Archive for the ‘Open Data’ Category

Why Open Knowledge?

February 22nd, 2016 by Graham Attwell

I like this presentation on Why open knowledge from Martin Weller. And besides the argumentation he has some very pretty pictures.

A video tutorial: Getting started with the LMI for All API

November 11th, 2015 by Graham Attwell

Regular readers will know that together with Philipp Rustemeier, I have been working on  the UK Commission for Employment and Skills’ LMI for All project. Through the project we are developing a database providing access to open data around the Labour `market. This includes data about occupations, pay, present and projected employment, qualifications and much more. So far, UKCES has focused on the use of the data for careers guidance but I suspect it may have far wider potential uses, including for education and local government planning. When mashed with other data I see LMI for All as pointing to the future is of open data as part of smart cities or rather as providing data about cities for smart citizens.

The LMI for All project does not itself produce applications.Instead we provide access to a open APi, which developers can query to build their own desktop or mobile apps.

One thing we are working on is providing more help for developers wanting to use the API. As part of that we are developing a series of ‘how to’ videos, the first of which is featured above.The video was originally recorded in real time using Google Hangouts and  YouTube.  The 31 minute original was cut to about 15 minutes and a new introduction added.

Any advice about how to make this sort of video will be gratefully received. And the code which Philip developed live in the video can be accessed on GitHub

How Web 2.0 and Open APIs made it easy to create and share Open Educational Resources

October 6th, 2015 by Graham Attwell

Another post on Open Educational Resources. Last week I talked about the early days with the SIGOSEE project, seeking to build awareness of the possibilities of Open Educational Resources and Open Source in education and to start to change policy directions, especially at European Commission level.

In these early projects, we had three main lines of activity. The first was awareness about changing what Open educational Resources were and especially about Creative Commons Licenses. The second was talking with all manner of different stakeholders, including educational organisations and administration, developers and even the more enlightened publishers about the advantage of OERs and pushing for policy changes. But by far the most time consuming work was with practitioners, organising workshops to show them how they could produce Open Educational resources themselves.

And whilst primary school teachers were long used to developing their own learning materials, with the help of sticky back paper, glue, paint and the like, teachers in secondary schools and higher education were much more used to using bought in materials. True, the photocopier had replaced the Banda machines, and data projectors were well on the way to spelling redundancy for overhead projectors. But teachers had little or no experience in producing ICT based learning materials themselves.

With the value of hindsight is was the development of reasonably easy to use content creation applications and even more the advent of Web 2.0 which changed this situation. I can’t quite remember the different work flows we originally created but I think most involved using Open Office to make materials and then using various work arounds to somehow get them into the different VLEs in use at that time (I also seem to remember considerable debates about whether we should allow the use of proprietary software in our workflows).

Interestingly at that time we say standards and metadata as the key answer, especially to allow materials to be played in any Virtual Learning Environment. But it was Web 2.0 and Open APIs allowed not only easy content creation but provided easy means of distribution. Video was expensive and difficult even 10 or so years ago. Even if you had a powerful enough computer to edit and render raw video (I used to leave my computer running overnight to render 30 minutes videos) the issue was how to distribute it. Now with YouTube and a basic WordPress site anyone can make an distribute their own videos (and add a Creative Commons License). Ditto for photos, audio cartoons etc.

Over the last few years the emphasis has shifted from how to create and share Open Educational Resources to how to use them for teaching and learning. And whist there seems to be progress that issue is not yet overcome.

Predicting mid and long term skills needs in the UK

June 24th, 2015 by Graham Attwell

Labour Market Information (LMI)  is not perhaps the most popular subject to talk about. But with the advent of open and linked data, LMI  is increasingly being open up to wider audiences and has considerable potential for helping people choose and plan future careers and plan education programmes, as well as for use in research, exploring future skills needs and for social and economic planning.

This is a video version of a presentation by Graham Attwell at the Slovenian ZRSZ Analytical Office conference on “Short-term Skills Anticipations and Mismatch in the Labour Market. Graham Attwell examines ongoing work on mid and long term skills anticipation in the UK. He will bases on work being undertaken by the UK Commission for Employment and Skills and the European EmployID project looking, in the mid term, at future skills needs and in the longer term at the future of work. He explains the motivation for undertaking these studies and their potential uses. He also explains briefly the data sources and statistical background and barriers to the wok on skills projections, whilst emphasising that they are not the only possible futures and can best serve as a a benchmark for debate and reflection that can be used to inform policy development and other choices and decisions. He goes on to look at how open and linked data is opening up more academic research to wider user groups, and presents the work of the UKCES LMI for All project, which has developed an open API allowing the development of applications for different user groups concerned with future jobs and future skills. Finally he briefly discusses the policy implications of this work and the choices and influence of policymakers in influencing different futures.

