On Thursday 30 April LTI will be holding a show and tell event on the students as producers projects that have recently been carried out at LSE, many as a result of the 2014 LTI grant process. An outline of some of the projects can be viewed on our events page and you can reserve a place at the show and tell event via the online training system.
Applicants can apply for kits of equipment (DSLR’s, iPads and Podcasting) to give out to students to create content.
I first came across the concept in the NetworkED seminar by Helen Keegan on 05/11/14. You can watch the recording of Helen’s talk on our Youtube channel. Describing her ‘students as active collaborators’ rather than passive consumers, Helen gave a really inspiring talk detailing various projects which often involved students working collaboratively across various institutions and countries.
You might think that her field of ‘Interactive Media and Social Technologies’ lends itself to this type of teaching more easily than the social sciences. Yet here at LSE students as producers projects have successfully run in the fields of Sociology, Management, Law, Languages and International Relations.
The Student Ambassadors for Digital Literacy (SADL) project has involved 40 undergraduate students this year from Statistics, Social Policy, International Relations and Law. We are almost at the project end, and tomorrow afternoon have organised a celebration for everyone who has been part of the programme this year; staff and students. After that we will be starting our evaluation and impact study of SADL, to plan how we go forward in 2015-16.
Our students attended four workshops over the course of this academic year. As part of SADL we also encouraged students to share what they were learning with each other and with peers on their course. They had a Facebook group, a Moodle course and various ways of sharing with each other, but this proved to be the hardest part of the project. The workshops we ran included:
We had two new aspects to SADL this year. Firstly, we appointed four students from the first year of the programme to act as ‘Senior Ambassadors’ to help us plan and run the workshops, and to mentor the currently cohort. The second new initiative was to divide the students into groups and set them to work on short projects. The projects are presenting tomorrow afternoon at our celebration. Each group has had a Senior Ambassador to mentor them and the topics they have researched include:
Improving learning at LSE
Improving learning spaces at LSE
Improving Moodle and
Improving peer support.
It will be great to see what the students come up with, but most of all tomorrow is a celebration and a chance to thank the students for being part of our programme.
Finally SADL is an example of what Jisc are now calling a ‘Change Agents Network‘ and I’m really proud to be taking two Senior Ambassadors, Seow Wei Chin and Eugene McGeown to the Changes Agents Network conference next week in Birmingham, where they will be joining other students from UK universities to discuss their experiences these last two years. Seow Wei wrote a great blog post earlier this week about her experiences on SADL over the last two years, and I really hope that this programme has been as aspiring for all our students.
LTI NetworkED Seminar: Student entrepreneurs and innovators: the role of education Wednesday 4th March 5pm in R01
Learning Technology and Innovation run an annual seminar series called NetworkED: technology in education that invites speakers from the field of education, computing and related disciplines to discuss how technology is shaping the world of education.
Next week’s seminar will be a lively debate bringing together LSE students and alumni to discuss the role of education in developing entrepreneurs and innovators of the future on Wednesday 4th March at 5pm. There are a limited number of tickets available and interested students should book a place via the training booking system: https://apps.lse.ac.uk/training-system/userBooking/course/7447291
In addition to the audience at LSE, the seminars are open to participants around the world, who can watch the live event online on our youtube channel and participate using a range of technologies. The seminars are also recorded so you can watch at your convenience.
Student panel members
Maria Carvalho
Whilst undertaking her PhD in green innovation at the LSE, Maria realised that technologies could play a very useful role in transforming the learning experience – as long as both students and teachers actually integrated using these technologies into their working lives. As a Research Student Officer for the LSE Student Union, Maria has worked with the LTI in launching a PhD student networking tool called Piirus, organised the first “Re-imaging Our Education” event which discussed how learning technologies could be used in education. She also co-founded Black Cili, an animation business that makes academic research more engaging.
Arseni Gladkov
Arseni’s background is in software development and management. Having just completed his Master’s degree at the LSE, he is now working on making the university learning experience more seamless, by means of a new kind of e-learning platform that integrates personal notes with online content and services.
