, referencing, evaluating information, and ‘starting your assignment’ UTS HELPS (Higher Education Language and Presentation Support) has some great self-help resources to support student...
From Bricks to Clicks – Learning Analytics recommendations - At the start of this year the UK Higher Education Academy (HEA) released its report ‘from bricks to clicks‘ which included (on p.7, copied below) a set of recommendations. Some of these are pretty UK specific (there may be Australian...- Testimonial Knowledge: Transmissive; Generative; Coconstructive? - Some draft thoughts I wrote an age ago – keen to explore this testimony stuff again at some point Testimonial knowledge implies a particular take on knowledge in which a proposition (x) may be passed from a speaker S to...
Visual minuting [stub] - Something I’ve really enjoyed at a couple of conferences I’ve been to is having visual minutes – visual depictions of sessions and discussions (notably at WikiCon and the Society of the Query Conference, I also know someone [far cooler than...
Edusearch: Setting information seeking tasks - A significant area of research for me over the last 5 years has been in the exploration of ‘searching to learn’ – how students use of search engines can be educational in nature. The ability to find and evaluate information...- Shared data for individual assessments - How do you distribute a shared dataset, in such a way that quiz-answers based on the data can’t just be copied? One of the subjects I’m involved in: Has a reasonably large, and growing enrolment (>50, which will grow to...
REVIEW Software – A tool and pedagogic strategy to improve assessment - REVIEWTM Software – A tool and a strategy to improve assessment I wrote this with Darrall Thompson recently for a Pearson ACODE award (for which REVIEW was ‘Highly Commended for Innovation in Technology Enhanced Learning’, although other very worthy projects...
Visit to ASU - I’ve just returned from a week at Arizona State University, in the SOLET (Science of Learning and Educational Technology) lab, funded by a small NSF Data Consortium Fellowship with Laura Allen. Incredibly productive week with some really great researchers –...- Search based games and puzzles - As I’m interested in search engines, and how people’s information seeking casts a lens on their understanding and evaluation of the problem, I’ve been interested in games based around search engines. These games sometimes (more or less deliberately) help people...
- Ethics and Privacy in Learning Analytics - I’ve recently joined the UTS Data Governance sub-committee, which alongside our ongoing work across stakeholder levels (from individual students and staff to institutional) has got me thinking a bit more about these issues. As Elouazizi notes [zotpressInText item=”{RJCF5Q6H}”] a key...
ICLS in Singapore - For the last week I’ve been in Singapore, at the 12th International Conference of the Learning Sciences. I kicked off the week as a respondent on the workshop ‘Towards next steps for the CSCL Community: Advancing science and informing real...
WordPress course writing and eportfolio space - We’ve been doing work to develop a space (‘CIC-around’) to allow students to: Collate posts, so a portfolio can showcase existing work Provide access control, to ensure the work can be viewed by the right people Structure posts, such that...
Using Google drive and doctopus for whole-class group and individual tasks - I recently ran a class (in our excellent Arguments, Evidence, and Intuition undergrad subject) on finding and manipulating data. As part of that I wanted to: Demo some sheets functions to import data (importhtml, etc.) and show some shared data...
Thinking about genre with students - I’m planning to do some work with students to encourage them to think about genre in their profession. (NB: See comment on this post for outcome of an activity based on this post). This fits into my wider project to...- May 2016 – Simon go back -
- UTS model of learning (writing): Writing for data scientists - At UTS we have a model of learning, that is built on in the ‘learning.futures‘ programme, both of which target course-based graduate attributes: An integrated exposure to professional practice through dynamic and multifaceted modes of practice-oriented education Professional practice situated...
Student diagnostic review/benchmarking data - I’ve been playing with a dataset for a while from a benchmarking exercise. These engage students with assessment criteria by asking them to apply those criteria to known reference texts (texts for which we already have marks), giving us and...- Flipping Textbook – Specifying a WordPress Toolkit - One of the new projects I’ve joined (as a late addition) is the ‘flipping textbook‘ project – a collaboration between CIC/MDSI, the library, and IML at UTS. The idea is to work on a ‘flipped textbook’ – getting students to...
- Writing a white paper or discussion paper - What types of writing do professionals engage in? What professional practices of writing should students entering those professions encounter? How can we support development of appropriate professional writing skills? These are issues I’ve been thinking about a bit lately, and...
UNSW talk: How could assessment data be used to enhance assessment practices? - Over @unsw#LearningAnalytics group to hear @gcrisp01 on ‘how could #assessment data be used to enhance assessment practices?’ — Simon Knight (@sjgknight) March 1, 2016 The talk was based on an interesting paper: Engaging academics w/ analysis of their MCQ assessment...- New output: Epistemic commitments in written texts - Conference paper accepted to ICLS, with some wonderful international co-authors and collaborators (Laura Allen at Arizona State, Karen Littleton and Bart Rienties at the OU, Dirk Tempelaar at Maastricht, and thanks to Chirag Shah and Matt Mitsui at Rutgers), abstract...
- New output: Collaborative Epistemic Discourse in Classroom Information Seeking Tasks - The second (and final) publication from my MPhil should be out in the next few months at Technology, Pedagogy, and Education (TPE). The journal irritatingly has an 18 month embargo, so the full record is freely available on ORO but...
Citation needed – inline templates for literacy quiz - A while ago I posted a blog post on using improvement in Wikipedia paragraphs over time to teach literacy skills. Building off some ideas around that, and an ‘a google a day’ style quiz idea, I’ve been thinking about ways...
Elaborating an evidence hub for writing practices - An Evidence Hub is designed to help your members add their insights where they’ll make the highest impact, and through the use of different visualizations/maps, helps answer questions such as the following: Who in my region is working on this...
Learning Analytics Carpentry (LAC) proposal - Over the last few years there have been a number of Learning Analytics and Educational Data Mining online courses, notably (thanks to Bodong): Data, Analytics, and Learning, offered by George Siemens, et al. on edX Big Data in Education, offered...
Cleaning essays in R (ish) - I’m currently working on a corpus of student essays. We want to run various analyses on these essays, but for that to work we need to have them in a fairly universal state, with some elements removed/modified for processing purposes....
Visualising Twitter History - Some time ago I saw a blog post on visualising your twitter history using streamgraphs in R. As my tweets moved from mostly psychology/philosophy tweeting around my teaching, through to my current mish-mash of learning analytics stuff, I thought it’d...
Location games on campus - One of the (many) notes sitting on the wall in my building says: Humans need to speak w(?) space -> UniTinder (From my wonderful colleague Theresa). We’ve had a few informal chats about what kinds of location-based tools might be...- Credosity – Supporting your writing - Review I ran a paper I’m drafting through it. To be clear, I don’t think I’m a particularly good writer, (although I certainly think I’ve improved over my PhD). It’s also important to remember that Credosity isn’t particularly marketing itself...
