As part of work to convert plain JSON records to proper RDF in JSON-LD I often want to convert a string value to a URI that identifies a thing (real world concrete thing or a concept). Continue reading
Tag Archives: random musings
Reading one of 25 years of EdTech
I enjoyed Martin Weller‘s blog post series on his 25 years of Ed Tech, and the book that followed, so when Lorna said that she had agreed to read the chapter on e-Learning Standards, and would I like to join her and make it a double act I thought… well, honestly I thought about how much I don’t enjoy reading stuff out loud for other people. But, I enjoy working with Lorna, and don’t get as many chances to do that as I would like, and so it happened.
I think the reading went well. You decide. Reading the definitions of the Dublin Core metadata element set I learnt one thing: I don’t want to be the narrator for audiobook versions of tech standards.
And then there’s the “between the chapters” podcast interview, which Lorna and I have just finished recording with Laura Pasquini, which was fun. We covered a lot of the things that Lorna and I wanted to: that we think Martin was hard on Dublin Core Metadata, I think his view of it was tarnished by the IEEE LOM; but that we agree with the general thrust of what Martin wrote. Many EdTech Standards were not a success, certainly the experience that many in EdTech had with standards was not a good one. But we all learnt from the experience and did better when it came to dealling with OER (Lorna expands on this in her excellent post reflecting on this chapter). Also, many technical standards relevant to education were a success, and we use them every day without (as Martin says) knowing much about them. And there’s the thing: Martin probably should never have been in the position knowing about Dublin Core, IEEE LOM and UK LOM Core, they should just have just been there behind that systems that he used, making things work. But I guess we have to remember that back then there weren’t many Learning Technologists to go round and so it wasn’t so easy to find the right people to get involved.
We did forget to cover a few things in the chat with Laura.
We forgot how many elephants were involved in UK LOM Core.
We forgot “that would be an implementation issue”.
But my main regret is that we didn’t get to talk about #EduProg, which came about a few years later (the genesis story is on Lorna’s blog) as an analysis of a trend in Ed Tech that contrasted with the do-it-yourself-and-learn approach of EduPunk. EduProg was exemplified in many of the standards which were either “long winded and self-indulgent” or “virtuoso boundary pushing redefining forms and developing new techniques”, depending on your point of view. But there was talent there — many of the people behind EduProg were classically trained computer scientists. And it could be exciting. I for one will never forget Scott plunging a dagger into the keyboard to hold down the shift key while he ran arpeggios along the angle brackets. I hear it’s still big in Germany.
Thank you to Martin, Laura, Clint, Lorna and everyone who made it the reading & podcast possible.
Added 5 Jan: here’s Lorna’s reflections on this recording.
[Feature image for this post, X-Ray Specs by @visualthinkery, is licenced under CC-BY-SA]
Mapping learning resources to curricula in RDF
Some personal reflections on relating educational content to curriculum frameworks prompted by some conversation about the Oak National Academy (a broad curriculum of online material available to schools, based on the English national curriculum), and OEH-Linked-Frameworks (an RDF tool for visualizing German educational frameworks). It draws heavily on the BBC curriculum ontology (by Zoe Rose, I think). I’m thinking about these with respect to work I have been involved in such as K12-OCX and LRMI.
If you want to know why you would do this, you might want to skip ahead and read the “so what?” section first. But in brief: representing curriculum frameworks in a standard, machine-readable way, and mapping curriculum materials to that, would help when sharing learning resources.
The confusing concepts of credentials and competences
Back in July and August the Talent Marketplace Signaling W3C Community Group made good progress on how to relate JobPostings to Educational and Occupational Credentials (qualifications, if you prefer) and Compentences. These seem to me to be central concepts for linking between the domain of training, education and learning and the domain of talent sourcing, employment and career progression; a common understanding of them would be key to people from one domain understanding signals from the other. I posted a sketch of how I saw these working,.. and that provoked a lot of discussion, some of which led me to evaluate what leads to misunderstandings when trying to discuss such concepts.
#OER18 Open to all
I spent the last couple of days in Bristol, a city I know well: I went to University there (undergrad, PhD and post doc in physics and materials science), my wife’s parents live there. I’ll be honest, meeting my friends from the OER community in a city of which I am very fond was part of what attracted me to this conference. The theme of the conference, “open to all,” with discussions about OER in the context of colonialism, was less attractive to me. Look at the rest of this blog, you’ll see I am much more comfortable talking about technical specifications, APIs and infrastructure to support the creation and dissemination of OER. Continue reading
Wikidata driven timeline
I have been to a couple of wikidata workshops recently, both involving Ewan McAndrew; between which I read Christine de Pizan‘s Book of the City of Ladies(*). Christine de Pizan is described as one of the first women in Europe to earn her living as a writer, which made me wonder what other female writers were around at that time (e.g. Julian of Norwich and, err…). So, at the second of these workshops, I took advantage of Ewan’s expertise, and the additional bonus of Navino Evans cofounder of Histropedia also being there, to create a timeline of medieval European female writers. (By the way, it’s interesting to compare this to Asian female writers–I was interested in Christina de Pizan and wanted to see how she fitted in with others who might have influenced her or attitudes to her, and so didn’t think that Chinese and Japanese writers fitted into the same timeline.)
