Author: Matt Lingard

Testing ALT-C Conference Reader

It’s ALTC2013 in a couple of weeks and I’m involved in testing the new conference website being developed by @mhawksey The site includes a version of Martin’s Reader tool which uses the WordPress plugin FeedWordPress. It was first developed for, and can be seen in action on the ocTEL website.

At City we have used the same plugin for our EdTech: Education & Technology blog which acts as a gateway to all the learning technology related blogs at the university.

If this test works then this post will appear in the Conference Reader as my blog is registered with the site and I have included altc2013 in the post or title text.

Infographic Investigated – Style over Substance

A look at the data behind a recent infographic that did the rounds on Twitter. Not quite what it seems.

I love infographics. They just look so darn good. And yet… I’ve always been quite sceptical about them, so today I’ve dissected one of this week’s popular infographics to see what’s behind it. Quite revealing.

You may have seen the infographic – it’s about students’ use of smartphones.  JISC was one of many that tweeted it to their network:

Screenshot of JISC Tweethttps://twitter.com/Jisc/status/362499544505786369

The original infographic was created by The Snugg, a company that sells smartphone & tablet covers & the infographic appeared in a post Students spend their lives wired in to their phones on 13th June. However the tweets I read this week were all linking to a 17th July post This Is How Students Actually Use Smartphones on Edudemic, a US education & technology site which offers “tools, tips, resources, visuals, and guest posts” and claims 1 million visitors a month.

UK or not UK? Students?

The reason this infographic caught my eye was that the Edudemic post stated it was about UK students and this was highlighted in several of the tweets. The infographic & the Snugg post includes money in £s and refers to UK phone networks. BUT when you delve deeper the source data is actually a mix of US & UK data and not all about students.

Data Sources

The Snugg infographic includes a list of sources. Handy. As it’s an image, the links are not clickable and some are a pain to type. Not so handy.

SNUGG Infograph

Unfortuanately one of the sites (3. below) is unavailable. This is a shame as the other 4 sources appear to contribute very little to the infographic.

  1. http://www.oncampuspromotions.co.uk/2011/07/students-mobile-phone-habits-and-usage/ As the URL shows this is a 2011 article. Click through and you’ll see it’s a 7 question survey of 100 1st & 2nd students. I can’t find any of this data in the infographic, in fact it seems to contradict it but then it is 2-years old! 😉
  2. https://fb-public.app.box.com/s/3iq5x6uwnqtq7ki4q8wk This is a market research report by IDC on behalf of Facebook. It’s a survey of 7,446 US smartphone owners, aged 18-44 undertaken in March 2013. Note the age. The report includes some 18-24 data but IDC state that 18-24 year olds were under-represented. No mention of students. The data at the top of the infographic about how quickly 18-24 year olds reach for their smartphone comes from here. That seems to be all.
  3. http://testkitchen.colorado.edu/projects/reports/smartphone/smartphone-survey/ This site is currently unavailable. Potentially the main source of the infographic. I’ve not been able to find out much about Colorado’s Digital Media Test Kitchen (there’s a 2011 article and they posted on Facebook in May 2012). It’s possible that the survey is from 2010 as I found this reference (see [15]) that refers to a survey with a similar URL. But impossible to know. Given that it’s based in Boulder Colorado it seems more likely that this is US data. Update 5/8/2013 – See comment below from Emma Tonkin. It is a 2010 survey and I’m struggling to see how it informs the infographic.
  4. http://www.savethestudent.org/money/student-budgeting/what-do-students-spend-their-money-on.html This post is based on a 2012 student finance survey of 2,219 UK university students. The only figure I can spot in the infographic that comes from here is the £24 a month spend on mobile phones.
  5. http://www.mobot.net/cost-repair-blackberry-screen/ My favourite ‘source’. A discussion post. Doesn’t appear to contribute to the infographic (other than as a source!). Thankfully.

I’ve always been sceptical of this kind of technology / social media infographic but the lack of data behind this one has really surprised me, although until I see the testkitchen survey I should reserve full judgement…

Update 5/8/2013 – having now browsed the archived site of testkitchen’s 2010 survey I think I can conclude that:

  • Hardly any of the information in the infographic comes from the cited sources – I make it 2 items.
  • The only item in the infographic from a cited source about UK students is that they spend £24 a month on mobile phone (2012).

Another quick search this morning  tells me that the real source of some of this data appears to be a 2011 survey done at the University of Sheffield! http://shef.ac.uk/polopoly_fs/1.103665!/file/mobilesurvey2011.pdf

I reckon infographic investigation would make a great student activity.

Brief Overview of MOOCs

Visuals from a recent MOOC talk I did at SMUC

I gave a short ‘intro to MOOCs’ talk at the St Mary’s University College E-Learning Staff Development day on 17th July, organised by friend & ex-colleague Hervé Didiot-Cook. The slides don’t tell the whole story of course but they will give you a good idea of what I covered. More about the event in Easy Tools Please on TED team blog.

Coursera under fire in MOOCs licensing row (Republished)

The following post was originally published at The Conversation under a Creative Commons Attribution/No derivatives licence. See their Republishing Guidelines for further information.

It’s a bit fiddly to republish at present as you must manually insert their logo and link to them. The HTML of the article is supplied and it would be great if logo & licence details could be automatically included 🙂

Read the original article.

Coursera under fire in MOOCs licensing row

By Megan Clement, The Conversation

A prominent member of the open education movement, former Open University Vice-Chancellor Sir John Daniel, has criticised online education provider Coursera for not making its materials available under creative commons licensing.

Coursera is one of the largest providers of MOOCs – Massive Open Online Courses – which allow students to take university courses for free online from anywhere in the world.

MOOCs have been credited with democratising higher education, making it available for those who cannot afford to attend prestigious universities. But providers like Coursera have come under fire in recent months for undermining academic jobs, not providing adequate accreditation, and, in this latest controversy, not adhering closely enough to the “open” part of the MOOC acronym. Continue reading “Coursera under fire in MOOCs licensing row (Republished)”

No Talking at the Back

A Twitter Backchannel pre-conference workshop for the Learning @ City Conference

I don’t usually ‘write-up’ or share my work workshops here, but this was a little different because 1) it was the first for a long time (my first at City!) 2) It was using iPads (for my first time) 3) it had the best set of feedback I’ve ever had.

No Talking at the Back was a pre-conference workshop for the Learning @ City 2013 conference. The workshop ran 3 times – once for edtech staff and then twice with conference delegates. It’s an introduction to using Twitter to participate in ‘backchannel communication’ during live events such as conferences. There were some pre-workshop activities (including creating an account) and the session itself was a lot of hands-on practical stuff with some discussion around topics such as is it OK to tweet photos of fellow delegates.

Myself and the attendees all used iPads in the workshop which worked really well. I used Prezi to structure the session but much of my presentation was demonstration. It was a slightly strange situation (as it always is) to have participants communicating and interacting with each other online when sitting a few feet from each other but it seemed to work.

[gigya src=”http://prezi.com/bin/preziloader.swf” allowfullscreen=”true” allowscriptaccess=”always” width=”550″ height=”400″ bgcolor=”#ffffff” flashvars=”prezi_id=j6po9rgvizns&lock_to_path=0&color=ffffff&autoplay=no&autohide_ctrls=0″ ]

 

I had some great individual comments in the feedback and 100% chose Very Good for the workshop overall. More importantly everyone said they might change their practice as a result of the workshop – Yes (4 people), Probably (5) & Possibly (3). Summary of Feedback

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