Open Educational Resources Research - One facet of my work over the last few years has been around Open Educational Resources. Having made much use of others’ resources (whether OER or not) and trying to contribute many of my own before starting my MPhil, I...- Interesting discussion data corpora - I recently published a post collecting together student writing corpora. I’m also interested in ‘discussion’ style corpora, for example chat data, social q&a, discussion boards, news/article/blog comments, etc. There are some of these openly available, there must be more than...
- My Research in XKCDs - I started off wondering about the implications of technology and a particular view on the mind for our understanding of knowledge and its assessment. http://xkcd.com/903/ But of course, sometimes it’s not as easy as reading “a view, and the opposing...
PhD activity to outputs/papers - One thing I’ve typically managed to do in my activities over the last few years is convert those activities into written outputs. If you’re engaged in something (a workshop, a policy discussion, some informal research or whatever) you’ve already done...- Identifying gaps in textual cohesion - One of the things I’m thinking about at the moment is how we analyse student writing and present those analyses as feedback. In the context of our work on rhetorical parsing, [zotpressInText item=”{I2QTP58J}”] we currently highlight sentences making particular rhetorical...
Identifying similar text (and plagiarism) - In analysis of written texts there are various reasons we might want to understand how similar multiple texts are. We might be interested in: Whether text is plagiarised, from a particular external source, or from another student Whether a text...- Resources for Qualitative Analysis - A little while ago a teacher colleague asked for advice regarding resources to conduct qualitative analysis. They’d actually done some excellent analysis using paper-based content-analysis methods, but were looking for both extra literature to guide their process, and any tools...
- Writing your thesis (and using your publications) - So, you’re finally writing your thesis, and hey you were one of those great students who published as you went along – Congratulations! But how do you deal with incorporating that published work into your thesis? Did you write all...
Human Data Interaction and Learning Analytics - In learning analytics contexts one of the things we’re interested in is how stakeholders – managers, educators, students, parents, etc. – interact with ‘their’ data at the various levels of granularity. Of course part of that is about how that...
The PhD viva - On the morning of my PhD viva (Dec 17th), I was rear ended by a scalding radiator on exiting the shower; happily the two red streaks (which I am still sporting) were the most painful thing to happen that day....- Factor Analysis in R [stub] - There are various places describing the mechanics of doing a factor analysis (in R or SPSS or whatever) but relatively fewer describing what you actually do, the iterative process of deciding factor size, item analysis, etc. I found these resources...
Getting more out of Microsoft Word’s Spelling and Grammar Checker - I recently saw a question on the #phdchat channel that made me dig a bit deeper into the MS Word Spelling & Grammar checker options. @solomon_kazza @KristinG63 Oh! Sentences >60 words can be marked in #word by spelling & grammar...
Ideation and collective intelligence platforms - The UTS Connected Intelligence Centre (CIC) operates as a creative incubator to catalyse thinking about the impact of algorithmic intelligence on education, research, and society more broadly. It does this by engaging the Collective Intelligence at (and beyond) UTS, making use of human-centred...- Writing Analytics - One of the things we’re working on at UTS is the development of analytic techniques to support students in their writing practices. I’ve been trying to think about the variety of tools available in that space, and possible categories (or...
- Student writing corpora - A blog to keep track of essay/student writing corpora I’ve encountered which might be useful in development of writing analytics. (There is also a curated list of ‘Learner corpora around the world‘ which is more extensive) Uppsala Student English Corpus...
- Using Launchpad and the NeCTAR Research Cloud to access RStudio - Notes to self, might be useful to others (I found the process a bit confusing)… The Nectar Cloud can be accessed by anyone with AAF access. UTS is an AAF subscriber, so anyone with UTS credentials, staff or students, can...
What training do teachers need? #impact22 - The newest Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain (PESGB) IMPACT pamphlet has been released on the role of theory in teacher education [zotpressInText item=”{6DMSQGN9}”] (available here). The pamphlet’s introduced by series editor Michael Hand who says: The place of...- #rstats download a set of webpages as a book - I recently came across a CC licensed book the web version of which is split across multiple pages (presumably to encourage purchase of the book – which is totally fair enough…but sorry, I want it in a single file). The...
- Diagnostic peer assessment - One of the things I’m interested in is how to use assessment (and especially peer and self assessment) as a learning activity. A method I used as a teacher, and more recently in my research, was to use a kind...
- Bibliometrics altmetrics & R - I’ve been thinking recently about a ‘researcher impact’ dashboard. The way I’m thinking at the moment, it could be setup as a Shiny App to let researchers view a set of bibliometric data, plus some wider impact stuff including perhaps...
- Identifying factive claims in written text - I recently attended CIKM in Melbourne, and heard/followed up on a couple of ideas around an idea on ‘assertion identification’ – that is, the spotting of claims that might be described as factive or assertive claims which either assert facts,...
- Research Agenda - I’ve now been in Sydney for a month (!) and in my new post at UTS for ~3 weeks. In that time I’ve of course been settling in to Sydney, and the role, meeting people and trying to get my...
- Blog the PhD - This post is just archiving some outdated material from the ‘about’ page (I did ‘1’, I didn’t really do ‘2’, I rarely do ‘3.1’, I decided ‘3.2’ was too ugly and didn’t align well enough with how I was using...
#CIKM2015 trip to Melbourne - Last week I went to CIKM (Conference on Information and Knowledge Management) in Melbourne. I was primarily there for Friday’s ‘Evaluation of Collaborative Information Seeking and Retrieval‘ workshop, at which I presented two short papers from my PhD work. One...- Flipped Learning Action Group (FLAG) meeting - Today I attended my first UTS Flipped Learning Action Group (FLAG) meeting. These monthly meetings bring any interested UTS academic staff together to “develop innovative teaching, learning and assessment practices that use the strengths of flipped learning.” It’s an exciting...
- Farewell to Wikimedia UK board - As I’ll be leaving for University of Technology Sydney (UTS) in October, the time has come (formally, Friday) for me to step down from the board of Wikimedia UK. I’ve now been on the board for just under 2 years...
- What do trustees do - I’ve now been in the Wikimedia UK’s 10 person board for about 20 months. I’ve been reflecting a bit recently on that time, and the role of the board. This post is some draft work drawing together some advise documents...
- Business cases and reporting - This is an old draft, but the resources are still useful (for me at least) so I’m publishing sort of part of what I had intended to write (which would have been more targeted at my trustee work). When I...
- Emigrating to Australia – checklist - This is largely for my own reference, but it might also be useful for other people 🙂 let me know if there’s anything I’ve missed! Lots of other places have useful checklists, including WestPac (my bank), and the very comprehensive...
- Climate change denial and persuasion - Last night I caught a bit of Channel 4 news, on which Liz Hutchins (Friends of the Earth) and Nicolas Loris (Heritage Foundation – they’re climate change deniers) presented opposing views on Obama’s Clean Power Plan, with Loris suggesting it...