 

Open Data App Challenge

November 12th, 2014 by Graham Attwell

Pontydysgu are working with the UK Data Service to open up three datasets under an open data license and then run an Open Data App Challenge during late spring/summer 2015. This a ESRC (Economic Social Research Council) innovation fund project.

Last Friday I went to a UK Data Service panel session and networking event at the Open Data Institute in London talking about our work and the issues around opening up data under an open data license. The audience was mostly App Challenge members and data owners. This event was held as part of the ESRC Festival of Social Science Week and we invited along some other experts as well.

The session included Ralph Cochrane (App Challenge), Louise Corti (UK Data Service), Jonathan Raper (Transport API), Olivia Ely (UKCES), Moeen Khwaja (Thingful)

Ralph has wriiten about the event on the Open Data Challenge web site. “The UKCES and their LMI for All programme have one of the best developed government APIs for accessing open data around jobs, careers and employment statistics)” he says.

“Transport API is the leading provider of open transport data in the UK. Anyone can sign up to their API on a pay per use basis. They have data relating to trains, roads, construction and even Heathrow airport.

Thingful is a discovery or search engine for the Internet of Things. There are many sensors and devices out there that publish their state and if you can link these as a data stream they can enrich many other datasources and services. For example, there are weather sensors on top of most high rise buildings in London. Could they be connected to the Met Office to help with weather based planning?

Louise is the project leader for the Open Data App Challenge project and is based at the University of Essex campus in Colchester.

Ralph Cochrane moderated this panel session and is the founder of App Challenge. He’s a crowdsourcing expert and runs the developer community day-to-day working with many of the world’s leading companies.”

Opening up data and research

September 19th, 2014 by Graham Attwell

Much of the focus of the open education movement has been on Open Educvational Resources and MOOCs. But just as important, in my humble opinion, is opening up research to a wider public. This is not only confined to opening up access to the results of research but allowing access to a wider audience than acandmicsx to raw research data. And there are a growing number of web sites that are doing this. One of the sites i am loving is the Understanding Society website based on the UK Households survey and run by designed and managed by a team of longitudinal survey experts at the Institute for Social and Economic Research (ISER), at the University of Essex.

Understanding Society, they say, “is a unique and valuable academic study that captures important information every year about the social and economic circumstances and attitudes of people living in 40,000 UK households.

It also collects additional health information from around 20,000 of the people who take part.

Information from the longitudinal survey is primarily used by academics, researchers and policy makers in their work, but the findings are of interest to a much wider group of people including those working in the third sector, health practitioners, business, the media and the general public.”

One study based on the survey and recently posted on the Understanding Society web site  looks at Gender differences in educational aspirations and attitudes land examined the ambitions and approaches to study of 11-15 year olds participating in the British Household Panel Survey.

The sudy says that “while girls have more positive aspirations and attitudes than boys, the impacts of gender on children’s attitudes and aspirations vary significantly with parental education level, parental attitudes to education, child’s age and the indirect cost of education.

Boys are more responsive than girls to positive parental characteristics, while educational attitudes and aspirations of boys deteriorate at a younger age than those of girls.

Girls also acknowleged the impact of the recession and increased youth unemployment by working harder. Boys however appear unresponsive to the business cycle. This might reflect misplaced confidence where they believe they will be able to find a job independently from the economic climate. Policies targeting boys with more information on the benefits from investing in education will increase their awareness about the consequences of an unfavourable youth labour market, which may improve their educational attitudes and aspirations and consequently their educational attainment.”

I’m not sure what is make of all this. But I wonder if there is any comparative data from other countries? No doubt it would be a chnallenge to norm such data, but it could greatly help in understanding why boys in the UK are underperforming. If you know of such data plese just add a comment or drop me an email.

The challenges of open data: emerging technology to support learner journeys

September 16th, 2014 by Graham Attwell

As promised, a post on our stand and presentation at Alt-C on the LMIforAll Labour Market Data project, sponsored by UKCES. Working together with the Institute for Employment Research at Warwick University and Raycom, we have developed a database and APi providing access to a range of data about a wide variety of different occupations in the UK including data about:

  • Pay
  • Gender
  • Numbers employed
  • Future employment projections
  • Occupational profiles
  • Skills and competences
  • Job vacancies
  • University destinations

The API is self documenting and is available free of charge to both for profit and not for profit organisatio0ns and developers. Working with Loud Source we have run a competition for Apps built on the API and together with Rewired State we have organised a series of Hack Days and Mod Days. We are currently redesigning the website to provide better access to the data and to the different applications that have been built to date.

One strange thing that took people visiting our stand some time to understand was that we were not selling anything (I think ours and Jisc were the only non commercial stands).  The second thing was that we were not trying to ‘sell’ them a shiny out of teh box project. To get added value from our database and API requires some thought and development effort on the part of organisations wanting to use the data. We provide the tools, they provide the effort to use them. But when people got that concept they were enthusiastic. And most interestingly they were coming up with completely new ideas for where the data might be valuable. As you can see in our presentation above, we have largely focused on the use of LMIforAll for careers planning. University and Further Education researchers and developers saw big potential using the API as a planning too for future courses and curriculum. Others saw it as a valuable resource for measuring employability, a big agenda point for many UK institutions. It was also suggested to us that the labour market data could be mashed together with data derived from learning analytics, providing possibly a more learner centred approach to analytics than has previously been deployed.

If you are interested in any of these ideas have a play on the LMIforAll web site. And feel free to get in touch if you have any questions.

 

 

The challenges of open data: emerging technology to support learner journeys

September 1st, 2014 by Graham Attwell

It is the end of the holidays and time to return back to work. And of course with September starts the autumn conference season. This week I am at the ALT C Conference at Warwick University and then at the European Conference for Educational Research in Porto. More on The ECER conference later.

At Alt C we are organising a workshop on the UKCES open data project (abstract below). And we will also have an exhibition stand. So if you are coming to the conference make sure to drop by the stand – No 16 in the Arts Centre – free coffee and sweets! and say hello.

The challenges of open data: emerging technology to support learner journeys

People make important decisions about their participation in the labour market every year. This extends from pupils in schools, to students in Further and Higher education institutions and individuals at every stage of their career and learning journeys. Whether these individuals are in transition from education and/or training, in employment and wishing to up-skill, re-skill or change their career, or whether they are outside the labour market wishing to re-enter, high quality and impartial labour market information (LMI) is crucial to effective career decision-making. LMI is at the heart of UK Government reforms of careers service provision. Linking and opening up careers focused LMI to optimise access to, and use of, core national data sources is one approach to improving that provision as well as supporting the Open Data policy agenda (see HM Government, 2012). Careers focused LMI can be used to support people make better decisions about learning and work and improve the efficiency of labour markets by helping match supply with demand, and helping institutions in planning future course provision.

A major project, funded by the UK Commission for Employment and Skills, is underway led by a team of data experts at the Institute for Employment Research (University of Warwick) with developers and technologists from Pontydysgu and Raycom designing, developing and delivering a careers LMI webportal, known as LMI for All. The presentation will focus on the challenge of collaborating and collecting evidence at scale between institutions and the social and technological design and development of the database. The database is accessed through an open API, which will be explored during the presentation.

Through open competition developers, including students in FE, have been encouraged to develop their own applications based on the data. Early adopters and developers have developed targeted applications and websites that present LMI in a more engaging way, which are targeted at specific audiences with contrasting needs.The web portal is innovative, as it seeks to link and open up careers focused LMI with the intention of optimising access to, and use of, core national data sources that can be used to support individuals make better decisions about learning and work. It has already won an award from the Open Data Institute.

The presentation will highlight some of the big data and technological challenges the project has addressed. It will also look at how to organise collaboration between institutions and organisations in sharing data to provide new services in education and training.Targeted participants include developers and stakeholders from a range of educational and learning settings.

The session will be interactive with participants able to test out the API, provide feedback and view applications.

Digital Curation

May 13th, 2014 by Graham Attwell

As I wrote in an earlier post, I am signed up for a MOOC on Digital Curation. I will post each assignment on the Wales wide Web as well as in the course forum. This weeks assignment is to introduce ourselves. And I though I had better explain what I was doing lurking in a community of expert librarians, museum staff and the rest.

“I work for Pontydysgu, a small company based in Pontypridd in Wales. Most of our work focuses on the use of new technologies for learning in a range of different contexts including in primary schools, in the community and in work. I am especially interested in informal learning and how informal learning can lead to knowledge development and sharing.

One of the projects we are currently involved in s called Employ-ID. Funded by the European Commission’s Seventh Research Programme it is looking at the chafing professional identities of worker in Public Employment services in Europe and how new technologies can be used for professional development for instance through online coaching.

We are planning to run a series of MOCCs as part of this project and the project partners have agreed themselves to do a MOOC as part of our won learning project.

So why did I choose to do a course of digital curation? I have spent a lot of time working on the development of Open Educational Resources (OERs). Open Educational Resources are resources for learning and teaching that are open to use. But resources means not only content and materials but also tools for content creation and sharing as well as intellectual property licenses for using these resources freely and openly.

Open Educational Resources include: Open courseware and content; Open software tools; Open material for e-learning capacity building of faculty staff; Repositories of learning objects; Free educational courses. C Central to the idea of Open Educational Resources is not only should they be freely available for use but teachers should be able to themselves edit and change these resources to meet their needs and the needs of learner.

It strikes me that many of the digital objects being grated by participants in this course could be a very rick source of learning. more than that it also seems that many of the issues in digital cur action are very similar to those sound OERs – for example

  • how do we classify and structure resources
  • how do we ensure digital resources are discoverable
  • how do we measure the quality of resources
  • how can we encourage people to interact with resources.

And finally I think that the best answers to these questions may come through an interdisciplinary dialogue. So I am looking forward to learning from you!”

What is happening with Learning Analytics?

April 7th, 2014 by Graham Attwell

I seem to be spending a lot of time looking at the potential of various technologies for supporting learning at work. I am not talking here about Virtual Learning Environments. In the construction industry we are looking at how mobile devices can be used to support learning and knowledge sharing between the different contexts of the vocational school, the industrial training centre and the workplace. And through the Employ-ID project we are looking at how to support continuing professional development for workers in public employment organisations across Europe.

None of these is particularly easy. Pedagogically we looking at things like co0counselling and at MOOCs for professional development. And another target on our horizon is Learning Analytics. Like so many things in technology advanced learning, Learning Analytics launched with a big fanfare, then seems to haver sunk under the surface. I was excited by the potential of using data to support learning and wanted to get in there. But there seems to be a problem. Like so often, rather than looking to use the power of Learning Analytics to support learners and learning, institutions have hijacked the application as a learning management tool. Top of the list for UK universities at least is how to reduce drop out rates (since this effects their funding). Rather than look at the effectiveness of teaching and learning, they are more interested in the efficiency of their approach (once more to save money).

So we are back where we have been so many times. We have tools with a great potential to support learners, but institutional managerialism has taken over the agenda. But perhaps I am being overly pessimistic and looking for information in the wrong places. If anyone can point me to examples of how to use Learning Analytics to support real learning please post below.

NB. Another issue concerning me is how to tell users what data we are collecting and how we are using it. Once more, does anyone have any pointers to good practice in this respect

 

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    News Bites

    Peer Review

    According to the Guardian, research conducted with more than 6,300 authors of journal articles, peer reviewers and journal editors revealed that over two-thirds of researchers who have never peer reviewed a paper would like to. Of that group (drawn from the full range of subject areas) more than 60% said they would like the option to attend a workshop or formal training on peer reviewing. At the same time, over two-thirds of journal editors told the researchers that it is difficult to find reviewers


    Teachers and overtime

    According to the TES teachers in the UK “are more likely to work unpaid overtime than staff in any other industry, with some working almost 13 extra hours per week, according to research.

    A study of official figures from the Trades Union Congress (TUC) found that 61.4 per cent of primary school teachers worked unpaid overtime in 2014, equating to 12.9 additional hours a week.

    Among secondary teachers, 57.5 per cent worked unpaid overtime, with an average of 12.5 extra hours.

    Across all education staff, including teachers, teaching assistants, playground staff, cleaners and caretakers, 37.6 per cent worked unpaid overtime – a figure higher than that for any other sector.”


    The future of English Further Education

    The UK Parliament Public Accounts Committee has warned  the declining financial health of many FE colleges has “potentially serious consequences for learners and local economies”.

    It finds funding and oversight bodies have been slow to address emerging financial and educational risks, with current oversight arrangements leading to confusion over who should intervene and when.

    The Report says the Department for Business, Innovation & Skills and the Skills Funding Agency “are not doing enough to help colleges address risks at an early stage”.


    Skills in Europe

    Cedefop is launching a new SKILLS PANORAMA website, online on 1 December at 11.00 (CET).

    Skills Panorama, they say,  turns labour market data and information into useful, accurate and timely intelligence that helps policy-makers decide on skills and jobs in Europe.

    The new website will provide with a more comprehensive and user-friendly central access point for information and intelligence on skill needs in occupations and sectors across Europe. You can register for the launch at Register now at http://skillspanorama.cedefop.europa.eu/launch/.


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