This has been a bit of a meeting-tastic week for me, and so most of my time has been taken up with internal developments here at GCU. All quite exciting for me but not so much in terms of a blog post. However I still have had half an eye on the rest of the world, well parts of it at least.
On Monday I went to the 3rd Open Data Glasgow Meet up. As one of community organisers is was heartening to see a core of regulars building up, and of course welcome new faces. The presentations were as diverse as ever from using wikipedia for developing research and scholarly skills at the Glasgow School of Art, where a number of secret wikipedians have been ‘outed’; to using open source designs and 3-D printers to build boat houses in the Hebrides. Added to this mix was a touch of open science and another up date from the Glasgow Future Cities demonstrator Project. I collated a twitter time line of the event which gives an overview of the presentations.
The NMC HE Horizon report was released. I’m not even going to attempt to review it (David Hopkins has done a great round up of reviews), but I can easily match most of the key trends, significant challenges and important developments to activities and/or areas in need of development within my own institution. I still have reservations the relevance of big data approaches in assessment in my context at this point in time. We are seeing a really big up take in e-assessment which is great. But it is going to take a while for the analytics side of things to become part and parcel of the emerging workflows/practices of our staff. At this stage, we need to a lot of work on developing (relatively) small and local approaches to data. We really are just taking baby steps in terms of actually getting the data in the first place never mind be in a position to make any sense of it. A more pressing priority just now is ensuring that e-assessment systems are reliable. As many of you know many of us in the UK HE sector are more than a little bit cross with certain well known similarity checking system.
Probably more interesting to me than the report were the video entries for the ELI video competition which show real examples of a number of the trends, challenges and developments from the report itself.
The HEA also released their flexible pedagogies report, which is a bit a contrast to the NMC report, but has some useful overview information in it.
Developing staff (and student) digital literacies were featured in the NMC and ALT ‘s Special Issue: Scholarship and Literacies in a Digital Age includes a fascinating range of papers around digital literacy issues – weekend reading for me I think.
