Computer assisted formative assessment: supporting students to become more reflective learners

e-Assessment is being advocated in the UK as our way of introducing a more personalised learning agenda throughout the Higher Education sector. This paper discusses the findings from two projects where formative e-assessment has contributed to students taking more control of their own learning. One study set out to provide further insights into the role of electronic formative assessment and to point the way forward to new assessment practices, capitalising on a range of open source tools. The guiding vision was to pilot a series of formative assessments which have the potential to help shape learners as independent thinkers, making their own judgements and decisions about their learning in partnership with their peers and tutors. Other work consisted of evaluating a series of formative assessments given to Philosophy students. Lessons have been learned about the type of feedback that instructors and students think will be most useful and how using theis type of application promotes self reflection. The research reported here starts to illustrate how technology can be adapted to become more 'fit for pedagogical purpose?. The feedback offered by these systems encourages learner metacognition and aims to empower students to reflect and become independent thinkers. This approach sits well within a constructivist paradigm which has often been less well served in the past through formal summative assessment which is not an integral part of the knowledge construction process

Promoting and Nurturing Interactions with Open Access Books: Strategies for Publishers and Authors (1.0).:A COPIM WP6 Research and Scoping Report

This report explores how publishers and authors can promote, nurture, and facilitate interaction with openly available books. Open access (obviously) opens up scholarship, but it also offers scope to enhance interactions between books, scholars, publishers, resources, librarians, and of course readers. This might take the form of creating communities and conversations around books, of gathering comments and hyperlinks, or of enabling updating, remixing and reusing, translating, modifying, reviewing, versioning, and forking of existing books. Open access, in short can create additional value and new avenues and formats that go beyond openness, by changing how people interact with books. Research shows that making books available in open access enhances discovery and online consultation (Snijder, 2019), but the short outline above makes clear that there is still a lot to be done to stimulate, explore, and practice the full range of book interactions made possible by open access. The first part of this report provides a literature overview that identifies the opportunities that digital technologies and enhanced interactions with open access books can provide for scholarship; it outlines some of the main types of interactions around scholarship—and around and as part of open access books more in particular—that scholars are involved in; and it showcases some of the experiments within humanities book publishing with reuse and remix; finally it presents some of the main (technological and socio-cultural) inhibitions that have prevented further uptake of these practices. The second part of this report more closely explores the technical dependencies that the introduced interactions and affordances rely upon. Doing so, it outlines and showcases various open source tools, software, technologies, platforms, infrastructures, guidelines and best practices, that lend themselves to being adopted by publishers and authors (or by publishers and authors working in collaboration with each other) to facilitate interaction around their book(s). The third part of this report then summarises the findings of the previous parts and provides recommendations, guidelines, and strategies (again, both socio-cultural and technological) for publishers and authors to further open up their books and collections to community interaction and reuse. Who is this Report for? The main communities we want to reach with this report are publishers and authors/scholars (or communities of scholars), to explore how they, by experimenting and often just making simple adjustments, can start to open up and stimulate interactions around their books. Where larger (commercial) publishers often have the resources to develop tools and workflows for interaction in-house (and often proprietary), scholar-led publishers, for example, although they have been at the vanguard of more experimental forms of publishing, have indicated that they often lack expertise and familiarity with more experimental forms of publishing and with the tools available to support them (Adema and Stone, 2017). We therefore focus in this report on open source tools and openly and freely available resources and guidelines that can help small-scale and not-for-profit book publishers that cannot afford to build their own custom platforms, to stimulate engagement around books. We also show various examples throughout this report of how publishers, publishing collectives and platforms, authors, and scholarly communities already are stimulating interaction around books in interesting ways and the tools and practices they have adopted to do so. This report focuses on interactions with books and on books within the humanities and social sciences in particular. Many of the types of interaction and interactive practices we describe within this report (such as for example open peer review and data mining), are being used and adopted more commonly within the STEM fields (where their uptake is also more widely researched). The humanities (and to a lesser extent the social sciences) in general have lower adoption rates where it concerns these types of practices and also have field specific preferences (as well as prejudices) towards many of these practices, which will be taken into account and further discussed in this report. Types of Interaction As part of our research we have identified several types of scholarly interaction taking place around books. The first part of this report is structured around some of the more common kinds of interaction that open access books afford: annotations, open peer review, remix and reuse, social scholarship and networked books, and emergent practices (including versioning, forking, and human computer interactions). This report doesn’t aim to cover all forms of interaction around books but has chosen to focus on the kinds of interactions that publishers and scholars would be able to promote and recreate with relatively simple adaptations to their workflows, systems, practices, and licensing. Each of the above identified types of interaction around books will be discussed in the next section, including how we can stimulate them and what obstacles currently exist towards their more general implementation. Throughout the next part of this report we will also be providing examples from within humanities book publishing to illustrate the different kinds of interaction. --- --- --- --- --- --- The report has itself been published in an experimental way. Making use of the advanced versioning functionalities offered by PubPub, we will iteratively update this document over the remainder of the project, thus allowing us to incorporate user feedback and new technological developments. Hence, we would be really grateful for constructive feedback from the communities out there who are already experimenting with new forms of interaction. Please don’t hesitate to leave comments either on the PubPub version (account and login required), or get in touch via email at [email protected] The report is published as a PDF here on Zenodo, while a more interactive book version that is available as a PubPub book.Community-led Open Publishing Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM) is supported by the Research England Development (RED) Fund, and Arcadia—a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin

TreeSpark: A Distributed Tool for Progeny Analysis based on Spark

Progeny analyses are useful in biological sciences for various purposes, such as improving individuals in new generations or carrying out molecular analysis of the transmission of genetic characteristics. Analyzing these data by making comparisons between individuals of a generation with their offspring is not a trivial task, and increases in complexity as more and more generations are incorporated. In this article, we present TreeSpark, an open source tool to carry out progeny analysis and provides functionality that allows simple access to the information of the individuals and their relations both as progenitors and descendants. This tool is developed as a Python module, which in turn inherits the distributed processing features of Spark, allowing it to process large volumes of progeny information. TreeSpark is compared with other similar tools, finding TreeSpark much simpler to use.Workshop: WBDMD - Base de Datos y Minería de DatosRed de Universidades con Carreras en Informátic

Exploring the Interplay between CAD and FreeFem++ as an Energy Decision-Making Tool for Architectural Design

The energy modelling software tools commonly used for architectural purposes do not allow a straightforward real-time implementation within the architectural design programs. In addition, the surrounding exterior spaces of the building, including the inner courtyards, hardly present a specific treatment distinguishing these spaces from the general external temperature in the thermal simulations. This is a clear disadvantage when it comes to streamlining the design process in relation to the whole-building energy optimization. In this context, the present study aims to demonstrate the advantages of the FreeFem++ open source program for performing simulations in architectural environments. These simulations include microclimate tests that describe the interactions between a building architecture and its local exterior. The great potential of this mathematical tool can be realized through its complete system integration within CAD (Computer-Aided Design) software such as SketchUp or AutoCAD. In order to establish the suitability of FreeFem++ for the performance of simulations, the most widely employed energy simulation tools able to consider a proposed architectural geometry in a specific environment are compared. On the basis of this analysis, it can be concluded that FreeFem++ is the only program displaying the best features for the thermal performance simulation of these specific outdoor spaces, excluding the currently unavailable easy interaction with architectural drawing programs. The main contribution of this research is, in fact, the enhancement of FreeFem++ usability by proposing a simple intuitive method for the creation of building geometries and their respective meshing (pre-processing). FreeFem++ is also considered a tool for data analysis (post-processing) able to help engineers and architects with building energy-efficiency-related tasks

Harnessing Collaborative Technologies: Helping Funders Work Together Better

This report was produced through a joint research project of the Monitor Institute and the Foundation Center. The research included an extensive literature review on collaboration in philanthropy, detailed analysis of trends from a recent Foundation Center survey of the largest U.S. foundations, interviews with 37 leading philanthropy professionals and technology experts, and a review of over 170 online tools.The report is a story about how new tools are changing the way funders collaborate. It includes three primary sections: an introduction to emerging technologies and the changing context for philanthropic collaboration; an overview of collaborative needs and tools; and recommendations for improving the collaborative technology landscapeA "Key Findings" executive summary serves as a companion piece to this full report

Designing relational pedagogies with jam2jamXO

This paper examines the affordances of the philosophy and practice of open source and the application of it in developing music education software. In particular I will examine the parallels inherent in the ‘openness’ of pragmatist philosophy in education (Dewey 1916, 1989) such as group or collaborative learning, discovery learning (Bruner 1966) and learning through creative activity with computers (Papert 1980, 1994). Primarily I am interested in ‘relational pedagogies’ (Ruthmann and Dillon In Press) which is in a real sense about the ethics of the transaction between student and teacher in an ecology where technology plays a more significant role. In these contexts relational pedagogies refers to how the music teacher manages their relationships with students and evaluates the affordances of open source technology in that process. It is concerned directly with how the relationship between student and teacher is affected by the technological tools, as is the capacity for music making and learning. In particular technologies that have agency present the opportunity for a partnership between user and technology that enhances the capacity for expressive music making, productive social interaction and learning. In this instance technologies with agency are defined as ones that enhance the capacity to be expressive and perform tasks with virtuosity and complexity where the technology translates simple commands and gestures into complex outcomes. The technology enacts a partnership with the user that becomes both a cognitive and performative amplifier. Specifically we have used this term to describe interactions with generative technologies that use procedural invention as a creative technique to produce music and visual media