Tom Merriman
Tom Merriman is a graduate student at LSE studying information systems and digital innovation. He has a background in financial services having worked with Bloomberg LP as a business manager in both London and New York. During his 8 years with Bloomberg Tom was responsible for a number of existing financial software businesses as well as launching several new ones. In 2013, Tom left Bloomberg, cycled 5,000 miles from his apartment in Brooklyn to his new home in San Francisco where he set up a craft beer export business. He has a MSc in Finance from Cranfield and his current research interests include how cloud computing and big data capabilities are disrupting the financial data industry.
Edvard Nore
Edvard Nore started Europe’s first student-led venture investment fund while an undergrad at UCL, then started a company that went well and subsequently failed spectacularly. He has written about tech for The Nordic Web and Arctic Startup and currently working for the City of Oslo (his hometown) as a community manager at their Oslo Innovation Embassy. He is studying a MSc in Organisational Behaviour at LSE.
Roman Thompson
Originally from Windsor, Roman Thompson is a second year undergraduate studying BSc Geography with Economics. As the son of a technology consultant, this innovative industry is part of his background. However, upon arrival at LSE, it became apparent to him that that LSE could do more to support careers alternative to the ‘traditional’ LSE routes of finance and consultancy. To this end, he is a cofounder and the current Vice President of Marketing and Public Relations for the LSESU Technology Society. He regards the encouragement of innovation and entrepreneurship as a vital part of this process and the global economy as a whole.
Chair of the panel
Farid Ul Haque
Farid is Founder and CEO of ERLY STAGE STUDIOS an Education Venture Studio focused delivering next generation learning solutions and ‘making learning fun’ for the consumer and corporate markets alike (www.erlystagestudios.com).
Farid is also a partner at Connected Labs a content company working across media to deliver brand stories through craft storytelling. Connected Labs is backed by award winning Connected Pictures (www.connectedpictures.com).
Do you have ideas and suggestions on improving the students’ experience at the library?
Would you like to have your say in the changes happening there?
Would you like to feed your ideas into a project to redesign the lower ground floor space?
Do you want to win an iPad or Amazon vouchers?
If you answered “yes” to any of the above, then this competition is for you !
LSE Library and IMT are holding a student competition from Thursday, February 26th to Friday, March 20th. The objective of the competition is to propose ideas to create a modern and engaging environment for the Library lower ground floor that meets students’ contemporary and future needs.
The winning design will receive an iPad Air 2 worth £479 and you will also get the opportunity to boost your CV and to feed your ideas into the design phase.
Interested?
-> Have a look at the full competition details to find out how to enter.
-> No time? Just send us your ideas!
If you have ideas but no time to enter the design competition then you can also send us your ideas about how you would reorganise the space. The best suggestions will receive Amazon vouchers. Submit here !
Tweet your questions and join the debate #lsenetedge
Professor Livingstone’s discussion follows on from our NetworkED seminar with Dr Leslie Haddon on children’s use of phones, and is timely considering the announcement from the BBC today that that ‘more than half of children in the UK have done something “risky” or anti social online’ based on results from the BBC Learning Poll of 2,000 11-16 year olds.
As professor Livingstone outlines below: “The widespread use of social networking sites (SNSs) by children and young people has significantly reconfigured how they communicate, with whom and with what consequences. Drawing on cross-national interviews and informed by the tradition of research on media literacy, I will discuss the idea of social media literacy. The empirical material reveals a social developmental pathway by which children learn to interpret and engage with the technological and textual affordances and social dimensions of SNSs in determining what is risky and why. Their changing orientation to social networking online (and offline) appears to be shaped by their changing peer and parental relations, and has implications for their perceptions of risk of harm.”
Reserve your place on the staff training and development system or by emailing imt.admin@lse.ac.uk. All our talks are live streamed for those who can’t attend and a link to the live stream will be available on this blog.
Professor Livingstone discussed her work on children’s rights in the digital age with the department of Media and Communications you can view the Q&A on the Media Policy Project blog.
Watch a video interview with Professor Sonia Livingstone below.
