20 apps and resources that do cool things with your social data – The Next Web

Besides the many concerns about privacy, another frequent criticism of social media is its lack of educational value. Indeed, making sense of the huge amount of data produced through social media can seem to be an almost impossible task. Building on the notion of exploring the potential for learning from and through social media, this is a fascinating list of social data analytics apps.

Twelve apps of christmas – Regent’s University London

In a promising attempt at online learning / MOOCs, Twelve Apps of Christmas aims to provide basic and advanced tips for using 12 educational apps.

Each post will contain instructions on a different app, together with tailored suggestions of how to use it with your students and how it might work effectively for you in your professional context.

The programme runs for 12 days and consists of short daily tasks taking no more than ten minutes of time, making it ideal for all of those too busy to follow a long-term course. While designed for staff at Regent’s University London, the course is free and open to everyone interested.

The quantified student – Marketplace

A day in the data-driven life of the most measured and monitored students in the history of education

Mentioned in Marieke Guy’s NetworkEd lecture last week, this fascinating infographic highlights some of the concerns and challenges of data collection in education. In addition to legitimate concerns around student privacy, we need to address the question of how we can best make use of the data available to enhance learning. Rather than seeing it as a threat, we should seize the opportunity to responsibly use technology and learning analytics to offer a more personalised and effective learning experience.

Sharing research equipment in Higher Ed – equipment.data

Too often universities view themselves as competitors in Higher Education. Focusing on collaboration instead, this laudable initiative seeks to provide a searchable UK-wide database of Higher Education research equipment. Sharing equipment can enable institutions to make more efficient use of the funds available and thus improve their overall research (and, indeed, learning and teaching) capacity.

Open education: a study in disruption – Van Mourik Broekman et al.

Does open education really offer the openness, democracy and cost-effectiveness its supporters promise? Or will it lead to a two-tier system, where those who can’t afford to pay to attend a traditional university, or belong to those groups who prefer not to move away from home, will have to make do with a poor, online, second-rate alternative education produced by a global corporation?

A free book (the full version of which can be downloaded using the link above) that seeks to critically engage with online education and its promised benefits. Especially the analysis of MOOCs in their political context makes for a promising read. We will feature a more detailed blog post on the topic in the coming weeks.

* Education technology is rapidly moving, sometimes divisive and always interesting, especially to us working in Higher Education. Every week, we share and comment upon a selection of interesting articles, posts and websites relating to education and technology we stumbled upon during the week. Do comment, recommend and share!