Tag: OER

Research as Hypermedia Narrative

As part of our university-wide doctoral training programme, which we’re opening increasingly to the world as open educational resources, here’s the webcast and multimedia resources from my keynote at last week’s Open University Research Methods conference. The Cloudscape from this event, which was live-blogged, is itself a great resource to mine (see also the Research Skills clouds).

It was fun putting this together, and I squeezed in as many movies and live demos as possible from the many projects we’ve done with Compendium to illustrate how far Bush’s original conception of the Memex has come, and how far a particular hypermedia tool with a very simple notation can go…

In this talk I will introduce the work of the Hypermedia Discourse Group at the Knowledge Media Institute, which is focusing on how software tools may shape the future of scholarship. Our particular interest is in how new forms of narrative can emerge through the use of hypertext tools that treat ideas, problems and arguments as coherent networks of nodes. This enables us to reframe qualitative data analysis, and scientific publishing, as the construction of narrative networks, grounded in primary sources. I will illustrate this with examples from projects including the NASA Mobile Agents project, the Hewlett Foundation OLnet project, and the AHRC+EPRSC+JISC e-Dance project.

OER Collective Intelligence Widgets: storyboard

As an investigator on the Hewlett Foundation-funded Open Learning Network project (a collaboration between OU and CMU) [olnet.org], my specific interest is to investigate ways to weave a socio-technical infrastructure that will assist the movement in pooling its collective intelligence.

We’re inviting feedback from participants at this week’s OER Conference, and from all members of the OER community, on a design storyboard that goes like this. Working with you, OLnet develops some “widgets” (attractive little apps you can embed in your OER website), which enable us to crowdsource input from the community. These are channelled back to the OLnet website which pools the data, generates aggregate views, offers recommendations of related people and resources to your interests, etc.

OER Collective Intelligence storyboardWith commentary…


Questions for you are therefore…

  1. What do you think of this design storyboard?
  2. What would make these widgets ‘killer apps’ for you?
    …so that you’d want to have these on your website, e.g. as an OER educator, learner, publisher, remixer, researcher, funder…? Depending on which hat(s) you wear, you might ask yourself:
    What would I like to know about an OER before deciding to use it to learn, or teach with?
    What would I like to know about the state of the art in a given debate, before deciding whether to enter it, or fund work on it?

Tell us what you think…

OLnet: Researching the open world

olnet-logosLaunched today at OER 2009, Monterey, William and Flora Hewlett Foundation is supporting The Open University and Carnegie Mellon University to develop the Open Learning Network — OLnet.

The aim of OLnet is to gather evidence and methods about how we can research and understand ways to learn in a more open world, particularly linked to Open Educational Resources (OER) but also looking at other influences.

The sociotechnical infrastructure that we will be putting in place will be a form of collective intelligence, enabling the community to pool and debate the evidence for the effectiveness of OERs and OER design tools, and the challenges facing the movement.

Right now we have a Research Fellowship on Collective Intelligence Infrastructure on offer…

Research Fellow: Collective Intelligence Infrastructure

The Open University UK

Research Fellow: Collective Intelligence Infrastructure

The Open University’s Knowledge Media Institute (KMi) invites applications for a 3 year Research Fellowship on Collective Intelligence Infrastructure. This position is in the context of the Open Learning Network (OLnet) – www.olnet.org – a joint project led by the Open University and Carnegie Mellon University, funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. The Open Educational Resources (OER) movement aims to maximise the impact of free, high quality learning resources. OLnet is charged with building the capacity of researchers and practitioners in the design, deployment and assessment of OER. Specifically, we aim to build a social and technical infrastructure enabling new forms of networked research and scholarship in OER. This is currently conceived in terms of connecting people, mapping debates in key challenges facing the field, facilitating the exchange and evolution of OER design patterns and tools, and building a multimedia evidence-base of OER effectiveness.

This position is for an emerging research leader, able to coordinate with both the UK/US teams, and OLnet’s global partners in developed and developing countries. Your task is challenging: to conceptualise OLnet as a form of collective intelligence, and to architect a CI infrastructure from a human-centred computing perspective. As detailed below, you wish to develop your research profile by applying your expertise in knowledge-building infrastructure to the demanding requirements of the OER movement. This post will also enable you to develop your skills in project management, leadership, dissemination, bid writing and PhD supervision.

The appointment will be made on the Academic Grade AC3 Salary Scales for Research Staff, ranging from £36,532 – £43,622 pa, depending on qualifications and experience. This post will be managed by Dr. Simon Buckingham Shum, one of the OLnet investigators, and leader of the Hypermedia Discourse team in KMi.

KMi is a highly successful interdisciplinary research centre founded at The Open University in 1995, and located in attractive premises at The Open University’s main campus in Milton Keynes, UK. We offer a stimulating environment, widely acknowledged to be at the leading edge of research and development, particularly in semantic web technologies, multimedia and information systems, knowledge modelling and management, new media for learning and sensemaking. KMi is part of the OU’s Centre for Research in Computing, ranked as one of the top 20 research centres in the UK RAE 2008. The style, impact and content of our work can be seen at http://kmi.open.ac.uk

Further Particulars: PDF

Informal queries:

Dr Simon Buckingham Shum
Senior Lecturer in Knowledge Media / SocialLearn Project Director
Knowledge Media Institute, The Open University, Walton Hall, Milton Keynes, MK7 6AA, UK
KMi: +44 (0)1908 655723 | SocialLearn: 332594
Mobile: +44 (0)7947 243986 | Skype: sbskmi
http://people.kmi.open.ac.uk/sbs