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PedR blogs

Henning Wehn @CurveLeicester

By noreply@blogger.com (AJC) from Science of the Invisible. Published on Feb 12, 2012.

Henning Wehn @ the Curve last night.
Funny.
Sample joke:

1st Man: Is there any football on tonight?
2nd Man: Austria-Hungary.
1st man: Who are they playing?

(HW then spends 5 minutes deconstructing the joke, which is the joke)

More reflections on open peer review

By noreply@blogger.com (AJC) from Science of the Invisible. Published on Feb 10, 2012.

Earlier this week I published the first product of my open peer review experiment, Student feedback using Google+. So far (after 3 days) the manuscript has been downloaded 74 times (latest figures here). This post is to follow up on my earlier reflection and tidy up a few loose ends concerning my experience of the open peer review process.

Given that this was the first time I undertook the process, in addition to posting the manuscript here for review, I also emailed a number of people I considered qualified to review it and pointed out that the process was under way. Those invitations gave rise to some discussions about "inviting friends to review your work" and consideration of whether this was valid peer review or not. In my opinion it was - open is open to all, friends and foes. However, considering the possible introduction of bias into the review process, when I repeat it in future (damn, given the game away now ;-) I will not issue invitations, only post the manuscript here and publicize the post through the normal channels. If that means the numbers of reviewers is lower, I will extend the review period until an acceptable number of reviewers have commented.

I intended to publish the final version a week or more ago, giving an interval from publishing the preprint to publication of the finished product of less than 21 days. However, personal circumstances and my current teaching load extended this to 23 days, a highly acceptable result in comparison to commercial publishers. Although I consider myself fortunate that most of the reviewers concurred on desirable additions, incorporating the comments of 7 referees is definitely hard work - assuming you attract enough reviews, open peer review is definitely not an easy ride! As hoped for, incorporation of the reviewers comments improved the quality of the publication considerably.

The final published version of this manuscript contain no acknowledgements - this work was a solo effort with no external funding. Since I was not sure about the etiquette of thanking reviewers I did not include them. I hope no-one is offended by that.

The big question for me is, is this model scalable? If I routinely asked for reviews in this way, would fatigue set in, or would my ‘mates’ become an echo chamber? It is too soon to say, but my concern is that the process I have piloted may not be sustainable because the reviewer ecosystem may not be able to circumvent the Tragedy of the Commons. The only way to tell is further experimentation. Watch this space.


Related posts:

• It's academic publishing Jim, but not as we know it
• Reflections on open peer review

Student feedback using Google+

By noreply@blogger.com (AJC) from Science of the Invisible. Published on Feb 09, 2012.

Whether or not you take a constructivist view of education, feedback on performance is inevitably seen as a crucial component of the process. However, experience shows that students (and academic staff) often struggle with feedback, which all too often fails to translate into feed-forward actions leading to educational gains. Problems get worse as student cohort sizes increase. By building on the well-established principle of separating marks from feedback and by using a social network approach to amplify peer discussion of assessed tasks, this paper describes an efficient system for interactive student feedback. Although the majority of students remain passive recipients in this system, they are still exposed to deeper reflection on assessed tasks than in traditional one-to-one feedback processes.

Cann, A.J. (2012) An efficient and effective system for interactive student feedback using Google+ to enhance an institutional virtual learning environment. Leicester Research Archive. http://hdl.handle.net/2381/10087


Background information: Open peer review

My thanks to all who participated in the open peer review process - more thoughts to follow soon.

It's academic publishing Jim, but not as we know it

By noreply@blogger.com (AJC) from Science of the Invisible. Published on Feb 08, 2012.

I have a manuscript currently in press with an academic journal which describes work that we performed three years ago. In part, the fault for the delay in publication lies at my door, but the original version of the manuscript now in press was written 18 months ago and first submitted for publication over a year ago. There followed a catalog of errors, some due to me, others due to editors and journals. The current incarnation of the paper was submitted to the journal where it will appear shortly six months ago. It is still not published. I should feel lucky - others have had worse experiences than this:

"Because of the work described in the paper had already been talked about in public forums and included in grant applications, and because publication was important for moving forward with our grant applications, job applications and other papers, we felt we could not spend another year in the review process. The very essence of the scientific process is to challenge paradigms and share the experimental details with other scientists who can then reproduce or refute the findings. Publication is key for this process. We needed to publish."