- Dear learner - Dear Data One of the things I’ve been fairly excited about recently is the ‘dear data‘ project, which is an “analogue data drawing project” between two women who’d “swapped continents” via postcard. Each week they both draw by hand a...
- Using a thesaurus to find strings (and synonymous strings) in R - So I don’t think anyone has blogged about this topic (although the github README of the package I’ll talk about is pretty good) – using a thesaurus to look for matching strings in a text. This is just a sketch...
- OpenSTV - I’ve been playing a bit with OpenSTV this week. If you’re a big organisation running lots of elections, you should definitely just cough up for the paid copy here, or almost certainly better yet, the online version (OpaVote) which looks...
- Wikimedia UK volunteer strategy consultation - Yesterday Wikimedia UK held its second Volunteer Strategy Gathering, followed by the Annual General Meeting. The VSG was focussed on our Volunteer Strategy Consultation, and involved discussions of our developing project based model, volunteer structures, and how we can encourage...
- Diagnostic peer assessment - Very short talk given in the Institute of Educational Technology (IET) at the OU on a diagnostic assessment process involving marking sample essays for which we have reference values, and using the difference from the reference values to assess rater...
- Freedom of Panorama #saveFoP - This is a copy of the email I sent my MEPs earlier this week in response to a proposal to restrict Freedom of Panorama in the UK (signpost piece, very good and drawn on heavily in my letter). I don’t...
- Trail Blazer – mapping your info seeking trail - Yesterday morning I had a chat with Matt Kennedy, one of the folks behind TrailBlazer, a browser addon which creates a visual navigation trail as you search and browse the web, which got some coverage in Wired a few months...
- Get started with econometrics in R - A friend (who is an economist) recently (January…I’m clearing drafts) installed R and asked for some pointers. This is just what I sent him, any additions of learning resources, data sources, or/and packages are very welcome. Economics specific A list...
- Reviewing – The (grad student) benefits - I forget why, but before Christmas I was thinking a bit about reviewing and how it fits into my academic-life (I’m aware that was 6 months ago…). I know people have fairly mixed feelings about reviewing, as reviewers, authors, and...
- Academic Publishing Scam - Academic publishing is a complete scam. Many people are aware of the cost to access journal articles (usually ~£20 for a paper), the writing of which is often funded via the public (through research grants, general university funding, fees, etc.)....
- Do you remember your first email? - My first email? I’m pretty sure I can remember my first email. It would have been probably 1999 (I was yr 9, 14). I was on the school student council, and setup an email address ostensibly to email the local...
- Modelling choices in document evaluations - While visiting Rutgers a couple of weeks ago I had the chance to talk to Clark Chinn’s group in the Graduate School of Education. One of their number (a visiting student from Germany) was thinking about how to setup their...
- Browser logs to session replay - Researchers (and non-researchers) are increasingly interested in collecting log data. Browser addons, apps, and tools like google analytics make that easier. But sometimes you want more of a feel for things than raw log-files offer. In the case of understanding...
- Rutgers visit - Cross posted to KMI planet news. I’ve just returned from a week at the School of Communications and Information at Rutgers University where I was an invited attendee of the DIMACS (Center for Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science) funded Workshop...
- LAK15: Temporality workshop and rich document literacies short paper; and Rutgers visit - I’ve just returned from the US where for the last 10 days I’ve been attending the 5th Learning Analytics and Knowledge (LAK) conference, followed by a short trip to visit colleagues at Rutgers University School of Communications and Information. At...
- Mapping (Wikimedia meetups) in R - Despite the fact I seem to be spending ALL OF THE TIME on R at the minute, I’ve been wanting to explore it a bit more, ideally through manageable chunks (perhaps the achievable element seems comforting contra PhD analysis). In...
- New #LAK15 publications – on Temporality and Literacy - At LAK15 I’m co-organising a workshop on the temporal aspect of learning and its analysis. The (2 page) proceedings piece is now live on ORO: “It’s About Time: 4th International Workshop on Temporal Analyses of Learning Data“. The workshop’s organised...
- rPython on the cRunch server - At KMi we have a hosted RStudio – cRunch – managed by Fridolin Wild. A recent addition to the capabilities is a Python package – rPython (and here on CRAN)– allowing users of the server to call Python from within...
Firefox OS phone - A couple of days ago my phone ‘on’ button (which also activates the screen) stopped working (most of the time…along with the heating in my flat). So that was all fun…anyway, this gave me a good kick to finally move...- Inter-rater reliability in R - As much for my own reference as anything else 🙂 One of the things I’ve spent a lot of time looking at over the last month is a set of inter-rater reliability measures for some peer and self assessment data...
- New BPS strategic plan - The British Psychological Society (BPS) has a new strategic plan, I have to say, when I first saw it I thought “oh, disappointingly flimsy”, happily though it was just that the full plan is in fact another click away (not...
- Etherpad for co-operation/collaboration learning analytics - One of my data-sources is the set of etherpads which were used to write (mostly in small groups) a report. This data includes the final output (obviously) including some basic formatting, across which we could look for the presence of...
- Ethics of Big Data in Higher Education - Interesting new paper Johnson, J. A. (2014). The Ethics of Big Data in Higher Education. International Review of Information Ethics, 7. although I think unfair to at least some (but certainly not all) data-mining research efforts so far. Argues that,...
- Quick Wikipedia Tasks - This post is adapted from: This Wikimedia UK page and gives some direction to ways people might get (quickly) contributing to Wikimedia projects! It’s also worth having a look at 60 ways to help new editors. Quick tasks (while the...
- Wikimedia UK Volunteer Strategy Gathering - Last Saturday I attended the first Wikimedia UK Volunteer Strategy Gathering. held in the Library of Birmingham (left) – room 101…. These are some very brief notes on a couple of bits of the day (mostly the morning sessions). Volunteers...
- Epistemic Cognition – videos on its scope, why it matters, etc. - Some nice videos on the Network of Programs in the Learning Sciences (NAPLES) website: Bill Sandoval giving a great account of situated epistemic cognition, and why epistemic cognition is such an important area of research for the learning sciences Then...
- Month note: Field work, conferences + other events - Mimicking Doug Belshaw’s weeknotes, well, it’s been a busy month mid Oct to now! Partly reflected in a lack of tweeting & blogging. I’ve had a few papers either submitted or progressing in chain, plus: Maastricht Mid October kicked off...
- Verifying your facts - I recently found myself on a journal website – looked all good, but it was published by a nutrition organisation. In the UK ‘nutritionist’ isn’t a terribly well regarded title (certainly no protection) so I wondered how I could check...
- Impact and the ethical thread - At Simon (Buckingham-Shum)’s valedictory lecture last week [this may have been sitting in draft for a while], John Domingue said a really nice thing, something like: In the Open University, a place built around openess, full of open people, Simon...
