A quick and overdue update on the Labour Market Information for All project, which we are developing together with Raycom, the University of Warwick and Rewired State and  is sponsored by the UK Commission for Employment and Skills (UKCES).

LMI for All will provide an online data portal bringing together existing sources of labour market information (LMI) that can inform people’s decisions about their careers.  The database will contain robust LMI from national surveys and data sources providing a common and consistent baseline to use alongside less formal sources of intelligence. Due for release at the end of May 2013, access to the database will be through an open API. the results of queries can then be embedded by developers in their own web sites of apps. We will also provide a code library to assist developers.

The project builds on the commitment by the UK government to open data. despite this, it is not simple. As the Open Data White Paper (HM Government, 2012)highlights,  data gathered by the public sector is not always readily accessible. Quality of the data, intermittent publication and a lack of common standards are also barriers. A commitment is given to change the culture of organisations, to bring about change: ‘This must change and one of the barriers to change is cultural’ (p. 18).

We have talked to a considerable number of data providers including government bodies. It is striking that all have been cooperative and wishing to help us in providing access to data. However, the devil is in the detail.

Much of the data publicly collected, is done so on the condition that is is non disclosive e.e. that it is impossible to find out who submitted that data. And of course the lower the level of aggregation, the easier it is to identify where the data is coming from. And the more the data is linked, the more risk there s of disclosure.

We have developed ways of getting round this using both statistical methods (e.g. estimation) and technical approaches (data aggregation). But it remains a lot of work preparing the data for uploading to our database. And I guess that level of work will discourage others from utilising the potential of open data. It may explain why, transport excluded, their remain limited applications built on the open data movement in the UK.

It may suggest that the model we are working on, of a publicly funded project providing access to data, and then providing tools to build applications on top of that data, could provide a model for providing access to public data.

In the meantime if you are interested in using our API and developing your own applications for careers guidance and support, please get in touch.

 

The European Conference on Educational Research (ECER) starts next Tuesday in Cadiz in Spain. Some 2000 delegates will take part, organised through 28 networks covering different areas and themes in education.

Not able to attend yourself? Pontydysgu are working with EERA, who run the conference, to provide alive stream of the four keynote speeches. We will be also broadcasting three live half hour internet radio programmes from the conference. The details are below (all times are Central European summer Time).

The live video can be accessed through the conference web site (full details will be on the site in the next 48 hours).

The radio programmes can be accessed at http://uk2.internet-radio.com:31022/live.m3u. Click on the link and the stream will open in your MP3 player of choice (e.g. iTunes).

Wednesday 19 September
14:00 – 15:00 Keynote 1 – What is ‘the Human’ about the Humanities today?  – Rosi Braidotti
14:00 – 15:00 Keynote 2  - Two different realms. Politics and Educational Knowledge in European history – Marcelo Caruso

Thursday 20 September

10:30 – 11:00 Conference radio programme 1
14:00 – 15:00 Keynote 3 – What is Wrong with the What-Went-Right Approach in Educational Policy? – Gita Steiner-Khamsi
14:00 – 15:00 Keynote 4 – Constitution, Education and Research – Fuensanta Hernandez Pina

Friday 21 September
10:30 – 11:00 Conference radio programme 2
15:00 – 15:30 Conference radio programme 3

 

Mendeley’s Open API Approach Is On Course To Disrupt Academic Publishing, according to TechCrunch. They say: “Mendeley’s ecosystem has now produced over 240 research apps drawing on open data from its database under a Creative Commons license. Those generate more than 100 million API calls to Mendeley’s database per month….The information fueling this ecosystem is being produced by the scientific community itself, putting a social layer over each document and producing anonymised real-time information about the academic status, field of research, current interests, location of, and keywords generated by its readers. The applications can cover research collaboration, measurement, visualisation, semantic markup, and discovery…

Mendeley’s tools now touch about 1.9 million researchers, pooling 65 million documents and claims to cover 97.2% to 99.5% of all research articles published. By contrast commercial databases by Thomson Reuters and Elsevier contain 49 million and 47 million unique documents, respectively.”

Design matters! And one of the problems with educational technology is that developers ignore design. Interfaces are unimportant, they say. It can be sorted after we get the coding debugged. they do not generally understand when users complain that the Alpha is hard to navigate and is not attractive.

I know because I have been there.  We try our best but none of us in Pontydysgu are specialist graphic designers. One of the problems is that project funding rarely (if ever) includes a budget for graphic design. Life is getting easier because of the more advanced templates for platforms like WordPress but even these need customisation. And lets face it, 90 per cent of Moodle sites look soooo boring.

So it is refreshing when a well designed educational technology web site comes out. So congratulations to Jisc TechDis who have just released a new Toolbox.