I have recently been depositing my papers in our institutional repository (How to fix academic publishing again already), but now it's time to move up to the next level: post publication peer review.

I invite reviews of the following original manuscript:


An efficient and effective system for interactive student feedback using Google+ to enhance an institutional virtual learning environment (PDF download via Dropbox) Update: Final version now published
Abstract:
Whether or not you take a constructivist view of education, feedback on performance is inevitably seen as a crucial component of the process. However, experience shows that students (and academic staff) often struggle with feedback, which all too often fails to translate into feed-forward actions leading to educational gains. Problems get worse as student cohort sizes increase. By building on the well-established principle of separating marks from feedback and by using a social network approach to amplify peer discussion of assessed tasks, this paper describes an efficient system for interactive student feedback. Although the majority of students remain passive recipients in this system, they are still exposed to deeper reflection on assessed tasks than in traditional one-to-one feedback processes.

How it works:

1. Please read the manuscript then leave your review as a comment on this blog post. Please use page and paragraph numbers to refer to specific sections of the manuscript.
2. Reviews may be named or anonymous as you wish.
3. To expedite the publication process, this manuscript will be open for review for 14 days from today.
4. Following the review period, all substantive reviews will be taken into account and the manuscript revised accordingly. (My best estimate from blog stats is that between 1,000 - 2,000 unique visitors view the content on this site. If 1% of visitors take the trouble to leave a substantive review, that's a much more rigorous review process than any academic journal I am aware of.)
5. If the majority view is generally positive, the revised manuscript (including reviews and author responses) will be published on the Leicester Research Archive.

I think this is as efficient and transparent as I am able to make the academic publishing process, but if you have any comments or suggestions, I welcome them. Most of all, I would welcome your review of the manuscript as a comment here. I cannot offer you any payment or other inducement beyond the knowledge that you will be helping to fix the broken model of academic publishing. And of course, given the opportunity, I will be happy to reciprocate your time in reviewing any papers I feel competent to comment on should you wish to participate in a similar process.



Notes:
Other options considered for sharing the provisional PDF were Slideshare and Google Docs. These were rejected due to problems with PDFs being reformatted and Dropbox selected as the best general purpose solution, but potentially any site which allows free PDF downloads would be suitable. if this blog had been hosted on Wordpress, that would have been a suitable choice, but Blogger does not allow PDF uploads.

Reflections on open peer review

By noreply@blogger.com (AJC) from Science of the Invisible. Published on Feb 08, 2012.

Last week I put up a manuscript for open peer review (It's academic publishing Jim, but not as we know it). In that post, I explained my reasons for doing this rather than going down the conventional (journal) academic publishing route. The review process, which I arbitrarily set at 14 days, is still running, but in this post I want to discuss my reflections on the process to date.

As I expected, reviews started to come in rapidly, 7 within the first 48 hours, then stopped equally rapidly. Internet attention is transitory, but in part this is a reflection of the fact that I drew the blog post to the attention of a number of people by email, inviting reviews. However, this pattern is typical for Internet content - a fast decay phase followed by a longer, slower tail (The Spread of Scientific Information: Insights from the Web Usage Statistics in PLoS Article-Level Metrics. (2011) PLoS ONE 6(5): e19917). There were no "spam" comments, which I had anticipated, and even though I had attempted to make clear in the post that anonymous reviews were entirely acceptable, all reviewers chose to identify themselves. Ironically, this is a concern, as while I suspect that reviewers consider named reviews to be somehow more "valid", I am worried that potential negative reviews are simply not posted, rather than being contributed anonymously. Interestingly, relatively few colleagues from my own institution, who I had alerted by email, contributed a review. In part this may be because they were wary of possible conflict of interests. When I repeat this process in future, I will simply post the article and reviewing guidelines online, without individual email notifications. Another concern for the future is the possibility that familiarity may breed indifference, limiting the number of reviews received.