- My Research - I have various different elevator pitches for different people, and my homepage bio (reproduced at the end here) gives a nice overview of the trajectory of my research program. It doesn’t, though, really give a good enough indication of more...
- 10 book recommendations - There’s a facebook thing going around on 10 books that’ve stayed with you. I’m not terribly inclined to do these things…but then, the mental exercise actually thinking about it was broadly interesting (and who doesn’t like book recommendations?) so here...
- Right to be forgotten - The recent ‘right to be forgotten’ (factsheet) has had a lot of attention, I wanted to post a blog a while ago thinking about it but haven’t had enough time to read around the various issues. This is pulling together...
- Measuring ‘value’ in 3rd sector social media - Back in 2011, just after I’d finished teaching, I applied for and got a Nominet Trust internship to write a report on social media use in 3rd sector organisations, and how it might create/measure ‘value’. This is now rather out...
- Charities and Nudge - One of the things I have vague interest in is behavioural economics, largely because I wrote my undergrad dissertation on the ultimatum game. Since that time, behavioural economics has become perhaps best known (or recognised) under the label ‘nudge’. I...
- On false balance in reporting - Great piece from the Conversation on false balance in reporting, and some things to look out for, nicely illustrated by this clip from John Oliver
- WordPress and LimeSurvey for Open Research - Just thought I’d whack a post up re: my work and the WordPress plugins etc. I’ve used to setup some research. The details of my research don’t really matter, but in short I have multiple groups and I want all...
- Economic and Epistemic Psychology – Too expensive to know? - I’ve just seen this article on negotiating salary. I don’t really care about the article (advice seems sensible enough) but the analogy used misunderstands the classic economic interpretation of the ultimatum game [zotpressInText item=”{AU5WTEZH}”]. In that game a player is...
- New paper – a Mediawiki OER resource bank for teaching STEM - Haßler, B., Hennessy, S., Knight, S., & Connolly, T. (2014). Developing an Open Resource Bank for Interactive Teaching of STEM: Perspectives of school teachers and teacher educators. Journal of Interactive Media in Education, in press. Is now online (in fact,...
- New video – supporting information seeking; my research - This was put together in a fairly short timeframe for an EPSRC/Technology Strategy Board competition, with a bit longer (and some tech-support…I made the foolish mistake of a) screencasting and b) committing the video to the new Windows Movie Maker...
- Writing habits #phdchat - I’ve just been reading some other PhD blogs, and thinking about writing habits. This is partly a reflection of thinking about when I can/cannot write, what tasks I can do where, etc. I’m doing a lot more cut n paste...
- “Looking for”…Information Seeking through Facebook - I see facebook just rolled out this new feature to me; now when I add a status update, I can indicate “looking for” with a pretty extensive list of options (presumably populated from common ‘other’ insertions). The integration of Bing...
- Citation management on Wikipedia - A question came up in the last few days on the ALT list about citation management in Wikipedia, and converting existing references in Word (using Endnote) to export to Wikipedia. I had a quick look, and except for conversion from...
- I’ve decided to have an opinion on the Facebook mood study - Background Having just seen a BPS Research Digest on the Facebook study, I thought I’d jot down my (very rough) thoughts. For those who haven’t seen the study (?!) basically some Facebook researchers manipulated what was shown in user’s news...
- #ICLS2014 Learning and Becoming in Practice – workshop and talk - Over the last week I’ve been in Boulder, Colorado for the 11th International Conference of the Learning Sciences (ICLS). I was over co-chairing a workshop on ‘Learning Analytics for Learning and Becoming in Practice’, and giving a talk on ‘Epistemic...
- ICLS in Boulder, Colorado - More to come, but I’ve just posted these on KMi planet news so copying below: Bridging Learning Analytics and Learning Sciences – ICLS Workshop Simon Knight, Saturday 28 June 2014 ICLS workshop underway On Monday this week 2nd year PhD...
- Putting learners in control of their data: ETAG proposals -
- Net neutrality and OER - So, an interesting question around the net neutrality principle. Net neutrality is basically the principle that it should not be legal to differentially charge/discount/throttle/fast-lane for web access dependent on the content being delivered. So in practice, this principle is broken...
- The Revolution in Asking & Answering Questions - Dan Russell recently posted this TEDx talk on ‘the revolution in asking & answering questions’ (see Dan’s blog on it). It’s a fun watch, and interesting to see someone I’ve (briefly) met do this kind of talk – it’s a...
- What does it mean to be an expert in the web era - Today I’m in Oxford, at the ‘What does it mean to be an expert in the web era?’ seminar (programme here). Hashtag #digitalcurrency (hm, this is a messy tag though, lots of bit-coin-esque stuff). A bit of a ‘live blog’,...
- Portable apps for experiment deployment - My study needs participants to use Firefox, and a browser extension (Coagmento), but there are some issues with this: the extension can’t be downloaded through the usual route so is very slightly more faff to install ideally we don’t want...
- Facebook’s community standards, legitimising glorification of violence - This isn’t a post about either removal of extremism in general, or censorship. It’s about a particular case where, I hope, facebook will very quickly see sense and remove the offending material. Warning: This post discusses an unpleasant post on...
- Notability on Wikipedia – the case of journals and learned societies - While at the OER14 conference, I had an interesting discussion re: an article for deletion case. I’m going to give the specific example here, because it exemplifies a few issues, but I think the things considered have much broader relevance...
- #OER14 – Thinking about Education, Open Practices, and Wikipedia - A couple of weeks ago I attended OER14 up in Newcastle with Martin Poulter and I going to represent Wikimedia UK (who generously funded us). The conference theme was ‘Building communities of open practice’ and is a well established conference...
- Philosophy of Education: Accessibility, clarity, and the philosophy-education relationship - On Monday I attended the Philosophy of Education Society GB (PESGB) funded ‘New Critical Conversations’ seminar at the Institute of Education, London. The seminar was part of a short series exploring notions of ‘accessibility’ and ‘clarity’ in philosophy of education....
- Using Wikipedia paragraph improvements to teach literacy - I just submitted an idea to the Wikimedia Idea Lab on Using Wikipedia paragraph improvements to teach literacy. The basic idea is to take a paragraph in a Wikipedia article, and use the revision history to extract earlier versions of...
- #wmcon Wikimedia Strategy – making it impactful, measuring impact, and thinking about tech and localisation - Since Wednesday I’ve been at the Wikimedia Conference (wmcon) 2014, in Berlin.The event is a movement wide conference for those engaged in Wikimedia organisations including chapters (sort of…it’s evolving right). This actually makes for an interesting mix (and dilemma) around...
- Moving to my own hosting - I’ve been meaning to do this for a while, mostly for longevity’s sake (I won’t be at the OU forever afterall). It slightly worries me that it leaves me more exposed to issues…but long term, obviously the right thing to...
