This report from JISC is of FE college students’ experiences of digital education. The survey was conducted between October 2019 and May 2020 so covers the emergency shift to remote teaching. About two-thirds of the 19,137 responses are from the pre-pandemic and one-third form the pandemic periods. Learners and their technology Access to digital devices … Read more
Its been a busy week with the start of the new academic year being in somewhat challenging circumstances. However, my teaching is all online and I’m ready to start teaching next week. It has also been the week of the launch of the Manifesto for Teaching Online including a programme of launch seminars. Otherwise, here … Read more
This sketch note maps some initial ideas linking earlier reading on resilience in higher education with Ian Kinchin’s ideas of pedagogical health and frailty. I am also working through his book that covers the same topic although I *think* we’re taking diverging views of resilience. [I’ll be updating this post later with some initial thoughts … Read more
This is my presentation on innovative approaches to researching informal digital learning for the Scottish Education Research Association conference in Edinburgh in November 2019. This paper presents an innovative research approach to examining learning in professional learning communities on Twitter. The research approach draws on a socio-material ontology and assemblage theory (Law 2004) to engage … Read more
Weller’s notion of resilience is proposed as an alternative perspective on change in education systems and institutions that provides a generative alternative to the ‘education is broken’ narrative. For this, he draws on resilience in terms of the stability of ecological systems and the ability of systems to absorb change. Resilience is, therefore, not simply … Read more
Returning to the topic of unbundling universities, this sketchnote is based on some of my notes from the Unbundling Higher Education Coursera course that I discussed here. The analytic approaches undertaken by the research project that underpins this MOOC gives a really useful starting point for studying the unbundling of universities. The study focused on … Read more
Ben Williamson has written a great post here on the concept and realities of a smart, quantified and data driven university. The post outlines the increasingly overt positioning of universities as conduits for data collection, analysis and exploitation. The datafication of universities as the ‘smart university’ or ‘intelligent campus’ provides a clear pathway for the … Read more
I am currently developing a paper on innovative research methods that discusses the operationalisation of socio-material assemblage theory. This is the summary of the paper so far: This paper presents an innovative research approach to examining learning in open online digital environments: in this case, professional learning communities on Twitter. The research approach draws on … Read more
This post on analysing a TAGs dataset using Tableau is a continuation of earlier posts on social media analytics here and here. It’s worth noting that Tableau Public cannot be used here as it is against Twitter’s Terms of Service. This post is really to act as notes for my own use but I thought they … Read more
I came across this quote in Veletsianos Open practices and identity: Evidence from researchers and educators’ social media participation which strikes me as a useful approach to auto-ethnographic research of (online) experiences in different contexts: This study was influenced by cyberethnography (Ward, 1999) and virtual ethnography (Hine, 2000). However, unlike these analytical approaches, and akin to Watulak (2011), instead of doing ethnography (Green … Read more