I am grateful to Martin Weller for his additional comment on the review process:

"I tried to put my official reviewer hat on and review it as if I was doing a standard (blind) peer review. It may be that this is an inappropriate transfer of process, and instead I should adopt a different style for open, informal review. But we fall back on what we know. My review may be a bit harsh, but I was conscious that 'asking your mates to review' isn't really comparable to anonymous peer review at all. I might be far less likely to criticise a friend. My colleague Gill Kirkup maintains that anonymity in the peer review process is essential because it protects the reviewer, particularly a young reviewer who is reviewing a paper by someone eminent in the field. Of course, it also allows people to be ruder than they would be otherwise, and often to say incorrect judgements because there is no debate or come back.
So this may be a good way to get feedback on a paper, but would it equate to peer review? I don't think so, but then maybe it's a sufficient filter to allow publication and then post-review. It's also quite a brave thing to do and I suspect many colleagues might be reluctant to go this route. If you write a crap paper that gets rejected by a journal, only a handful of people have seen it - if you do it this way, potentially hundreds will."

A number of people commented on various forums that I was "brave" to expose my work in this way. It doesn't feel brave to me, it feels liberating, although possibly foolish. Specifically, it feels far less brave than exposing my work to non-transparent peer review. Maybe I've just had a run of bad luck, with editors taking capricious cost-based decisions to refuse to even send my work out for review. Entering that lottery - now that's brave (or foolish). Accepting that my peers may tell me that my work is of little or no value (and I have no doubts about the honesty of people who responded, so I feel confident they would), the whole process feels right to me. If some papers are slammed, then I either work on them further or abandon the concepts they contain.

So will I repeat this exercise in future? Most definitely - I already have a manuscript in mind, although this one is perhaps more of a technical report than an investigation. Will this become my sole future publication channel? No, not because I do not believe in it, but there are circumstances (collaboration with junior colleagues for example) where the alleged kudos attaching to publication in conventional journals is important for their careers. Should you repeat my experiment. That's up to you, but if you feel your circumstances permit, I would encourage you to try it for yourself. As I commented on Frances Bell's blog, "... I am not suggesting the approach I have taken is the “best” solution, nor necessarily appropriate for everyone – I have already identified a number of flaws. I do suggest that it is an improvement on the current model of closed, and frequently capricious, peer review. Open is good. If we support open access, why not open peer review?".


Update: Storify capture of Twitter discussion:

Safer internet day #SID2012 : Can I apply lessons from undergraduate teaching to primary schools?

By jobadge from DrBadgr. Published on Feb 07, 2012.

Safer Internet Day 7 Feb 2012 Last week, a paper by Alan Cann, Neil Saunders and I, was published on our work using FriendFeed with first year undergraduates on a compulsory IT and numeracy skills course. The paper examines the networks that grew up amongst the students and how they communicated with each other and with the staff involved. One [...]

Beyond marks: new tools to visualise student engagement via social networks

By noreply@blogger.com (AJC) from Science of the Invisible. Published on Feb 06, 2012.

"Evidence shows that engaged students perform better academically than disinterested students. Measurement of engagement with education is difficult and imprecise, especially in large student cohorts. Traditional measurements such as summary statistics derived from assessment are crude secondary measures of engagement at best and do not provide much support for educators to work with students and curate engagement during teaching periods. We have used academic-related student contributions to a public social network as a proxy for engagement. Statistical summaries and novel data visualisation tools provide subtle and powerful insights into online student peer networks. Analysis of data collected shows that network visualisation can be an important curation tool for educators interested in cultivating student engagement."


Research in Learning Technology 2012, 20: 16283 doi: 10.3402/rlt.v20i0/16283

Getting used to G+

By jobadge from DrBadgr. Published on Feb 05, 2012.

I’ve been on Google Plus since whenever Alan sent me an invite and we were looking for Social Media networks to replace the ailing FriendFeed we had been using with students. I always think it is worth bagging a username, and I know that Alan usually needs someone to talk to on any new social media [...]

Children’s view on what makes a good teacher

By jobadge from DrBadgr. Published on Feb 03, 2012.

As a way of getting to know the children I am teaching a little better, I asked them today to tell me what made a good teacher. There were some interesting answers: 1. Know the subjects very well- the main subjects are, English, maths, history, science, topic 2. Be smiley 3. Be kind 4. Bond [...]

We don't even have a word for it

By noreply@blogger.com (AJC) from Science of the Invisible. Published on Feb 02, 2012.

We don't even have a word for it - "public-ness" - as opposed to privacy.

I never know quite what to make of Jeff Jarvis. And considering the publicity blitz around Public Parts I'm unsure whether to post a public review. But that's the point. Unlike Clay Shirky's books, which lay it all out for you, Jarvis's writing makes you work for the underlying conclusion.

