On 17th December Simon Knight successfully defended his PhD thesis. Simon’s thesis Developing Learning Analytics for Epistemic Commitments in a Collaborative Information Seeking Environment (supervised by Dr. Bart Rientes, Prof. Simon Buckingham Shum and Prof. Karen Littleton) draws upon diverse literatures to present an instantiation of a theoretically grounded analytic development arising from socio-cultural theory….
The Open University’s Schools University Partnership Initiative (SUPI) is being featured as the ‘Case Study of the Week’ on the National Co-ordinating Centre for Public Engagement’s (NCCPE’s) website. Over the last year Trevor Collins (KMI), Peter Devine (IET), Rick Holliman (Science) and Mark Russell (Denbigh School) ran a series of participatory design workshops to explore…
The Director of KMi will be a keynote speaker at the eSTEeM Conference on 16 April 2015. There’s only one day left to register for this conference, which will bring together academics in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) to promote innovation, scholarship and enterprise in open and distance learning. Peter will be taking the…
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…
As part of the OU’s OpenScience Lab, Trevor Collins and Chris Valentine have started a new collaboration with the Field Studies Council (FSC) to produce a portable web server and network to support outdoor learning. Trevor and Chris had their first meeting at the Preston Montford Field Studies Centre on Tuesday (February 6th) with Sam…
Seventy pupils from Farmborough Primary School in Bath took part in three photomarathons during their trip to the Roman Baths today. Photomarathons are a timed competition in which a group of photographers are given a set of themes to take photos on. At the end of the available time the photographers submit a set of…
Yesterday afternoon Paul Hogan called KMi using the ERA Portable WLAN Toolkit. Paul’s visiting Masaya volcano in Nicaragua, where he has been carrying out a number of field tests for his iPhone applications and backhaul trials for the JANET funded Portable WLAN project. Paul connected up with us using a BGAN (Broadband Global Area Network)…
Trevor Collins from KMI and Jessica Bartlett from the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences ran a workshop on inclusive fieldwork at the Rewiring Inclusion conference in Nottingham on Tuesday. The conference, organised by the UK’s Association of Learning Technology (ALT) and the Joint Information Systems Committee’s (JISC) TechDis service, sought to highlight the importance…
Paul Hogan from KMi will be heading off on Saturday for two weeks of fieldwork on a volcano in Nicaragua. Paul has developed several iPhone applications (as part of the iTunes U project) for use by the geophysicists and environmental scientists whilst on the volcano and he is going out to experience their use first hand. He…
The Out There and In Here (OTIH) project has been awarded funding from the Research Councils UK Digital Economy Programme under the ‘Research in the Wild’ call. The project team, led by Dr Anne Adams from IET, will develop the use of mobile technologies and interactive tabletop displays to support collaborative group work between field…