- #HEABigData summit - On Thursday & Friday I was in Manchester for a 2 day HEA summit on big data in the social sciences. The event focussed on how social scientists could engage with big data, and the implications of that for teaching...
- My ORO Statistics - Following Rob Farrow I thought it might be nice to share my (Open Research Online) ORO statistics Overview. A total of 1007 downloads, with fairly unsurprisingly the Epistemology, pedagogy, assessment and learning analytics getting the most hits. Nicely, Creating a supportive...
- Wikipedia is a corrupting force, eroding the world’s intellect – a reply - Open Letter in reply: Open Letter in reply: Wikipedia is just a bunch of people deciding what they think is important, adding and correcting things they assert are information. At least, that’s what you’d believe if you took Saturday’s piece...
- New chapter: Finding knowledge – what is it to ‘know’ when we search? - New upload on ORO today linked to my talk in Amsterdam. Knight, Simon (2014). Finding knowledge – what is it to ‘know’ when we search? In: König, René and Rasch, Miriam eds. Society of the Query Reader: Reflections on Web...
- Extended Mind and Moral Development (an old draft paper) - Abstract I first discuss the relationship between moral theories, theories of moral development and perspectives on moral education. This discussion leads to a conclusion regarding the decision criterion for inclusion of an educational component into a model of moral education....
- A one world web? How new technologies are adapting to different cultures - A UCL seminar – A one world web? How new technologies are adapting to different cultures – for today’s lunch (and an IoE one for dinner). The seminar brought 3 researchers together to talk about their research in the context...
- ICLS Workshop – Analytics for Learning and Becoming in Practice - Some good news! My ICLS workshop proposal (with Simon Buckingham Shum, David Williamson Shaffer and his students Wesley Collier and Golnaz Arastoopour, Alyssa Friend Wise, and Paul A Kirschner) was accepted. We’ll be putting something more formal together over the...
- Wikimedia UK Strategy Consultation - If you’ve spoken to me recently and asked what I’m up to it’s likely I’ll have said “strategy” (with a more or less weary tone). That’s because I’ve been working on the Wikimedia UK strategy since the new year with...
- To read or not to read: decoding Synthetic Phonics - Rather a lot of money (23.5 million) has been spent for schools to engage specifically with synthetic phonics teaching and materials, with increasing emphasis in teacher education and Ofsted criteria. There is a sizeable debate around synthetic phonics, and as...
- The Measure of Knowledge - UPDATE 2016: I wrote a draft paper about this some time ago (in 2014 I guess), I don’t think I’m going to do anything with it (I don’t think it’s quite right either) so download the draft: Assessing the Measure...
- Academic Identities (and generosity) - A while ago I wrote a post on ‘what my phd is‘ – as in, what subject or discipline it falls into. Around the same time I was also thinking about academic identities more broadly; about the type of academic...
- Epistemology, assessment, pedagogy: where learning meets analytics in the middle space - New paper out on ORO. This is the accepted Journal of Learning Analytics version (i.e. some changes might still be made) of the paper we wrote up from our LAK13 presentation, and we anticipate it being in publication in the...
- Educating Time - Before Christmas I had coffee with a Cambridge friend & colleague Mona Nosrati, and (don’t worry, amongst other things) we talked about how grounded theory analysis, and discourse data gets represented and why the representational tools are important. A lot...
- Mozilla Contributor Audit - In 2011 Mozilla undertook a contributor audit https://wiki.mozilla.org/Contribute/Audit with a team to support community engagement https://wiki.mozilla.org/Engagement/Community_Engagement and on-ramping and guidance for contributors who want to contribute to getting people to contribute https://wiki.mozilla.org/Contribute I’m wondering what the Wikimedia community could learn...
- Searching Time - Last week I posted something on Educating Time. Of course one of my particular interests is information seeking and there to, temporality in search is a really interesting issue. Searching for Temporal Information Time is of course a crucial element...
- Wiki-dates with moving events - Here’s a fun project for someone: Build a module that can generate the dates of major events that vary year by year (such as Easter). There’s already a module for generating the date of Easter and dates tied to it...
- Making Mediawiki More Accessible - A while ago I wrote a post on accessibility issues on the internet, standards and tools to support accessibility. Talking about this puts me in the embarrassing position of having to acknowledge that I haven’t really thought about it with...
- Measuring value in Wikimedia projects - A couple of years ago I wrote a report for Nominet Trust on measuring value in social media projects. That report started with a discussion of the various ways we might mean “value” – monetary, social, personal, towards the charitable...
- CDEInFocus Learning Analytics Event - I attended this event last week, I’ve got about 20 drafts at the moment so pushing this out unfinished… These are partial notes for various reasons, sorry :-). Michael Moore, D2L big data in education theory and practice Personalisation targeted...
- Smart ways to educate – Nexters event - Last night I went to a ‘Smart ways to educate’ event organised by Nexters, KPMG High Growth Technology Group & Code Advisors. https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/smart-ways-to-educate-tickets-9436389495 It was a networking led event (with Ashley from Nexters being an exceptionally good mediator/director), with some...
- What are you searching for - When people use search engines, they do so to meet some information need. It might seem obvious how one would establish what that need was, by looking at the query terms, exploring the pages users actually click on (that’s why...
- Code Acts – The middle space of algorithms and [learning] intents - I’ve just had the ‘Code Acts’ ESRC seminar series pointed out to me which looks like a fantastic series around the sociotechnical factors involved in code. In a slightly indirect way these are issues that I’ve been talking about this...
- Society of the Query conference - This is just my stuff (video & slides) from the conference, with a twitter archive thing too, bit pushed for time but I’d encourage everyone to check out the other presentations :-). Based on my reader chapter (Translated into Russian...
- Multiple Document Processing in R or Python - Just to upfront this disclaimer again, I write (/hack together) horrible code…and this is very drafty, largely for my own future reference I have a set of html documents (I converted some from pdf but that doesn’t matter for this...
- Assessing finding knowledge - Teachers out there,what advice do u give students on discriminating between stories on web? asks @dmrussell http://t.co/BZrT2pmMl8 #edtech — Simon Knight (@sjgknight) November 16, 2013 In that case, Dan was talking about a specific case which serves as a nice...
- On lying [stub] - I wonder if there’s something interesting in epistemic cognition and the ways people mislead/lie (along the same lines as I wonder about how people deal with the “when no answer is answer enough” issue). Misleading, lying, bullshitting, the specific ways...
- Epistemic Commitments in Epistemic Frames - I’ve had this blog sitting in draft for so long that I’ve written a paper about it in the meantime! The working copy of that paper can be found on the KMi tech report site and we welcome any comments...
- 2020 The Future British Library - Today I went down to the BL for a workshop event imagining future library services for researchers using the BL. “This Library 2020 project forms part of a British Library initiative which seeks to identify future information and research needs...