Although I find Jarvis' style sometimes grates against the content, there is real value here - for example the chapters on the history of public discourse and the bibliography. The later chapters on ethics challenging knee jerk reactions to open-ness are also a must read if you have a significant online profile.

In spite of this, ultimately, I came away with the feeling that Public Parts is a book which asks the right questions but doesn't know the answers. Possibly because there is no answer, unless we each arrive at our own. Which is, I suppose, a recommendation to read it.

Rant for the Day

By noreply@blogger.com (AJC) from Science of the Invisible. Published on Jan 31, 2012.

Competencies not Literacies!

Measurable, deliverable, understandable.

Why are people trying to burden students with things they can't even define?

10 Reasons Why Google+ is Better Than Twitter

By noreply@blogger.com (AJC) from Science of the Invisible. Published on Jan 30, 2012.

1. Status text can be any length from 0 to 100,000 characters, enabling much richer interaction and detailed explanation.
2. URL sampling provides rich snippets inline enabling rapid decisions over attention worth.
3. Video and images displayed inline rather than as links.
4. Hangouts (or direct video posting) with text chat/Google Docs/YouTube integration - a full blown conferencing tool much more stable than Skype.
5. Circles and individual-targeted posts allow fine grained control of privacy.
6. Circles and individual-targeted posts allow fine grained control of publishing.
7. Google+ is a refinement of what has gone before, optimizing attention stream architecture.
8. Google+ pages are a useful way to separate online identities, e.g. professional from personal interests.
9. Hashtag searches highly filterable to eliminate noise, e.g. Public, from your Circles only, etc.
10. Google has bet the farm on Google+. It isn't going anywhere.
11. But my friends/family/colleagues don't use Google+ yet. They will do.

Reflections on TeachMeet for Special Educational Needs #TMSEN12

By jobadge from DrBadgr. Published on Jan 29, 2012.

Helping to organise a TeachMeet whilst trying to do a PGCE course is a bit bonkers, but then there is never a good time to anything in life, is there? Josie Fraser did the real work, and I was there to keep the publicity going, to nag her when she needed it  and co-host. I’ve [...]

Measuring stuff at #bathcr

By noreply@blogger.com (AJC) from Science of the Invisible. Published on Jan 27, 2012.

At #bathcr yesterday I preached the gospel of Heaphy's Law:

For a successful career
Find something to measure
And measure the f**k out of it.

Simple targets work best, for example, if you're measuring interactivity, count number of Twitter @ replies or followers. And definitely count the number of hits on your web properties originating from Twitter, Google+ or wherever. If you insist on having fancy tools, there are lots available, although I'm slightly dubious of the value of tools such as SocialBro, and outraged at the spurious influence claims made by Klout. So keep it simple and measure your impact by setting clear targets to aim for.

For more in the same vein, be sure to follow the live video stream from Martin Weller's keynote talk at #dr12vitae.

Promoting Your Research Using Social Media #bathcr

By noreply@blogger.com (AJC) from Science of the Invisible. Published on Jan 25, 2012.

Tomorrow I'm in Bath giving a workshop:

Aim: To help you understand how social media can support your research and which tools are the most appropriate for you to use.
Date: 26 Jan 2012
Time: 10:30 - 13:30
Location: University of Bath 1E 3.6
Speakers: Alan Cann, University of Leicester, with Jez Cope and Geraldine Jones, University of Bath.
Funded by the EPSRC Knowledge Transfer Account.
This workshop will show you how you can use social media to help your research and your career. Social tools have important implications for how researchers (and educators) communicate and collaborate. This session will provide you with information to make informed decisions about using social media and help you select from the vast range of tools available. Social media has downsides as well as upsides, but on balance there is real value for researchers, from information discovery, through dissemination of your research, to impact metrics.

The hashtag for the session is #bathcr. I don't know how many of the participants will be tweeting, but if you'd like to follow along and contribute between 10am and 1pm tomorrow, that would be great.

This is the introductory talk for the workshop:

Blogging, tweeting and being a #PGCE student

By jobadge from DrBadgr. Published on Jan 25, 2012.

