Milton Keynes, UK: Along with other colleagues at the OU, Ruhr- Universität Bochum in Germany, Carnegie Mellon University in the USA, EPFL in Switzerland and Diversync Limited in the UK, KMi will be hosting a workshop at the annual European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning (EC-TEL) on the subject of learning technologies for Equality, Diversity…
Part of the 2021 ACM CHI Virtual Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, the hands-on workshop Opinions, Intentions, Freedom of Expression,… , And Other Human Aspects Of Misinformation Online was held on 7th of May. It gathered multidisciplinary researchers from across the world (i.e. Canada, the US, Belgium, Germany, Brazil, Austria, Italy, and the…
The Black Lives Matter movement has (re)highlighted systemic inequalities within our social structures, including Higher Education (HE), that require immediate attention. Efforts to decolonise research and curricula must be accompanied by real investment in communities that have been historically disadvantaged or excluded from HE or specific domains, like STEM. To contribute to balance and improved…
Tracie Farrell, one of KMi’s Research Associates, won second place for her presentation on exploring emergent language in the manosphere at WebSci2020 this month. This work was based on a large-scale study using word embeddings to help extract and define new words from online communities focusing on men’s issues. The paper is available here: http://oro.open.ac.uk/70529/….
At the 25th Anniversary KMi Festival we invited staff from across the OU campus to come and find out how our latest knowledge and media technologies are impacting education, science, and cities. The Festival attendees included Lady Kitty Chisholm, one of the three founders of KMi, the STEM Executive Dean, Nick Braithwaite, and the new…
This week, WIRED Magazine released an article covering KMI’s ongoing work about networked misogyny and misogynistic language online. WIRED reporters interviewed KMi researchers in response to a paper delivered at the WebSci19 conference (Sunday June 30th – Wednesday July 3rd, Boston, USA). Authors Tracie Farrell, Miriam Fernandez and Harith Alani, along with associated researcher Jakub…
The Co-Inform consortium came back triumphant from Cyprus where the project’s first review took place on June 7th in the beautiful historical public library building of Limassol. Project officer and assigned monitors expressed their surprise of how much was achieved by Co-Inform in its first 12 months of life. These achievements included the organisation of three community and stakeholder…
On October 4th, 2018 KMi hosted the first Misinformation Workshop for OU researchers working on the topic of mis/dis/information, education and information literacy. As part of our participation in Co-Inform, a European-funded project to create misinformation resilient societies (https://coinform.eu/ ), we hope to draw from interdisciplinary research conducted at our own institution to help understand how…
Tracie Farrell successfully passed her PhD viva on Friday August 3rd. Her PhD thesis investigates the affordances of learning analytics for mediating learning. Tracie has conducted a series of in-depth interviews and focus groups with Open University students and educators. Her findings suggest that domain-related epistemological assumptions and previous experience influence how and why an…
The Knowledge Media Institute is delighted to be among the successful applicants announced by The Equality Challenge Unit for the November 2017 award round. Our Athena SWAN Bronze Award will be presented at an awards ceremony to be held at Swansea University on 16 July 2018. Dr Miriam Fernandez, who led KMi’s submission said “This…