Thoughts on Support for Technology Enhanced Learning in HE
I was asked to put forward my thoughts on how I thought the use of technology to enhance teaching and learning should be supported where I work. I work in a UK University that has campuses overseas, and which is organised into Schools (Computer Science is in a School with Maths, to form one of the smaller schools). This was my first round brain dump on the matter. It looks like something might come of it, so I’m posting it here asking for comments. Continue reading
Flying cars, digital literacy and the zone of possibility
Where’s my flying car? I was promised one in countless SF films from Metropolis through to Fifth Element. Well, they exist. Thirty seconds on the search engine of your choice will find you a dozen of so working prototypes (here’s a YouTube video with five).
They have existed for some time. Come to think about it, the driving around on the road bit isn’t really the point. I mean, why would you drive when you could fly. I guess a small helicopter and somewhere to park would do.
So it’s not lack of technology that’s stopping me from flying to work. What’s more of an issue (apart from cost and environmental damage) is that flying is difficult. The slightest problem like an engine stall or bump with another vehicle tends to be fatal. So the reason I don’t fly to work is largely down to me not having learnt how to fly. Continue reading
Three resources about gender bias
These are three resources that look like they might be useful in understanding and avoiding gender bias. They caught my attention because I cover some cognitive biases in the Critical Thinking course I teach. I also cover the advantages of having diverse teams working on problems (the latter based on discussion of How Diversity Makes Us Smarter in SciAm). Finally, like any responsible teacher in information systems & computer science I am keen to see more women in my classes.
Iris Bohnet on BBC Radio 4 Today programme 3 January. If you have access via a UK education institution with an ERA licence you can listen to the clip via the BUFVC Box of Broadcasts. Otherwise here’s a quick summary. Bohnet stresses that much gender bias is unconscious, individuals may not be aware that they act in biased ways. Awareness of the issue and diversity training is not enough on its own to ensure fairness. She stresses that organisational practise and procedures are the easiest effective way to remove bias. One example she quotes is that to recruit more male teachers job adverts should not “use adjectives that in our minds stereotypically are associated with women such as compassionate, warm, supportive, caring.” This is not because teachers should not have these attributes or that men cannot be any of these, but because research shows[*] that these attributes are associated with women and may subconsciously deter male applicants.
[*I don’t like my critical thinking students saying broad and vague things like ‘research shows that…’. It’s ok for 3 minute slot on a breakfast news show but I’ll have to do better. I hope the details are somewhere in Iris Bohnet, (2016). What Works: Gender Equality by Design]
This raised a couple of questions in my mind. If gender bias is unconscious, how do you know you do it? And, what can you do about it? That reminded me of two other things I had seen on bias over the last year.
An Implicit Association Test (IAT) on Gender-Career associations, which I took a while back. It’s a clever little test based on how quickly you can classify names and career attributes. You can read more information about them on the Project Implicit website or try the same test that I did (after a few disclaimers and some other information gathering, it’s currently the first one on their list).
A gender bias calculator for recommendation letters based on the words that might be associated with stereotypically male or female attributes. I came across this via Athene Donald’s blog post Do You Want to be Described as Hard Working? which describes the issue of subconscious bias in letters of reference. I guess this is the flip side of the job advert example given by Bohnet. There is lots of other useful and actionable advice in that blog post, so if you haven’t read it yet do so now.
XKCD or OER for critical thinking
I teach half a course on Critical Thinking to 3rd year Information Systems students. A colleague takes the first half which covers statistics. I cover how science works including the scientific method, experimental design, how to read a research papers, how to spot dodgy media reports of science and pseudoscience, and reproducibility in science; how to argue, which is mostly how to spot logical fallacies; and a little on cognitive development. One the better things about teaching on this course is that a lot of it is covered by xkcd, and that xkcd is CC licensed. Open Education Resources can be fun.
how scientists think
hypothesis testing
Blind trials
Interpreting statistics
p hacking
Confounding variables
Extrapolation
Confirmation bias in information seeking
undistributed middle
post hoc ergo propter hoc
Or correlation =/= causation.
Bandwagon Fallacy…
…and fallacy fallacy
Diversity and inclusion
Licence: All xkcd are by Randall Munroe and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License. This means you’re free to copy and share these comics (but not to sell them). More details.
[Updated 15/11/2016 to add full source & licence info and some links, which I really ought to have known better than to forget.]