This post forms part of a blogging carnival organised by Danny Nicholson. I haven’t taken part in a blog carnival, but I really liked the idea (and seems a good way to thank Danny for the inspiration I get from his whiteboard blog). I am a primary PGCE student. Before I started my transformation into a teacher, [...]

Still the same old iTunesU

By noreply@blogger.com (AJC) from Science of the Invisible. Published on Jan 23, 2012.

The fuss over Apple's launch of iBooks last week obscured what could have been much more important - the launch of the "new" version of iTunesU, together with accompanying free iPad/Phone/PodTouch app.

At first, I was excited by this, because it appeared that this was iVLE, aka VLE in the cloud. And the iPad app is very nice. But sadly, the app functionality is not replicated well in iTunes, thus cutting out students who do not own iPads, and all Windows users. iPhones/Pods are OK for listening to a couple of podcasts, but no-one in their right minds is going to attempt a full-blown statistics course on an iPhone. And the content on iTunesU is still as variable in quality as it ever was.

Presumably Apple could not see a revenue angle in iVLE. Oh, what might have been.

Google Teacher Academy UK #GTAUK application – how is this for starters?

By jobadge from DrBadgr. Published on Jan 22, 2012.

When I was making the decision to become a teacher, I started to follow some teachers on twitter. Several that inspired me went on to be the first UK Google Certified Teachers, and following their tweets during and after the event was amazing. It wasn’t necessarily the incredible amount of ground they seemed to cover in the [...]

Trip to Heath Primary School

By jobadge from DrBadgr. Published on Jan 21, 2012.

Doug aranged for us to visit Heath Primary School in Derbyshire on Friday 20 January. We were warmly welcomed to the school and shown around by two of their ICT Accreditation Team (two very able girls from year 4). We saw a wide range of technology being used through out the school: talk buttons in [...]

Trying to help

By noreply@blogger.com (AJC) from Science of the Invisible. Published on Jan 20, 2012.

In my module questionnaires our students say they want face to face sessions - but do they?  Very few students attend voluntary help sessions intended to supplement detailed notes online.  In the past I have tried "Office Hours" but still very few takers.  I put this down to the fact that our students are not familiar with the "Office Hours" culture.

So what is the way forward? How do I give the "personal touch" with >250 students? Any suggestions? (Google+ discussion)

Update: This post is somewhat relevant:
Enhancing Out-of-Class Communication: Students’ Top 10 Suggestions
Sigh, maybe I should just give up and encouyrage thenm to use email.  It's probably what they want :-(

The Digital Scholar @ #dr12vitae

By noreply@blogger.com (AJC) from Science of the Invisible. Published on Jan 20, 2012.

I'm delighted to say that Martin Weller will be giving the keynote address at The Digital Researcher conference next month (#dr12vitae). I've been preparing materials for my sessions and part of that involved generating this wordcloud of Martin's recent book, The Digital Scholar.

#dr12vitae is sold out, but the intention is to livestream parts of the meeting and certainly Martin's keynote talk, so follow the hashtag for details.

Oral versus written assessments

By Chris Willmott from Journal of the left-handed biochemist. Published on Jan 18, 2012.

The January 2012 meeting of the Bioscience Pedagogic Research group at the University of Leicester included a “journal club” discussion of a paper Oral versus written assessments: a test of student performance and attitudes by Mark Huxham and colleagues from Napier University, Edinburgh. The paper had recently been published online in advance of a paper [...]

Oral versus written assessments

By noreply@blogger.com (AJC) from Science of the Invisible. Published on Jan 18, 2012.

At our monthly PedR meeting yesterday we discussed the following paper:

Mark Huxham, Fiona Campbell, Jenny Westwood (2011) Oral versus written assessments: a test of student performance and attitudes. Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education 37(1): 125-136
Student performance in and attitudes towards oral and written assessments were compared using quantitative and qualitative methods. Two separate cohorts of students were examined. The first larger cohort of students (n=99) was randomly divided into ‘oral’ and ‘written’ groups, and the marks that they achieved in the same biology questions were compared. Students in the second smaller cohort (n=29) were all examined using both written and oral questions concerning both ‘scientific’ and ‘personal development’ topics. Both cohorts showed highly significant differences in the mean marks achieved, with better performance in the oral assessment. There was no evidence of particular groups of students being disadvantaged in the oral tests. These students and also an additional cohort were asked about their attitudes to the two different assessment approaches. Although they tended to be more nervous in the face of oral assessments, many students thought oral assessments were more useful than written assessments. An important theme involved the perceived authenticity or ‘professionalism’ of an oral examination. This study suggests that oral assessments may be more inclusive than written ones and that they can act as powerful tools in helping students establish a ‘professional identity’.


