Research Essentials

Attended this lunch-time presentation by an ex-student, Jonathan San-Diego and his supervisor James Aczel. I was interested to learn a little more about how you would go about collecting and analysing eye-tracking data, wondering what other applications it might be used for. Fascinating presentation. Interesting challenges. you could capture what people were looking at when [...]

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Looking at tracking and observing practices happening at distributed sites and personal settings of engagements. No longer possible to assume a fixed setting as a primary or sole context for knowledge.   Using anthropoligical, ethnographic methods.   Mobile behaviours are low profile, done on the fly. Often pass unnoticed. because mobile phone use generally very [...]

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David Livingston’s talk in the afternoon   Broadcast via video.   Proposing that enabling approaches are more fruitful than evaluative apporaches for researching informal learning.   He’s referring us to the website www.learningwork.ca for details of californian studies   Starts by pointing out that we’re becoming more and more formally educated. More of us are [...]

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Talking about the PlaSciGardens project – one small bit relating to the Kew Gardens study. Relating to how children collect data out of doors. 9 – 10 year olds organised in small grous.  The goal was to aid engagement and help children use meaningful investigatives skills. So they were asked to classify fruit and veg [...]

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Interested in how mobile devices can be used to assiste learning and assessment in practice among disabled students.  What works well for disabled students? Challenges presented by mobile devices for disabled students?   Looking at methods. Going to give students technology and web cams and get them to record their thoughts through the video-camera technology. [...]

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Talking about his 2005 project with Palm PDAs Using a logging system to give accurate usage information. In Jon’s opinion, student’s devices not really used that much. Data logging on PDAs was automatic, however the transfer of logs relied on the students and this was failing. So they offered incentive of free games. But 1st week 2 [...]

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to gather data on school visits to science centres. Anthony Lelliott from Johannesburg. Looking at Visitor learning by doing a variation on the pre-test post-test method. RQs – How much do they learn What are their individual experiences How do their prior knowledge and interests affect their experiences of visit. Collected a variety of data, [...]

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Practice Strand Patrick’s presentation Researching the world out there: how do we know about the users that do not tell us anything?   This strand is going to be a series of short presentations with discussions around the theme and then Jocelyn will present the outcomes.  The challenge of openlearn is how to research the [...]

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Mike Sharples  Recaps the Big Issues in Mobile Learning workshop in June last year in Notthingham where evaluation emerged as one of the big issues. He’s now doing a whistle-stop tour of mobile learning, highlighting the evidence that mobile learning can be effective. But now he gets to the key points – how did we [...]

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I’ve just finished two days with Chris High and Emily Flower (and Rick who came in on the second day to help with editing) to look into Participatory Video. Emily works for Insight and is involved in many PV projects. PV is a fairly new research method that involves participants in making videos as a form [...]

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