Archive for the ‘news bites’ Category

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Open Badges

July 23rd, 2013 by Graham Attwell

A new nationwide Open Badges initiative has been launched by DigitalMe in the UK. Badge the UK has been developed to help organisations and businesses recognise young people’s skills and achievements online.

Supported by the Nominet Trust, the Badge the UK initiative is designed to support young people in successfully making the transition between schools and employment using Mozilla Open Badges as a new way to capture and share skills across the web.

At the recent launch event at Mozilla’s London HQ Lord Knight emphasised the “disruptive potential” of Open Badges within the current Education system. At a time of record levels of skills shortages and unemployment amongst young people all speakers stressed need for a new way to encourage and recognise learning which lead to further training and ultimately employment opportunities. Badge the UK is designed to help organisations and businesses see the value in using Mozilla Open Badges as a new way to recognise skills and achievement and and connect them to real world training and employment opportunities.

You can find more information on the DigitalMe web site.

Posted in Competence Development, digital badges, Informal learning, news bites | Comments Off on Open Badges

Twitter feed

June 27th, 2013 by Graham Attwell

Apologies for the broken Twitter feeds on this page. It seems Twitter have once more changed their APi, breaking our WordPress plug-in. It isn’t the first time and we will have to find another work around. Super tech, Dirk is on the case and we hope normal service will be resumed soon.

Posted in news bites | Comments Off on Twitter feed

MOOCs and beyond

May 14th, 2013 by Graham Attwell

A special issue of the online journal eLearning Papers has been released entitled MOOCs and beyond. Editors Yishay Mor and Tapio Koshkinen say the issue brings together in-depth research and examples from the field to generate debate within this emerging research area.

They continue: “Many of us seem to believe that MOOCs are finally delivering some of the technology-enabled change in education that we have been waiting nearly two decades for.

This issue aims to shed light on the way MOOCs affect education institutions and learners. Which teaching and learning strategies can be used to improve the MOOC learning experience? How do MOOCs fit into today’s pedagogical landscape; and could they provide a viable model for developing countries?

We must also look closely at their potential impact on education structures. With the expansion of xMOOC platforms connected to different university networks—like Coursera, Udacity, edX, or the newly launched European Futurelearn—a central question is: what is their role in the education system and especially in higher education?”

Posted in MOOCs, news bites, Pedagogy, teaching and learning, TEL | Comments Off on MOOCs and beyond

The cost of austerity and privatisation

April 22nd, 2013 by Graham Attwell

There is growing concern over the consequences of the English (Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have different policies) government’s cutbacks and privatisation of  careers guidance for young people. The International Centre for Guidance Studies reports on a discussion paper called ‘Cost to the Economy of Government Policy on Career Guidance: A Business Case for Funding and Strengthening Career Guidance in Schools‘ from Lizzie Taylor who is an Careers England Affiliate Member. “The report claims that the economic consequence of current government policy on career education is an escalating annual cost to young people in reduced and lost earnings, reaching £676m p.a. in 2018 before dropping back slightly to £665 m p.a.2022. The total cost in reduced and lost earnings to young people in the period 2013 to 2022 is estimated as £3.2bn.”

Posted in Career Guidance, careers, news bites, policy, politics | Comments Off on The cost of austerity and privatisation

Open Education 2030

April 16th, 2013 by Graham Attwell

The Institute for Prospective Technological Studies (IPTS) –part of the Joint Research Center of the European commission –  is calling upon experts and practitioners to come up with visionary papers and imaginative scenarios on how Open Education in 2030 in Europe might look with a major focus on Open Educational Resources and Practices, in different education sectors.

The foresight scenarios submitted can be normative or descriptive, idealistic or provocative, critical or imaginary, reflective or polemic, imaginative or concrete, comprehensive or selective, general or specific. They should be both inspiring and scientifically sound.

Submissions are free to choose any angle, subject, approach, but they say the future vision and/or scenario should address the key question of how Open Education in 2030 in Europe might look, and include the role of OER.

More details from the EU Europa website.

Posted in news bites, Open Educational Resources, Open Learning | Comments Off on Open Education 2030

PLE Conference Update

March 26th, 2013 by Graham Attwell

I wasn’t overoptimistic about the Personal Learning Environments Conference this year. Discussions about PLEs have been subsumed in the hype over MOOCs. And most conferences are struggling with the ongoing recession. But I am delighted that we have received 59 submissions including a number of great proposals for interactive workshops.

The PLE Conference takes place on 10 and 12 July in Berlin.