I enjoyed reading the paper and was happy to see oral assessment "winning out" over writing as the sole means of assessment. Nevertheless, I was disappointed not to see any accounting comparing time taken for oral and written tests - in reality, this is the factor likely to scupper any back to the future return to the Socratic method.
Our discussion at the PedR meeting pulled out a number of statistical errors and other possible confounding factors not discussed, but overall we agreed this is a good paper worthy of note. What a shame the authors did not subject the manuscript to open peer review to make it an even better paper.

SEN Tech: The Critical Agenda debate with Sal Cooke, John Galloway and Bev Evans new at SEN TeachMeet #tmsen12

By jobadge from DrBadgr. Published on Jan 17, 2012.

Our SEN themed TeachMeet follows the traditional format – practitioners sign up to come along, or ideally – to talk and demo practice that works, in 7 minute micro presentations or 2 minute nano presentations. These are short to encourage a wide range and diversity of contribution, to make sure as many people attending as [...]

The Digital Researcher #dr12vitae

By noreply@blogger.com (AJC) from Science of the Invisible. Published on Jan 17, 2012.

I'll be writing about The Digital Researcher over the next month:

Vitae in partnership with The British Library are running Digital Researcher 2012: an innovative, thought-provoking one day event to help researchers make the most of new technologies and social media tools in their research. Designed for both postgraduate researchers and research staff within any UK institution, this interactive event will be held at the British Library on Monday 20th February 2012, and will provide an opportunity for researchers to think about how they undertake research and to consider whether new technologies could improve their research.

Although this popular event is now full, there is a waiting list, and this year, we are looking to make the online event better than ever so that everyone can participate.

Possible tools and techniques for my ICT project @orunner

By jobadge from DrBadgr. Published on Jan 16, 2012.

Now that I know which school I will be going to on my second teaching placement, I’ve been thinking about what tools I might want to use with the year 4 class I’ll be teaching. I could use any of these to support the teaching I’m doing, the trick will be finding one that I [...]

Taking note: Notability, Evernote, Dropbox and Remember the Milk on iPad #pgce

By jobadge from DrBadgr. Published on Jan 16, 2012.

As I am trying to think about my second PGCE assignment, and what topic I will use for an action research project on my second teaching placement, the ideal displacement activity is blogging about my reading and note taking methods that I use Taking notes in class I use my iPad every day, I bought [...]

I suppose I should make a fuss

By noreply@blogger.com (AJC) from Science of the Invisible. Published on Jan 14, 2012.

not because I'm particularly proud of having 1000 followers on Google+, although I'm happy they are there, but because 1000 followers is a benchmark social networks tend to use to categorise users.

In any case. Google+ is where my attention is focused these days, at the expense of Twitter.

Using Blogs and New Media in Academic Practice

By noreply@blogger.com (AJC) from Science of the Invisible. Published on Jan 12, 2012.

"As an outreach vehicle, blogs with well-structured messages and delivery mediums reach beyond the uni-directional information provision typical of many scholarly communication efforts to connect with readers and compel them to look critically at sources of information; to search out more information; and, ultimately, to influence practices. The flexibility and ease of publishing a blog allows for greater engagement between researchers, stakeholders, and the public through rapid dissemination of commentary and analysis on research. The accessibility of new media, such as blogs, helps create a multi-way dialogue and exchange of ideas so as to complement traditional communication avenues used in research, teaching, learning, and extension work carried out at higher education institutions.
Recognition and reward frameworks used at higher education institutions to evaluate scholarly activities have been structured around traditional forms of academic publication. New media, such as blogging, provide new channels for conducting and disseminating scholarly work. We suggest that ample evidence can be provided for new media practice and products to be considered for promotion and tenure within an academic portfolio."


Douglas A. Powell, Casey J. Jacob and Benjamin J. Chapman (2011) Using Blogs and New Media in Academic Practice: Potential Roles in Research, Teaching, Learning, and Extension. Innovative Higher Education doi: 10.1007/s10755-011-9207-7

Governing the Commons

By noreply@blogger.com (AJC) from Science of the Invisible. Published on Jan 11, 2012.