- Nesta Games Based Learning Event - Last week I went over to Nesta in London for a game science and game based learning session. They had a few groups there and were cohosting with the serious games institute at Coventry uni. This blog is just my...
- The Role of Open Access and Open Educational Resources within Distance Education - I’m working from bits of the University of London today (in UCL now) having attended a UoL CDE (Centre for Distance Education) lunchtime seminar on The Role of Open Access and Open Educational Resources within Distance Education. This is something...
- Data and the Philosopher – what is epistemology? - After my LAK13 talk someone (sorry, forget who) asked (roughly): “you don’t actually think you can use learning analytics to tell us about epistemology do you?” In this post, I’ll first discuss the answer to the (intended) question. I’ll then...
- My Year – developments, collaborations, skills - Sitting outside in Ireland (near the place below) seems as good a time as any to think about how the year’s gone, collaborations forged, skills developed, etc. (this is also one of the last things I need to slot in...
- Danish use of internet in exams – epistemology, pedagogy, assessment… - Earlier this year I took the Google Advanced Power Searching with Google MOOC. For one of the assignments I did some research on a relatively long standing interest of mine – the use of internet in exams in Denmark, a...
- What am I doing a PhD in? - Sometimes I get asked what my PhD is in, often by people who really just want a general subject rather than research details. This is something I struggle with, partly because research is complex (duh), partly because I’m aware disciplinary...
- Jobs - One of the things I’ve spoken to a few people about on my US trip is the pressure the 3 year PhD creates on thinking about jobs quite early on. In the US with people taking maybe 5-7 years, this...
- Talking MOOCs at Stanford – Google Experiences - Last week while I was at Stanford some people from Google came in and talked about their experiences of delivering MOOCs on the Google Course Builder (for Google). Julia Wilkowski (senior instructional designer) talked about experiences on the Power Search...
- Talking MOOCs at Stanford - Last week I spent some time hosted by Stanford University’s Lytics Lab talking to people there, and in the tech world, about education, technology, search engines and epistemic practices. A really really big thank you to everyone who met up...
- Visiting the Epistemic Games Group - I’m currently spending some time at University of Wisconsin-Madison with the Epistemic Games group there. Some very brief (i.e. they probably won’t make much sense without knowing something about the epistemic games group) notes… I’d read about, and seen demoed,...
- Exploratory Collaborative Search Tasks - This evening I met up with Gene Golovchinsky, of FXPAL (Fuji Xerox research institute in Palo Alto). Gene’s work is pretty varied (there was some cool stuff on collaborative whiteboards & storing/retrieving info a while ago) but a big area...
- Contributions to the Sum of Knowledge – Wikimedia Foundation meeting - Two of my four meetings yesterday were with people at the Wikimedia Foundation (the other two were with instagrok, and google). I had a chat with Tilman Bayer about Wikimedia research, and LiAnna Davis about the WMF Education program. With...
- Concept maps for epistemic insight – meeting instagrok - One of the tools I’ve been most impressed by in the student-research-support space, and one which I’ve had the longest interaction with is Instagrok. Instagrok is a tool in which searches map keyterms to related concepts, and provides quick facts...
- Google Coursebuilder and Search Education - Last night I went into Google (something very surreal about saying that, and about doing a search From:”Hotel California”; To:”Google”…). Here’s a picture of me with a big google sign… Google (and other search engines)...
- Badging Wikipedia Contributions - I’m keen on using mediawiki as a platform for learning analytics. So projects which can use analytics on Wikipedia (and related mediawiki projects) are interesting because a) they’re hopefully useful to the individual project and b) they provide proof of...
- Using R to process Wikipedia link flow data - I’ve been a bit quiet recently – preparing for my US trip (on Monday – 5 weeks of it!), and writing first year report, and playing with Wikipedia data to look at link flow to get some idea of collaborative...
- WMUK Conference – Mediawiki for OER and Learning Analytics - Yesterday I spoke in Lincoln at the WikimediaUK Conference on Mediawiki for OER and Learning Analytics – slides (with audio) below, video (I think) available on the conference link some time later this week. I’d met a group of the...
- Collaborative Information Seeking on Wikipedia Talk Pages - CIS in wiki I’m interested in whether links (internal and external) are added to talk pages, and if so whether they then ‘flow’ into the main-page. I know I park links on talk pages, sometimes because I’m not qualified to...
- Giving pupils the lead in dialogic talk around presentations - Over summer I did a bit of work on the Interactive White Boards (IWB) project at Cambridge, and wrote a chapter for the reader on creating an environment for effective dialogue in the classroom. The focus of that work, and...
- Researching moocs - Doing what I do, I talk a reasonable amount about moocs, OER, learning analytics, the sorts of opportunity they provide and how we might do research on them. I’ve also done a reasonable amount of work on the Wikipedia pages...
- When no answer is answer enough - Here’s an area for epistemic cognition research, when do people take the lack of response to be a response in itself? That is, when do they assume (positive) knowledge of something from the lack of results returned from queries on...
- Pedagogically driven purchasing in school ICT - Recently I was asked about revamping school ICT – what technology ‘should’ we be exploring to improve pedagogy, and learning in a school. The question wasn’t about content delivery, or flashy content – but about general technology to support pedagogy...
- An Invitation to the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) Wikipedia Page - Well, it was bound to happen at some point – I’ve had my first taste of Wiki-disillusionment. As anyone who follows me on twitter will know, I’ve put quite a lot of time in to editing the Learning Analytics wikipedia...
- An App for event sampling in search engine tasks - Given that assigned tasks are completed in a different way to self-selected/naturalistic tasks, it crossed my mind some time ago that an interesting way to gather data on naturalistic tasks might be to ask people to install an ‘event sampling’...
- Wikipedia Learning Analytics editathon - At #LAK13 I raised this issue again, so I’m just going to publish this blog even though I haven’t actually managed to organise a formal editathon. I’d really encourage academics from all disciplines to look at their subject discipline pages...
- #lak13 Conference & Workshops - Last week I attended the 3rd ACM Learning Analytics and Knowledge conference (LAK13) in Leuven, Belgium. Beautiful city and gorgeous beer aside the 3 day conference and 2 days of workshops were a productive and interesting space and a great...
- Testimony of Silence in Social Q&A and Search Engine Use - Does the absence of reply imply no opinion, laziness, no knowledge (“I don’t know about [x,y]”), no positive knowledge (e.g. thinking someone should “go x”) or/and no negative e.g. advising them “don’t go y”), a belief someone else will do...
- CSCW2013 – 2 workshop papers & Texan fun - I recently returned from Texas, San Antonio where I was in attendance at the 16th ACM Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) conference. While there I gave Two workshop papers: W8: Collaborative Information Seeking: Tracking Epistemic Beliefs and Sensemaking in Collaborative...