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Open Educational Resources in Europe

March 20th, 2013 by Graham Attwell

The Open Educational Resources in Europe (OEREU) project is providing a critical assessment of OER initiatives and practices in Europe, developing sector-specific foresight scenarios to illustrate the benefits, carrying out a representative survey on the use of OER, identifying challenges across all sectors and, jointly with stakeholders, developing, discussing and proposing recommendations for the further development and mainstreaming of OER in Europe.

OER, says the project website, refers to “the open provision of educational resources, enabled by ICT, for consultation, use and adaptation by a community of users for non-commercial purposes” (UNESCO, 2002). It is important to note that those resources are not limited to content, but comprise also “the creation of open source software, development tools and the development of standards and licensing tools” (OLCOS, 2007). It is acknowledged by policymakers and researchers that a fundamental transformation of education and learning throughout Europe is needed to address the new skills and competences required if Europe is to remain competitive, overcome the current economic crisis, grasp new opportunities and insure social justice and cohesion.

Posted in news bites, Open Educational Resources | Comments Off on Open Educational Resources in Europe

Horizon Report – 2013

February 4th, 2013 by Graham Attwell

The New Media Consortium (NMC) and EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) have released the NMC Horizon Report0> 2013 Higher Education Edition. This tenth edition describes annual findings from the NMC Horizon Project, a decade-long research project designed to identify and describe emerging technologies likely to have an impact on learning, teaching, and creative inquiry in education. Six emerging technologies are identified across three adoption horizons over the next one to five years, as well as key trends and challenges expected to continue over the same period, giving campus leaders and practitioners a valuable guide for strategic technology planning.

This year’s NMC Horizon Report identifies massively open online courses (MOOCs) and tablet computing as technologies expected to enter mainstream use in the first horizon of one year or less. Games and gamification and learning analytics are seen in the second horizon of two to three years; 3D printing and wearable technology are seen emerging in the third horizon of four to five years.

Download the report at go.nmc.org/2013-hied.

Posted in e-learning 2.0, games, mobile learning, MOOCs, news bites | Comments Off on Horizon Report – 2013

Congratulations to Cris

December 6th, 2012 by Graham Attwell

Congratulations from all of us at Pontydysgu to our friend and colleague Cristina Costa, on successfully defending her doctoral dissertation.

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Particpatory Workshops

November 27th, 2012 by Graham Attwell

The UK Jisc Infonet produce a great range of useful web resources. The latest is an ‘infokit’ on participatory workshops.  “At its most basic”, they say “a participatory workshop is an organised event which brings a group of people together to seek their opinions, extract their knowledge and to solve problems in a collaborative and creative environment.”

Posted in news bites | Comments Off on Particpatory Workshops

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    News Bites

    Cyborg patented?

    Forbes reports that Microsoft has obtained a patent for a “conversational chatbot of a specific person” created from images, recordings, participation in social networks, emails, letters, etc., coupled with the possible generation of a 2D or 3D model of the person.

    Racial bias in algorithms

    From the UK Open Data Institute’s Week in Data newsletter

    This week, Twitter apologised for racial bias within its image-cropping algorithm. The feature is designed to automatically crop images to highlight focal points – including faces. But, Twitter users discovered that, in practice, white faces were focused on, and black faces were cropped out. And, Twitter isn’t the only platform struggling with its algorithm – YouTube has also announced plans to bring back higher levels of human moderation for removing content, after its AI-centred approach resulted in over-censorship, with videos being removed at far higher rates than with human moderators.

    Gap between rich and poor university students widest for 12 years

    Via The Canary.

    The gap between poor students and their more affluent peers attending university has widened to its largest point for 12 years, according to data published by the Department for Education (DfE).

    Better-off pupils are significantly more likely to go to university than their more disadvantaged peers. And the gap between the two groups – 18.8 percentage points – is the widest it’s been since 2006/07.

    The latest statistics show that 26.3% of pupils eligible for FSMs went on to university in 2018/19, compared with 45.1% of those who did not receive free meals. Only 12.7% of white British males who were eligible for FSMs went to university by the age of 19. The progression rate has fallen slightly for the first time since 2011/12, according to the DfE analysis.

    Quality Training

    From Raconteur. A recent report by global learning consultancy Kineo examined the learning intentions of 8,000 employees across 13 different industries. It found a huge gap between the quality of training offered and the needs of employees. Of those surveyed, 85 per cent said they , with only 16 per cent of employees finding the learning programmes offered by their employers effective.

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