I've been intending to read Elinor Olstrom's Governing the Commons since Michael Nielsen recommended it at Solo11, but I only got around to it over Christmas.
The work, for which Olstrom won the Nobel Prize, is about the allocation of "common-pool resources" (CPRs) mostly of a physical nature such as water or fishing rights and gives many examples of where solutions have been reached.

I was particularly interested in Olstrom's discussion of the "theory of the firm" (entrepreneurs) and the "theory of the state" (rulers), and how this relates to academics working in universities struggling with OER production and use. All I have to do now is read Hobbes Leviathan, something I had an inking I might need to do when all my university contemporaries had it on their shelves while I had biochemistry textbooks. Olstrom's solution to CPR allocation is to address three problems: supply, commitment, and mutual monitoring, giving us a framework for addressing OER issues. What is apparent from reading the many case studies analysed is the absence of heavy-handed institutional intervention in successful and stable CPR allocation.

Although Olstrom states that "in a highly competitive environment, those that do not search for and select ... rules that enhance net benefits will lose out to those who are successful in adopting better rules" the question remains in terms of OER adoption whether universities are competitive or are in fact a cartel.

Duncan Greenhill he's our man if he can't learn 'em no-one can

By noreply@blogger.com (AJC) from Science of the Invisible. Published on Jan 10, 2012.

It's a pleasure to welcome Duncan Greenhill as College Web Resources Officer (Twitter). I'm looking forward to having Duncan's input in supporting educational development in the School.

Welcome aboard.

Statistics Explained: An Introductory Guide for Life Scientists

By noreply@blogger.com (AJC) from Science of the Invisible. Published on Jan 09, 2012.

The recently published second edition of Steve McKillup's Statistics Explained: An Introductory Guide for Life Scientists is an excellent introductory textbook, theory based, nicely contextualized in life sciences. I'm adopting it for my R-based statistics module next term, where it will sit nicely alongside the practical aspects of using R.

Use of Weapons

By noreply@blogger.com (AJC) from Science of the Invisible. Published on Jan 02, 2012.

I finally got round to reading Use of Weapons, and it is better than Consider Phlebas. But it's not good enough.

The ideas are there but Banks doesn't know what to do with them, and the punning ship titles are still a distraction.

So my Banks experiment is over. Who's up next? More McDonald I think. Brasyl?

Marking (in)consistency – the elephant in the assessment room?

By Chris Willmott from Journal of the left-handed biochemist. Published on Dec 30, 2011.

In a thought-provoking article, available online ahead of publication in the February 2012 edition of Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education, Teresa McConlogue looks into the pedagogical benefits of peer assessment. Her paper But is it fair? Developing students’ understanding of grading complex written work through peer assessment focuses on work conducted with engineering students at [...]

Week off

By noreply@blogger.com (AJC) from Science of the Invisible. Published on Dec 29, 2011.

Took a week off the Internet thing, and it was good. I didn't miss anything important.

A quick glance over what went on when I was away confirmed that the noise is constant but the signal varies, so it's still all about filtering

Where's my "of 2011" filter?

Involving alumni in careers education

By Chris Willmott from Journal of the left-handed biochemist. Published on Dec 28, 2011.

The December 2011 edition of Bioscience Education included an account I wrote concerning our Careers After Biological Science (CABS) programme at the University of Leicester. The CABS series of careers talks was started in 2007. Since 2009 it has been supported and enhanced by the Bioscience careers blog which includes copies of the slides used [...]

An instrument to evaluate Assessment for Learning

By Chris Willmott from Journal of the left-handed biochemist. Published on Dec 28, 2011.

Assessment for Learning (AfL) has been a key notion in recent curriculum developments in both secondary and tertiary education (see this link for previous left-handed biochemist posts on AfL). The December 2011 edition of Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education featured a paper Does assessment for learning make a difference? The development of a questionnaire [...]

Personal Facebook Pages

By noreply@blogger.com (AJC) from Science of the Invisible. Published on Dec 20, 2011.

Yesterday Martin Weller wrote about How to undermine Facebook. I've got love-hate feelings about Facebook, and while all my referrer stats tell me I can't afford to abandon it, I can easily image a situation where I might want to move to an asymmetric relationship rather than the symmetrical "friend" relationship I currently have with a very select group.

