Today Paul Hogan presented the first seminar in the Digital Humanities in Practice 2016/17 seminar series. Covering all his work to date in the field of Augmented Reality and Virtual Realty the presentation was a practical demonstration of each application detailing the ideas behind its development and possible uses where it could be applied. The seminar demonstrated…
KMI’s Enabling Remote Activity (ERA) project has been mobilised again recently to support the accessibility of Environmental Science field courses. The OU’s use of the portable communications toolkit enables mobility impaired students to participate fully in field courses. The flexibility of the kit means that for sites which some students are unable to reach, the…
With KMi’s support, Compendium’s user and developer community have self-organised to take its future software development forward. BACKGROUND: The OU’s Knowledge Media Institute (KMi) and Verizon co-founded the Compendium Institute, and in 2002 KMi became the software development hub, releasing Compendium as a freely distributed application, funded by external research grants, and resulting in a…
I was recently in Edinburgh where I ran a hands-on workshop for the OU in Scotland team led by Ronald Macintyre, who have a project fnuded by the Scottish Government on how Scottish higher education institutions are engaged with workplace learning. The OUiS team will be co-designing an Evidence Hub to help them map the…
As part of our Collective Intelligence R&D, for the last few months we’ve been developing the concept of an Evidence Hub, learning user experience lessons from the first example we developed for the Hewlett Foundation on the Open Learning Network project, generifying the shell into one that can be customized for the different communities who…
The EnquiryBlogger project has just released a suite of plugins turning WordPress into a social learning journal with learning analytics. WordPress is the world’s most popular open source content management system and blogging platform. EnquiryBlogger plugins add Dispositional and Enquiry-Based Learning Analytics. EnquiryBlogger is a collaboration between the Open University’s Knowledge Media Institute (Simon Buckingham…
One of the research fields which KMi leads is Computer-Supported Argumentation, in particular, Argument Mapping — the visualization of the structure of an argument or debate for greater comprehension, better analysis, and collaborative sensemaking. A great example of knowledge transfer to the OU’s frontline is the ArguEd project led by Paul Piwek (Maths, Computing &…
A great success story for KMi technology transfer: our Compendium knowledge mapping tool was customized by the OU’s Learning & Teaching Solutions team for a groundbreaking OU course U101 “Design thinking: creativity for the 21st century”. I met with U101’s chair Peter Lloyd several years ago when the course was in conception, and we discussed…
Last month saw the release of SOA4RealEstate in the iTunes App Store, an iPhone application that allows users to make informed decisions when looking for a property to buy in the UK. The app, which was demo-ed during John Domingue’s inaugural lecture held last week, allows users to combine on demand linked data coming from…
The Open University is one of the first universities worldwide to make eBooks available on iTunes U, adding 100 free, interactive titles today with a further 200 to come by the end of 2010. OU eBook content comes from the OUs OpenLearn website which contains over 6,600 hours of free, current course materials and has…