The technology section of the site explains:

The word technology is a simple way of describing tools to help us do things. These tools can be computers or tablets, but could just as easily be a mobile phone or even an ebook reader.

All types of technology can be changed and adapted to make them just right for you. This could be changing the size of the font on a screen or having the text read out loud. You may prefer to plan your work using mind mapping software or to record your thoughts as a video. Whatever you choose you can set it up in the way which is the best for you.

This section contains a large number of ideas to help you adapt the technology you use everyday. It covers both Windows and Mac computers as well as using mobile devices and tablets.

And it looks fantastic.

I have just discovered this book – published in 2010 and available as a free PDF download.

Accessible Elements informs science educators about current practices in online and distance education: distance-delivered methods for laboratory coursework, the requisite administrative and institutional aspects of online and distance teaching, and the relevant educational theory.

Delivery of university-level courses through online and distance education is a method of providing equal access to students seeking post-secondary education. Distance delivery offers practical alternatives to traditional on-campus education for students limited by barriers such as classroom scheduling, physical location, finances, or job and family commitments. The growing recognition and acceptance of distance education, coupled with the rapidly increasing demand for accessibility and flexible delivery of courses, has made distance education a viable and popular option for many people to meet their science educational goals.

The announcement that the Wellcome Trust has teamed up with the Max Planck Society in Germany and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in the US to set up a new open-access journal called eLife probably marks the turning point in the campaign for open access publishing. Yet what is surprising is how resilient the traditional journal publishing model has been, and how long it is taking to change it.

It is relatively simple to set up an open access web journal. And most open access journals share with traditional journals the same system of peer reviewing. Despite publishers claims that they need to charge relatively high costs for journals due to the support they provide for editing and reviewing, I am dubious. I have reviewed many submissions for both closed and open access publications and the differences seem to lie more in the difference of the effort, commitment and outlook of individual editors, rather than the support of the publishers.

Where the traditional publishers do spend, I suspect, is on marketing. Yet a series of reports have suggested that papers published in open access journals get more readers than those in traditional subscription based print journals. In terms of getting readers and feedback, I have tended to find web self publishing the most effective!

So why has is taken so long for open access journals to emerge? Firstly, I suspect is the deep adherence of educational culture and institutions to print media. The web is simply seen as second best. And most importantly, is the various academic rating lists for journals, which vastly favour the closed journals promoted by the academic publishers. Many of my friends would far prefer to publish in open access journals but feel forced to submit to educational publishers as they see it important for their future careers.

That is why the Welcome Trust announcement is so important. The publication of a range of prestigious open access journal is likely to open up the floodgates.

Yet the time it has taken for this to happen show the challenges for the wider open education movement.

For the past 3 1/2 years I have been looking at the impact the web has had on the practices of Academics who are highly engaged in virtual environments. This inevitably takes me to explore the social side of their … Continue reading →

As Geoff Cain says, “I was at the Open Education 2011 conference this week and David Wiley had the good sense to invite Jim Groom in to rattle cages and shake the chains. I have been reading his stuff for sometime. You can follow him on twitter here and his blog is always worth reading, but it is really a whole other experience to meet him in person. As a distance education director, I almost never say that. He is the favorite exuberant uncle who occasionally breaks the furniture. His mind is clear but his soul is mad. and here he is at his Dionysian best.”

The sound quality is sometimes a bit ropey but don’t let that put you off. Watch it all!

This is interesting stuff from Nancy White taken from a presentation on the #Change11 Massive Open Online Course. The Contents are well worth a watch. But why I have linked to it is the process. I guess this presentation was using Elluminate. And most presenters in Elluminate – or for that matter other online conferencing applications – struggle to involve participants. Nancy has no such problems!

The latest in our occasional series of blogs about data.

Although in education much of the emphasis has been on viualising data as an aid to teaching and learning, or to explore network effects, the use of data can be a useful research tool. This simple visualisation below, posted by Mike Herrity on twitpic, shows the depth and length of the present economic recession and also, I suggest, the total failure of political and economic policies to deal with the recession.

Th second visualisation also deals with politics and economics. It comes from research by the Guardian Data Blog, following the demands of the #OccupytheCity movement in London for the democratisation of the City of London. The City of London is run as a state within a state at the moment, with its own police force and governance, and with companies allowed multiple votes in elections, dependent of the number of employees. Unsurprisingly the finances of the City of London are less than transparent. however, the Guardian did mange to obtain some details about expenditure and produced the following visualisation using the free IBM ManyEyes tools.

Mike Herrity shared his picture without comment. The Guardian appealed for readers help in further investigating the city of London finances. essentially both visualisations can form part of a distributed and loosely coupled research effort, with materials openly published being able to be reused and repurposed in education and in research.