Knowledge Centre blogs

By: Simon Knight
On: 25th June 2012

Accessing the internet

Back when I started these blogs I wanted to think about how we could use technology to support learning in a variety of settings. A recent thread on the ALT discussion list regarded Assistive Technologies, and how specific access needs are addressed. Ideally, all websites would follow ‘Universal Design’ principles – they’d be designed for easy access by everyone – and there are tools to assist designers in doing this. But for whatever reason, sometimes that doesn’t happen, sometimes users n more >

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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 >

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Finding Knowledge - young people's use of search engines

By: Simon Knight
On: 16th April 2012

Some thoughts on my practical experiences of field work (and preliminary outcomes!)

I’ve now done three runs of my field work and started analysing the data. So today I thought I’d discuss some of the preliminary findings, and their implications. The findings are interesting in themselves, but I also want to highlight some of the benefits of the methods I used – recording talk, and ‘on-screen’ behaviours of groups of children completing search engine tasks.

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Symptoms and Causes: The Digital Divide...a digital problem?

By: Simon Knight
On: 12th April 2012

I have data!

But, sorry to tease, I’m not going to talk about it at all today…In this blog, I’m going to give an overview of research looking at differences in access to internet information. My broader research looks at the ways students use talk to think about what knowledge they need to solve problems, and then actively attempt to address those problems. I’ll write more specifically on that topic as I go on, but today I’ll focus on the problem of finding information: