Research Essentials

Really useful presentation by Jonathan Drori at ALT-C about how to add impact to a pilot project. Questions to ask about your project include: Why is this project different from all other projects? Will more people learn better? Will this save money? Will teachers and/or students be happier? Can this be done better without technology? [...]

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While researching heritage in Second Life, I noted that time speeds up in virtual worlds. Events that took place only months ago are referred to as part of the world’s history. When your world is only five years old, anything that survives for a few years begins to look like a venerable antique. Second Life’s [...]

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At HHL2007, I joined twitter. This was good fun and definitely a little ahead of the game. I’m now signed up for HHL2008 in October and this year they’re sending all delegates who register before 31st July a free Nintendo DS. Apparently it will come with one game and some conference material. I wonder what else? [...]

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I’m almost reluctant to wade in with yet another post about twitter. It seems to quite polarise views. Will triggered qute an interesting dialogue when he highlighted some disadvantages of twitter in his blog and suggested that it might be possible to become addicted to twittering. Martin responded with some interesting points about how twittering [...]

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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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