The LTI (learning technology and Innovation) NetworkED seminar next Wednesday 28 January at 3pm in R01 will be from Dr Leslie Haddon on Children’s experience of phones: for better or for worse.
Dr Haddon from the Media and Communications department will be sharing the findings from the Net Children Go Mobile project on children’s use of smartphones and tablets. The two year project carried out quantitative and qualitative research in 7 countries to investigate access and use, risk and opportunities of mobile internet for children in the European context.
Students As Producers projects – students can be asked to work collaboratively to create content. Using technology specifically designed for group collaboration enables students’ to work online and in their own time. LTI have limited numbers kits containing iPads, iPad mini’s, podcasting equipment and Digital SLR camera’s which can be applied for as part of LTI grants projects. You can also ask students to bring in their own laptops/phones/tablets or other devices or to create collaborate documents and platforms such as Padlet and Paperli. More ideas can be found on our Padlet and from the recent NetworkED talk given by the UK National Teaching Fellow Helen Keegan. Building on TLC’s note on introducing more creative forms of assessment the completed content could count towards an assessment (formative or summative) and depending on how far you want to take the project could be combined with peer marking – with students commenting on each other’s projects. For example Social Policy carried out peer assessment using WebPA and Teammates and more details can be found in a video with Dr Irene Papanicolas.
Flipped lectures – Ask your students to prepare for week 6 by watching pre-recorded lecture or alternative resource. The contact time is then used to get students to do something more interactive. LTI run a course on flipping lectures, and places can be booked online
E-Assessment – Use the new academic year structure to rethink how you approach assessment and feedback. LTI are currently running an E-Assessment pilot project with various departments. We would be interested in working with departments to trial new technology for exams in week 0 or in the summer term, and to work on E-Submission and E-Assessment. To hear some ideas from other academics at LSE and elsewhere, watch the Show and Tell event on E-Assessment we hosted in November this year.
LTI Grants – we offer Learning Technology and Innovation Grants to encourage individuals and departments to explore the use of new technologies in teaching and learning. We are seeking applications under the three strands of “E-Assessment”, “Students as Producers” and “Innovation”. We will hold a third run of grants at the start of the Summer term which will invite applications to be planned over the summer for the 2015/16 academic year.
We look forward to discussing your ideas well in advance of next academic year. Email LTI.Support@lse.ac.uk.
Our NetworkED seminar with Marieke Guy on 26 November was on open data in education. Marieke gave a broad overview of the topic of open data, discussing the different ways that open data is currently being used, who is using it and how it could be used in the future. Marieke gave lots of interesting examples of projects that have used open data and pointed out various open data tools such as Histropedia which allows users to timeline and tag data from Wikipedia or equipment.data which allows HE institutions to sharing educational equipment and facilities.
One of the most interesting aspects of the talk for me was the idea that we should be doing more with open data in the classroom. Marieke advocated using real data sets in teaching and learning as a way to engage students and get them to apply concepts, theories and critical thinking to real world issues and to help them develop their digital literacy skills. This leads in nicely to our upcoming NetworkEDGE seminar with Professor Matthew Connelly which will be on ‘hacking the archive’.
Professor Connelly will be talking about his course ‘HY447 – Hacking the archive’, which uses big data from various International History databases and teaches students new tools and techniques to explore various the vast array of material available online. Students are encouraged to rethink historical research in the digital age as older primary sources are increasingly becoming available online alongside newly declassified information and ‘born digital’ electronic records. Interdisciplinary research is becoming more essential with academics collaborating across disciplines and with the broader public in order to mine extensive amounts of online data.
Matthew will be speaking at NetworkEDGE on Wednesday 14 January2015, at 5pm
The event is free to attend but places are limited so will need to be reserved via the staff training and development system or by emailing imt.admin@lse.ac.uk. All our talks are live streamed and recorded for those who can’t make it.
You can watch the video recording of the Marieke Guy NetworkED seminar on our LTI Youtube channel and a Q&A with Marieke can be found below
Marieke Guy from Open Knowledge
Ahead of her NetwokED seminar talk on Wednesday 26 November Marieke Guy answered some questions for LTI on open data in education. Q1. How would you define ‘open data’? How does this relate to ‘open access’ and ‘open education’ ?