- #lak13 mooc week on epistemology, assessment and pedagogy - This post is a copy of the course syllabus for week 6 as of 17:15 GMT 15/03/2013 (licenced under a CC attribution licence) https://learn.canvas.net/courses/33/wiki/week-6-epistemology-and-pedagogy George Siemens runs the course, and Simon Buckingham Shum and I wrote the material for this...
- Facebook ‘likes’ predict personality - Usual disclaimer, I’m pushing this out earlier than I’d like (draft wise) because I’m too busy and shouldn’t be focussing on this…apologies for inaccuracies and poor writing :-). Last year I went to a talk “I am therefore I buy...
- Introduction to Epistemology - This post discusses epistemology – first the sorts of questions we might ask when applying epistemology to education, and then a general taster of the areas epistemology covers (which is by no means comprehensive). If you want to comment, click...
- The Extended Knowledge Project - http://www.extended-knowledge.ppls.ed.ac.uk/?page_id=163 Can I retire and just let Edinburgh get on with it? I’ve never been to Scotland….I wonder if I could visit. I wrote my MA thesis at the IoE on the implications of the extended mind thesis for how...
- Epistemic [information] Architecture? Panes, Windows, Frames…queries, sessions, discourse - In the last few blogs I wrote about the problems with cognitivist models of epistemic beliefs and a discourse-oriented approach to viewing epistemic action. I also elaborated on this view in the context of discourse ‘to do’ information retrieval and...
- You don’t have to be Sapir to think language is important – Qualitative data analysis - That title is funny (just in case you hadn’t noticed). This has been in draft for ages…publishing now to stop myself from looking at it again :-). One of the things I’ve grown interested in is the (philosophical underpinnings of)...
- Epistemic beliefs and games - My “friends” mock me for ALL OF THE EPISTEMIC TALK. It might be justified… In this post (which is taken from a draft paper in submission at a conference) I outline some current work in epistemic behaviour, and some issues...
- Epistemic Behaviour with Epistemic Tools - In my parallel blog I highlighted some current work in epistemic cognition and games – particularly ones I think could be fruitful for further investigation. This blog expands that, if you’re interested some of these ideas appear in a different...
- Coding for Kids – What is it good for? - Not “absolutely nothing”, I just like inserting random lyrics into things 🙂 (this will begin to irritate my supervisors at some point…if it hasn’t already). However! I am something of a sceptic on this issue. Last year I wrote a...
- Personalising for Diverse Results – Diversity Aware Search - Personalisation – Reinforcing a narrow perspective One concern with search personalisation and similar tools is that personalisation narrows perspectives on results, falling into the trap of confirmation bias – users are 1) more likely to search for affirming content and...
- MediaWiki for Learning Analytics? - One of the things we’ve talked about in SoLAR recently is the potential of established platforms for learning analytics data. Two of the most used platforms are Mediawiki (which Wikipedia is on) and WordPress (which this blog, along with a...
- BETT – Technology, Innovation, Improvement - With BETT coming up, I thought I’d link to what I said after BETT 2012 (at which I presented for Pearson Innov8). My concern then was that in fact a lot of the technology being talked about was quite conservative,...
- My Day hour by hour - I’m not going to do this very often, but this morning I found myself putting lots of things in the diary for the day – and then I just kept going filling it in with stuff I’d been doing. I...
- Personalisation and Personal Recommendation – tailoring my knowledge graph - Algorithms and big data are provocative right? Is Google personalisation a risk to our epistemic autonomy? Are recommender systems epistemically problematic in general? Is an over reliance on search engines to know what we want – even if we don’t...
- Is Google making me [stupid|smarter]…how about Bing? - Is google making me smarter, stupider, is it all just Ch-ch-ch-ch-Changes and can we even trace it? Having seen yet another article on this issue, I thought I’d better have an answer – one other than just rolling my eyes. ...
- Six Provocations for Learning Analytics - [THIS post is a slightly edited version of an internship proposal I submitted…I’ll try to update as I hear about that) Introduction With an increasing interest in ‘big data’ and business intelligence, and the rise of Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs)...
- Exams as assessors of epistemic virtue - So here’s an interesting question – are exam grades good at (indeed, are they aimed at) establishing the epistemic virtue of the student? Having piqued your interest, I’m afraid I can only offer some thoughts on it here – but...
- Using the internet to do research – some tips, ideas, tools, comments - For formatting reasons, I’ve placed this post on a page here http://sjgknight.com/finding-knowledge/edusearch-tips/
- “History shall be viewed as factual, not constructed” [stub] - That’s the law in Florida ya know…. http://www.historians.org/perspectives/issues/2006/0609/0609nch1.cfm
- Evaluating Facebook Graph search as an epistemic tool - The new Facebook Graph search will allow users to conduct a much finer grained search across their networks than they currently can. It’s not hard to imagine how facebook & Bing’s relationship might be built on here for feeding into...
- Choosing epistemic methods – a Rawlsian game - I read ‘Social Epistemology’ at some point last term (see below for citation), and got a lot from it. The blending of social-normative elements of epistemology, pragmatism, and virtue epistemology are particularly interesting. I wish I’d know more about this...
- What does it mean to think that a pupil has made progress? - What does it mean to think that a pupil has made progress? What would it look like if a group of pupils all made the same amount (relatively) of progress? Thinking about these questions reveals a lot about what we...
- Open (remixable) moocs – what would it look like, what could we do with it? - OER and moocs are two key trends at the moment. While sometimes moocs are described along the same lines as OER, they are different things. Moocs are courses structured around content (which may or may not be open), with –...
- The Pragmatic Web: More than just semantics contextualised - In my work we might look at implementing pragmatic lessons on the web in two ways: 1) the technical solution seeks to represent the data ‘pragmatically’ somehow; 2) the user solution seeks to scaffold the user to understand the pragmatic...
- Wikipedia Feedback Ratings as an Epistemic Tool - In a spark of creativity which kept me active for a while over Christmas, I had an idea about using the feedback ratings on the bottom of most Wikipedia pages as a tool to analyse the epistemic judgements on those...
- Evaluating recommender systems as epistemic tools - Following on from my ‘Evaluating Google as an Epistemic Tool’ post I’m just exploring the Open University’s RISE and the related OpenURL projects both of which use log data on academic searches to provide users with article and journal level...
- Epistemology, Assessment, Pedagogy – Learning Analytics? - I wrote (with my supervisors) a draft paper, available for commenting on google docs (it’s already there so I won’t transfer it to this system). The paper is available at the link below and discusses how I conceptualise the relatioship...
- Evaluating Google as an Epistemic Tool - I’ve just read an article which explicitly considers the evaluation of search engines with respect to their epistemic functions under a social epistemological perspective. There’s a pre-print available http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/teaching_staff/simpson/simpson_index.html and the citation is: Evaluating Google as an Epistemic Tool, Metaphilosophy...
