Knowledge Centre blogs

Wikipedia in Education, and tracking how 'knowledge' is used...

By: Simon Knight
On: 16th September 2012

EduWiki Conference & the power of 'paradata'

Last week I went to the EduWiki conference in Leicester.

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Creative Commons, Open Government Licensing and PDFs

By: Simon Knight
On: 25th August 2012

Over the summer I’ve been working on a project the Open Resource Bank for Interactive Teaching (ORBIT) – an OER wiki hosting Teacher Education resources for Professional Development on interactive pedagogy, particularly using ICT. It’s still a work in progress prior to the project end in September, and to an extent it’ll still be in progress after that (although, to an extent we very much want it to be – it is a wiki after all!), but do give it a look. The site also hosts a few other teacher education Wikis (OER4School more >

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Innovations in Learning – Badges for accreditation

By: Simon Knight
On: 11th August 2012

The Open University’s Institute of Educational Technology recently released a fantastic report – “Innovating Pedagogy 2012” (pdf) (Creative Commons licenced too). The report offers 10 innovations with the potential to change education in the short to medium term. It starts with a two page executive summary – so if you don’t read anything else, take a look at that!

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Social Learning Analytics - Making sense of people making sense together

By: Simon Knight
On: 11th June 2012

Thinking about information, together

Last time I talked about why the ways individuals think about knowledge, might impact on their behaviour, and how we could support more advanced behaviours. Of course, this also depends on how we - collectively - think about knowledge and act on this, through our policy and the ways we structure websites, etc. For example, how education/assessment policy might encourage particular ways of thinking about knowledge.

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How Useful is that?! Making sense of information, together

By: Simon Knight
On: 27th May 2012

Well, whatdya know?

When we search for and find information on the web, how do we decide what information is useful? From a researcher perspective, deciding how ‘successfully’ people have found information – whether through a search engine like google, an OER website like gooru, or a jobs portal, school site, or whatever is challenging. I think we should also be interested in how users conceptualise what they’re looking for – do they think there’s, “one answer” or many, do they think there are lots of bits of connecting information or are they more independent. Perhaps they have views on particularly authoritative websites (the BBC v. Wikipedia v. Yahoo Answers), or whether they should just take as a “given” what is said on websites, or that in order for them to have knowledge, they need to understand the information. more >

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The Digital Divide - an issue of ethics?

By: Simon Knight
On: 4th May 2012

For today’s blog I thought I’d take a step back and consider some of the ethical imperative for studying the digital divide.

Meaningful Access

Sometimes, we take it as a given that such divides must be addressed, that we know what the divide is, and that we know how to address the divides – we just, close them. more >