We’re very lucky to have an excellent definition of open data from Open Definition, which specifically sets out principles that define “openness” in relation to data and content:
“Open means anyone can freely access, use, modify, and share for any purpose (subject, at most, to requirements that preserve provenance and openness.”
So we are talking about data that is available for people to access and can be reused and redistributed by everyone. One of the important points to make is that openness does not discriminate against commercizal use. Open data is definitely a friend of open access and open education! Publicly funded research publications should not only be open access but the data behind them should also be shared and openly available. At the Open Education Working Group we see open education as a collective term that is used to refer to many practices and activities that have both openness and education at their core. Open data is an important area, along with open content, open licensing, open tools, open policy and open learning and teaching practices. This is becoming even more the case with the rise in online learning, MOOCs and the use of learning analytics.
Q2. Who typically uses open data and what does it get used for?
Anyone can consume open data as an end-user benefitting from openness, but there are two main groups who have a specific interest in dealing with open data. Data providers (such as the government or your institution) may be interested in releasing and sharing data openly. Data handlers are interested in using the data available, maybe by developing an app or service around the data, or by visualising the data, or by asking questions of the data and mining it in some way. A nice easy example here is the Great British Toilet map,
The Great British Toilet Map
where government data was combined with ordnance survey and open street map data to provide a public service app that helps us find the nearest public convenience. You can also add toilets you find to the map, allowing the data that is available to be improved on.
Obviously people who want to get their hands messy with data will need to be data literate. One of our core projects at Open Knowledge is School of Data. School of Data works to empower civil society organisations, journalists and citizens with the skills they need to use data effectively in their efforts to create more equitable and effective societies.
Q3. What are the pros and cons of open data?
The main benefits for using open data are around transparency (knowing what your government and other public bodies are doing), releasing social and commercial value, and participation and engagement. By opening up data, citizens are enabled to be much more directly informed and involved in decision-making. This is about making a full “read/write” society, not just about knowing what is happening in the process of governance but being able to contribute to it.
Opening anything up makes organisations more vulnerable, especially if they have something to hide, or if their data is inaccurate or incomplete. There is also a cost to releasing and building on data. Often this cost is outweighed by the social or economic benefit generated, but this benefit can develop over time so can be hard to demonstrate. Other challenges include the possible misinterpretion or misrepresention of data, and of course issues around privacy.
I personally see open data as being in the same space as freedom of speech with regard to these challenges. We know that open data is the right way to go but there are still some subtleties that we need to work out. The answer to a ‘bad’ use of open data is not to close the data, just as the answer to a racist rant is not to remove our right to freedom of speech.
Q4. Do you have any examples of projects that have involved using ‘open data’ and if so what advantage did ‘open data’ bring?
Earlier this year Otavio Ritter (Open education data researcher, Getulio Vargas Foundation, Brazil) gave a talk to our Open Education Working Group. He mentioned a case in Brazil where the school census collects data about violence in school area (like drug traffic or other risks to pupils). Based on an open data platform developed to navigate through the census it was possible to see that in a specific Brazilian state 35% of public schools had drug traffic near the schools. This fact put pressure on the local government to create a public policy and a campaign to prevent drug use among students. Since then a collection of initiatives run by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) have made a huge impact on the drug traffic levels near schools.
Q5. What does Open Knowledge do?
Open Knowledge is a worldwide non-profit network of people who believe in openness. We use advocacy, technology and training to unlock information and enable people to work with it to create and share knowledge. We work on projects, create tools and support an amazing international network of individuals passionate about openness and active in making, training and promoting open knowledge. Our network is global (we have groups in more than 40 countries and 9 local chapters) and cross-domain (we currently have 19 working groups that focus on discussion and activity around a given area of open knowledge).
Marieke Guy will be talking at LSE on Wednesday26 November at 5pm in NAB2.06. To book your place go to the staff training and development system or (for those without access to the system) email imt.admin@lse.ac.uk
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Thursday 30 April 12:00-13:45 NAB.2.14
Arseni Gladkov