- In Praise of Tests - Michael Gove’s speech to the Independent Academies Association (IAA) was widely described as praising ‘rote learning’ (e.g. in the guardian www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2012/nov/14/michael-gove-backs-learning-by-rote?commentpage=all#start-of-comments). Whether it did or not is – on reading – a bit more questionable, but nonetheless there are a...
- Dialogue & Collaboration - A colleague (also working on EdFutures wiki) asked about some stuff on collaborative learning and dialogue a while ago. I didn’t have time to write a long review (although, see bottom of page for 2 things I’ve contributed to on...
- Shirley Brice Heath: Ways with words – Literacy [or something] in our face - Last week I went to a seminar Shirley Brice Heath gave (I believe the recording will be available online at some point but I can’t see it yet). Shirley’s main point was that, with ever increasing pressures on working families,...
- Knowing Knowledge - I thought I’d write a brief post about George Siemens’ book, ‘Knowing Knowledge’ for a few reasons: I think – bizarrely – that the concept of ‘knowledge’ is overlooked in a lot of discourse around education. There’s a reasonable amount...
- Information Foraging – Tracking the ‘scent’ of information - This is from a while ago, but it’s a nice article on information foraging http://www.apa.org/monitor/2012/03/information.aspx “Cognitive psychologists have found that people search for information online in much the same way that animals hunt for food. Now those researchers are extending...
- Qualitative & Quantitative data analysis…immeasurable seminars 😉 - Martyn Hammersley Pretty standard stuff but better than equiv last year Some interesting questions I hadn’t thought as much about before: Can quan data be turned into qual (infographics may be a case?) At ‘data’ level – distinction pretty clear. ...
- Learning Sciences reading group - I just went to a reading group, reading Keith Sawyer’s introductory chapter to the Cam Handbook of Learning Science Click to access R.%20Keith%20Sawyer%20-%20New%20Science%20of%20Learning.pdf Interesting talk and a really nice introductory text (which I may well dip in to again at...
- Using the internet to do research – Google Documents - Just as having students predict answers to math problems is a way of creating more meaningful learning, prediction can be a useful strategy in successful searching too. Search results can be presented any number of ways: tables and charts, videos,...
- Free Technology for Teachers: Web Search Strategies in Plain English - Just as having students predict answers to math problems is a way of creating more meaningful learning, prediction can be a useful strategy in successful searching too. Search results can be presented any number of ways: tables and charts, videos,...
- SearchReSearch: Internet search: What makes it simple, difficult or impossible? - Just as having students predict answers to math problems is a way of creating more meaningful learning, prediction can be a useful strategy in successful searching too. Search results can be presented any number of ways: tables and charts, videos,...
- Get richer, more interactive answers – Inside Search - Just as having students predict answers to math problems is a way of creating more meaningful learning, prediction can be a useful strategy in successful searching too. Search results can be presented any number of ways: tables and charts, videos,...
- New Nominet Trust Blog: Digital Divide – an issue of ethics? - http://www.nominettrust.org.uk/knowledge-centre/blogs/digital-divide-issue-ethics For today’s blog I thought I’d take a step back and consider some of the ethical imperative for studying the digital divide. Key questions: Are we excluding users, or failing to include them? Are we trying to shrink an...
- NominetTrust Blog: Finding Knowledge – young people’s use of search engines - I’ve now done three runs of my field work and started analysing the data. So today I thought I’d discuss some of the preliminary findings, and their implications. The findings are interesting in themselves, but I also want to...
- NominetTrust blog: Symptoms and causes: The digital divide…a digital problem? - Introduction to my literature review essentially. I discuss whether or not the digital divide should be thought of (and addressed as) primarily an online or offline problem, specifically linked to socioeconomic factors which are not related to simple ‘access’ to...
- NominetTrust blog: Is giving access the best way to address technological inequality? - Following on from the interest in pragmatism, I discuss a sort of ‘sociocultural’ context. Specifically that, rather than asking “does this group have access to information”, we also need to ask “can this group use the information they have, effectively”....
- NominetTrust blog: What we do, just is what we know - Fairly broad introduction to my ‘pragmatist’ epistemology http://www.nominettrust.org.uk/knowledge-centre/blogs/what-we-do-just-what-we-know
- NominetTrust blog – Open Learning Analytics & Measuring ‘success’ - Open Learning Analytics and measuring ‘success’ Open Learning Analytics – what is it, how can it help? In my last couple of blogs, I’ve looked a bit at the importance of innovation in platforms and curricula design over content delivery...
- I am, therefore I buy – measuring consumer preference in a digital age - Went to an interesting talk on consumer marketing in digital age, with particular reference to use of personality data today. These are the comments/notes I made…if I sound like I’m slating it, I probably am but I suspect my issue...
- My Research in Wordles - Essay 2: Essay 1: Proposal (note the over emphasis on my own name! :s) First MA (Phil of Ed) Thesis:
- New @nominettrust edu-browse; a browser for education? - New post now up on Nominet Trust blog In the new post I discuss the possibility of a browser (and set of extensions) designed specifically for education – it’s something I’ve thought about a little bit, but I’d love to...
- The myth of the paperless office… - So I accidentally wrote about 6000 words too many on my essay…so after printing, reading it through and cutting paragraphs like that, I’ve spread it out on my floor so I can (literally) walk over it and spot repetition, physically...
- Second @NominetTrust blog; Nurturing and measuring the ‘value’ of innovation – BETT and beyond - Second Nominet Trust blog post live; http://www.nominettrust.org.uk/knowledge-centre/blogs/nurturing-and-measuring-%E2%80%98value%E2%80%99-innovation-%E2%80%93-bett-and-beyond “Nurturing and measuring the ‘value’ of innovation – BETT and beyond “
- So…Gephi eh? - So, having had a bit of a play, a look at what people are doing, and just mucking around with data, I ended up essentially making some up just to see what I was trying to (in principle) do. So...
- Visualising tag data (from Zotero?) - I’m currently writing a methodological justification. For that, it crossed my mind that a nice appendix would include articles that have used various methods, as well as some little descriptors (in this case I was primarily thinking epistemological positions). That...
- First post on Nominet Trust blogs - http://www.nominettrust.org.uk/knowledge-centre/blogs/?filters=type%3Ablog%20tid%3A42%20uid%3A3929 Briefly explains what I want to cover over the next year of blogging for NT: Technology in Education – How it’s being applied now What gaps are there in the innovations What sorts of insights we need to develop...
- Key Questions I’m interested in - “ Does acquisition of (propositional) knowledge drive know-how or does acquisition of know-how drive knowledge. UK ed predicated on former sjgknight September 30, 2011 “ Hold as little in your head as possible…but arrange it in as meaningful a way...
- Collaborative annotation/commenting - EDIT: 7/10/11 – this article in ijCSCL from the abstract seems to discuss the use of collaborative annotation/commenting. However, although it’s a really useful discussion of the educational considerations, as far as I can see none of the tools does...
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