"The idea that one can trace the causal connections of any events without employing a theory, or that such a theory will emerge automatically from the accumulation of a sufficient amount of facts, is sheer illusion." — Friedrich Hayek — Hayek_Quotes (@HayekQuotes1) August 10, 2018 Worth repeating, especially in relation to ideas that ‘big data’ … Read more
I’m attending the IT Futures conference at Edinburgh today. These notes are not intended to be a comprehensive record of the conference but to highlight points of interest to me and so will be subjective and partial. A full recoding of the conference will be available at the IT Futures website The conference opens with … Read more
I’m currently writing up some ideas on open online professional learning that includes considering personal learning networks. I came across this interesting post from Martin Weller on the apparent decline in interest or discussion of personal learning networks. The reasons suggested include the mainstreaming of the practices associated with PLEs, a consolidation of the tools used … Read more
Geoge Veletsianos is speaking at a seminar hosted by DiCE research group at University of Edinburgh. The hastag for the event is #edindice and the subject is MOOCs, automation and artificial intelligence. [These notes were taken live and I’ve retained the typos, poor syntax and grammer etc… some may call that ‘authentic’!] George began … Read more
Back at the UFHRD conference and the post-lunch key note address. Change dthe title to “(Quite) grupy old men, mars bars and epistemology”. Noted a slide from a talk yesterday as a list of critics of HRD: the grumpy old men including “Sadler-Smith 2014”! Looked at the issue of relevance and rigour in HRD and … Read more
The conference welcome is from Dave McGuire of Edinburgh Napier University including a short welcome video prepared by one of his students with a good number of talking heads. The opening key note address is by Prof Jonathon Passmore [JP] with the title: “Coaching Research: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly”. The session looks … Read more
This is the second session of the day I wanted to note in detailed (the first is here). The session it Robert Procter on Big Data and the sociological imagination, Professor of social informatics at the University of Warwick. These notes are written live from the live stream. So here we go: The title has changed … Read more
As previously discussed here & here, I am studying two Twitter discussion events as sites of professional identity formation and development. The broad structure of the two events is broadly similar to the research process of a Tweetstorm: “an online, open brainstorm-like session via Twitter” (Sie, Bitter-Rijpkema, and Sloep 2009: 60). A Tweetstorm was described as a … Read more
Notes on a presentation by Pablo Paredes. The abstract for the seminar is: This presentation will be about how to make social network analysis from social media services such as Facebook and Twitter. Although traditional SNA packages are able to analyse data from any source, the volume of data from these new services can make … Read more
I’m currently analysing a couple of Twitter chat events aimed at learning professionals. The analysis will mainly be qualitative but to make sense of what are often a messy and chaotic events, I’m currently doing some pattern searches on the nature and functions of participants’ interactions. This image is of a social network analysis of … Read more