It’s that time of year, a time of renewal, of promises… of revision. Yes, spare some thoughts for the poor students, still nursing their New Year hangovers as they consider the exams awaiting them this January. For some of them it will be the first time they have been assessed at University, the first time […]
Category: Higher Education
Reflections on the Web Science MOOC
Week Two of the Web Science MOOC has ended, and the MOOCsters move on from my material to Craig Webber’s week on crime and security online. So do I feel like Frodo and Sam in Return of the King, collapsing in relief as the sweeping gaze of Sauron moves of to another corner of Morder? […]
Building the Web Science MOOC
This week at the University of Southampton we launched the Web Science MOOC with FutureLearn, the course is a dizzying whirlwind of interdisciplinary coolness that acts as a primer for Web Science and includes a wide variety of topics from cybercrime to digital democracy. My week is on Networks, and runs in week two of […]
The Praxis of Ideas (Why Computer Science is Awesome)
There has been a lot of coverage of ICT education in the UK press over the last few months, including a number noting how poorly ICT at School prepares students for real Computer Science. The relationship between ICT and Computer Science is part of the problem, as ICT seems to be commonly taught as a […]
RedFeather: Light and Fluffy OER
We’ve been building teaching and learning repositories at Southampton for a number of years now, ever since we were brought into a couple of projects dealing with Learning Objects and decided that there really must be a better way. I’ve written before about the EdShare software we created and how it was more like a […]
The Poor Elite
So the government is shocked and surprised that Universities want to use the new fees system to recover all the money they lost through the HE funding cuts. Most V-Cs seem to think that a charge of 7.5k to 8k would allow them to balance the books again, and many of the UKs stronger Unis […]
In Defence of the Academy
Given that we are no longer to spend public money on higher education the new deal for students is progressive and better than their current financial arrangements – but goodness that misses the point! The thing that we all seem to have forgotten is that there is no given and that the privatisation of higher […]
Killer Semantics: The Challenges of Linked Data in Higher Education
This week I was at ECTEL – The European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning. The main event for me was actually the workshop for Semantic Technology in Higher Education (SEMHE), where I was on a discussion panel at the end of the day considering potential roadmaps for semantic technology adoption in HE. The atmosphere was […]
Prepare for Disruption
Back in November I wrote a blog article on the momentum that was building behind Open Educational Resources (OER) and I have just published a similar essay in the Language and Linguistics Area Studies (LLAS) Liaison magazine. When I was writing the article I was hoping to address many of the concerns that teachers and […]