The way I would do this is via my Facebook page.

Nice to have your exit strategy prepared.

The Costs of Not Being Resident

By noreply@blogger.com (AJC) from Science of the Invisible. Published on Dec 19, 2011.

One of the most influential pieces of work which has shaped my thinking over the past few years has been Dave White's ideas on Visitors and Residents. A while ago Dave expanded on his original idea in a post entitled The cost of Residency. In this post he makes some good points about the rapidly changing social network landscape, and then goes on to discuss the costs of residency:

Time is the non-negotiable cost to Residency and to maintaining fulfilling relationships of any form. The way this precious resource is spent, especially in the context of learning, needs to be better understood by those of us promoting the idea of digital literacy.

This is one of the most valid criticisms ("not enough time") that people raise in the face of social media advocacy, and this has been seized on in a number of discussions which took place in adjacent spaces around the post. While I accept the issue as valid, after consideration I am left with the uneasy feeling that the way the negative aspects of this post have been seized on neglects to provide adequate balance on the issue of the costs of not being resident. I would like to redress that balance here.

In my video discussing V & R I make the point that a Visitor approach to formal education is more likely to be successful than a Resident one given that all students are likely to end-up isolated at a desk in an exam room at the end of their courses – i.e. the education system assesses our ability to be Visitors not Residents.

My feeling is that this narrow view fails to take into account skills required beyond the hamster wheel of assessment and reward - workplace and life skills which Visitors fail to glean due to the absence of network effects.

Characterising digital literacy as a simple drive towards Residency would be dangerous; digital literacies are required and acquired as much at the Visitor end of the continuum as they are at the Resident.

This is a straw man, Visitor skills are the low hanging fruit, it's residency skills, and the ability to balance them with other pressures, where the advances in technology lie. Dave continues to develop the V & R idea, but it is crucial that we balance the positive outcomes of residency against the downside doubters. So where is the low hanging fruit of residency?


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Institutional repositories, social media and academic publication: a simple experiment

By Chris Willmott from Journal of the left-handed biochemist. Published on Dec 04, 2011.

Over at Science of the Invisible, my colleague Alan Cann has been reflecting on the contemporary landscape within academic publication. Specifically, he’s been thinking aloud about the role played by institutional repositories alongside (or, more radically, instead of) more formal journal publication (for example, see Wit’s End, which links in turn to Melissa Terras’ post What [...]

Questionnaire design: some tips on generating meaningful data

By Chris Willmott from Journal of the left-handed biochemist. Published on Nov 22, 2011.

At the November 2011 meeting of our Bioscience Pedagogic Research group, attention was focused on Questionnaire Design. Emma Angell, from the University’s SAPPHIRE group (Social science APPlied to Healthcare Improvement REsearch) shared some tips she had picked up during a two-day course which she had attended in May 2011. The course took place at the London [...]

Effective Learning in the Life Sciences

By Chris Willmott from Journal of the left-handed biochemist. Published on Nov 11, 2011.

Today I have received my copy of Effective Learning in the Life Sciences: how students can achieve their full potential. As the subtitle implies, the book is targeted first and foremost at students wanting to make the most of their time at university, and at academics helping them to reach that goal. 1. Creativity (David Adams [...]

Graduate employability: a growing concern

By Chris Willmott from Journal of the left-handed biochemist. Published on Oct 28, 2011.

During the research for a recently-submitted paper, I decided to investigate the rising importance of graduate employability as a concern for universities (and the wider society). As an indicator of this trend I searched Google Scholar for articles with “graduate” and “employability” in the title – the results are shown in the chart below. The [...]

The best and worst of the OU

By Chris Willmott from Journal of the left-handed biochemist. Published on Oct 22, 2011.

I have been a long-time admirer of the Open University; my mother completed a degree with them when I was a child and another of my relatives was one of the first ever cohorts of OU students. At a recent conference a presentation on the OU’s new “Science Investigations” module* was truly inspiring – the [...]

Anonymous data and educational research

By Chris Willmott from Journal of the left-handed biochemist. Published on Oct 21, 2011.

When undertaking educational research you often want to know how an intervention has affected a cohort, and ideally to be able to drill down into the data to see the impact on individuals. In order to match pre-and post- activity surveys, some kind of identifier is required. You could ask the students to put their [...]