From flowers to palms: 40 years of policy for online learning

This year sees the 40th anniversary of the first policy paper regarding the use of computers in higher education in the United Kingdom. The publication of this paper represented the beginning of the field of learning technology research and practice in higher education. In the past 40 years, policy has at various points drawn from different communities and provided the roots for a diverse field of learning technology researchers and practitioners. This paper presents a review of learning technology-related policy over the past 40 years. The purpose of the review is to make sense of the current position in which the field finds itself, and to highlight lessons that can be learned from the implementation of previous policies. Conclusions drawn from the review of 40 years of learning technology policy suggest that there are few challenges that have not been faced before as well as a potential return to individual innovation

Semantic web learning technology design: addressing pedagogical challenges and precarious futures

Semantic web technologies have the potential to extend and transform teaching and learning, particularly in those educational settings in which learners are encouraged to engage with ‘authentic’ data from multiple sources. In the course of the ‘Ensemble’ project, teachers and learners in different disciplinary contexts in UK Higher Education worked with educational researchers and technologists to explore the potential of such technologies through participatory design and rapid prototyping. These activities exposed some of the barriers to the development and adoption of emergent learning technologies, but also highlighted the wide range of factors, not all of them technological or pedagogical, that might contribute to enthusiasm for and adoption of such technologies. This suggests that the scope and purpose of research and design activities may need to be broadened and the paper concludes with a discussion of how the tradition of operaismo or ‘workers’ enquiry’ may help to frame such activities. This is particularly relevant in a period when the both educational institutions and the working environments for which learners are being prepared are becoming increasingly fractured, and some measure of ‘precarity’ is increasingly the norm

'Regeneration for practitioners' at the University of Chester: Using a flexible, work based framework to deliver demand based education for professional regenerators

This conference paper discusses the development of a regeneration programme at the University of Chester

Evaluating Mobile Learning: Reflections on Current Practice

The field of mobile learning is at present characterised by a proliferation of pilots and trials that allow mobile technologies to be tested out in a variety of learning contexts. The sustained deployment of mobile learning will depend on the quality of these pilots and trials, which includes evaluation methodology and reporting. The paper examines current evaluation practice, based on evidence drawn from conference publications, published case studies, and other accounts from the literature. The authors also draw on their work in collecting case studies of mobile learning from a range of recent projects. Issues deserving examination include the apparent objectives of the pilots or trials, the nature of the evaluations, instruments and techniques used, and the analysis and presentation of findings. The paper reflects on the quality of evaluation in mobile learning pilots and trials, in the broader context of evolving practices in the evaluation of educational technologies

Educational development units: the challenge of quality enhancement in a changing environment

Reviews the role of the Educational Development Unit and suggests that such units should focus primarily on building a learning environment appropriate to its host university, rather than paying a disproportionate amounts of attention to externally imposed targets. A unit should not of course ignore those targets, rather it should endeavour to manage them in a way that meets the work patterns of its own institution

Architecture of Environmental Risk Modelling: for a faster and more robust response to natural disasters

Demands on the disaster response capacity of the European Union are likely to increase, as the impacts of disasters continue to grow both in size and frequency. This has resulted in intensive research on issues concerning spatially-explicit information and modelling and their multiple sources of uncertainty. Geospatial support is one of the forms of assistance frequently required by emergency response centres along with hazard forecast and event management assessment. Robust modelling of natural hazards requires dynamic simulations under an array of multiple inputs from different sources. Uncertainty is associated with meteorological forecast and calibration of the model parameters. Software uncertainty also derives from the data transformation models (D-TM) needed for predicting hazard behaviour and its consequences. On the other hand, social contributions have recently been recognized as valuable in raw-data collection and mapping efforts traditionally dominated by professional organizations. Here an architecture overview is proposed for adaptive and robust modelling of natural hazards, following the Semantic Array Programming paradigm to also include the distributed array of social contributors called Citizen Sensor in a semantically-enhanced strategy for D-TM modelling. The modelling architecture proposes a multicriteria approach for assessing the array of potential impacts with qualitative rapid assessment methods based on a Partial Open Loop Feedback Control (POLFC) schema and complementing more traditional and accurate a-posteriori assessment. We discuss the computational aspect of environmental risk modelling using array-based parallel paradigms on High Performance Computing (HPC) platforms, in order for the implications of urgency to be introduced into the systems (Urgent-HPC).Comment: 12 pages, 1 figure, 1 text box, presented at the 3rd Conference of Computational Interdisciplinary Sciences (CCIS 2014), Asuncion, Paragua

Using a work based learning framework to deliver regeneration education for practitioners at the University of Chester

This is the author's PDF version of an article published in Ad-Lib© 2009. The definitive version is available at www.cont-ed.cam.ac.uk/institute-media/pdfs/adlib/adlib38.pdfThis article discusses a regeneration practitioner programme delivered through the work based learning and integrative studies programme at the University of Chester

Technology-enhanced learning as a site for interdisciplinary research

This briefing on Interdisciplinary Research is the fifth publication of its kind emerging from the Technology Enhanced Learning Research programme (TEL). TEL is a £12m programme running from 2007-2012 with eight large interdisciplinary projects aiming to combine technological and pedagogical expertise to improve outcomes for learners. The programme is funded jointly by the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council and Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council. TEL also commissions analyses of key theoretical, practical and policy issues across and beyond the eight projects, and in the wider TEL field