My Games Design

Just a very short post to point to a couple of things that might be useful for the final assignment: 1) A research proposal outline - posted by Sonja 2) Assignment guide for H809 - James suggests reading from page 7 onwards 3) A link to some videos on educational theories - posted in the blogs 4) Oh, and please don't forget to fill in the course survey here . Good luck with finishing your ECAs!

First off, apologies to H809ers for my absence over the last couple of weeks. I'm afraid that submitting my probation report, going back home for a family wedding and presenting at my research group conference ( CALRG ; a post on the conference to follow soon) has meant that H809 has had to take a bit of a back seat. So I haven't been doing the reading for Block 3 but for excellent summaries and commentary on the last few weeks, please have a look at Juliette Culver's blog . In week 11, she raises some wothwhile points about how candid (or not) people are when filling in surveys while also discussing the notions of validity and reliability (where she notes "reliability is about whether you can consistently achieve the same results using methods, validity is about whether your methods tell you what you claim they do"). I think she also raises some interesting issues surrounding the concept of ethnographic research in weeks 13&14 , especially in relation to virt...

Well, everyone seems to have been busy with their second assignment so there's not been a massive amount of activity online for H809 the last couple of weeks. I did finally get around to reading the last few papers but have been pretty busy myself as I've been preparing for my upcoming probation report. And I'm probably going to be quite busy with this for a while, as it's essentially a test of whether I sound like I have a good enough grasp on what I want to do, why it's worth doing and how I'm going to do it, so I can prove I'm ready for my second year of PhD study. If it sounds straight forward, it's not as these are surprisingly difficult questions to answer but I'm sure that the whole process means I'm at least going to come up with a plan! But yes, I'm probably going to be a bit quiet over the next couple of weeks (at least until my report is due in on May 18th) though I will be keeping an eye on what's happening on the blogs at lea...

Ok , I think I've always been about a week behind with the posts but it also looks like people on the course are trying to play catch up too, and I've been pretty busy with PhD work , so I am probably a bit more behind than usual. And yeah, I haven't caught up on the reading for weeks 8 and 9 either... But anyway. Week 7 has been interesting, but before I go on to that I wanted to post a couple of interesting links that have popped up on the forums since last week. The first is to a blog post called " How Online Communities and Flawed Reasoning Sound a Death Knell for Qualitative Methods ". The second is related to last weeks discussions on audiences, and is a link to a New Scientist article on how the media can distort research findings . There was a little more talk about audiences and ethics as well, with it being pointed out that often a researchers write for themselves in order to clarify and work through ideas (i.e. you are your own audience) and that the ...

I had thought about combining this post with a week 7 entry, as it is a little overdue, but the forums have been a bit quiet so I thought I'd focus on week 6 and wait a little longer to give people a chance to discuss the relevant activities. The theme of week 6 was audiences and ethics, and while there was no set reading to discuss, students were asked to listen to a podcast - which anyone can listen to from here (thanks to Juliette for posting the link). The podcast was discussion between James Aczel , Eileen Scanlon , Cindy Kerawalla , and Chris Jones about the impact of different audiences on the process of research and how it is reported. Discussions in the forums highlighted the importance of pitching proposals to funders in such a way as to justify the research planned (including a consideration of any ethical issues), the need to be cautious of distorting the findings by oversimplifying the message (e.g. when reporting to a non-technical audience), and how there can often...

This is just a quick post to wrap up the last of block 1 so we can all start afresh for the next part of the course. I can imagine that everyone has been very busy getting the first assignment in (due today) so things have been a little quieter. In week four, there was some discussion about referencing tools and bibliographic software. It's something I have to keep reminding myself to do - keep track of what I'm reading and where to find it - but I have to admit I don't always stay on top of. But, once you get to grips with the tool you are using, it's one of those things that will actually save you time in the long run and well worth it. The main tools that have come up in the discussions include Refworks , Endnote and Zotero (which is the one I actually use). I did have a go at Endnote but Zotero just seems easier - I love the fact I can add references just straight from my browser, though you do need to be using Firefox to do so). Plus, if you use it in combinat...

I had been meaning to get this post out earlier but have been busy this week trying to submit a conference paper. But it's all in now, so will have to wait and see how it goes. Students were asked to use academic search engines such as Google Scholar and ISI Web of Science (which you need to access through the OU library page , under databases but remember to sign in first) to find papers and evaluate their impact by checking how many times the papers had been cited. It seems that while this turned out to be a rather time consuming task and that not everyone got the same results, most people concluded that the last two readings didn't seem to have a huge impact and some students started to question whether number of citations was the only way to measure impact - surely having to read them for the course means they have an impact, despite not adding to how many times they have been cited? There were two readings for this week; the first of which was " How can learning ...

Technically, I guess H809 is in week three, but it seems to make sense to post about the previous works activities (some of which are carrying on) rather than on trying to provide some sort of 'this just happened' account. I thought it would also be worth sharing some wikipedia links that came up in the forums for anyone who was having trouble with the stats reported in last weeks paper - the first concerns F-ratios , and the second ANOVAs . It might also be useful to look at the course wiki (sign in required) to see how some of the students have used it to integrate their different accounts of how technology has been used in education over the years. This activity will help prove useful further on in the course as we start to consider how to contextualise educational research. A link that might be useful for finding relevant articles was also posted in the cafe for Journals in the field of technology enhanced learning . Week two's reading was ‘Using computer-based text a...

Well it's been just over a week and things have definitely got going with H809. Students have been busy introducing themselves, and it seems there is quite a range of people on the course, with a variety of backgrounds and expertise ( as was last year's group ). There's also been a certain amount of becoming familiar with the VLE , I know I'm still getting used to the forums but I am starting to feel less confused about where everything is, and less overwhelmed by the number of posts! There are even a few blogs popping up - I've listed the public ones under H809 on the left hand side of this page, though there are also a couple that are just open to OU users. Not much is happening on these just yet but there have been a few posts e.g. Juliette Culver introducing her research background and her thoughts on educational research, and Mike Protts reflecting on the first course reading. Hopefully, we'll see a few more starting up and some further discussion as the...

As a kind of introductory H809 post (though most of this will probably apply to anyone who is thinking about setting up there own blog), I wanted to talk about some of the blogging tools that are out there for people to use and what sort of questions you need to ask yourself when deciding what to use. I figured the easiest way to go about this was to try and compare some of the tools available so I'm going to talk about the OU blogging tool (available as part of the VLE ), Blogger and Wordpress . Note: there is also wordpress .org , where you can download a bit of blogging software and need your own domain name to host your blog, but I'm going to be discussing W ordpress .com where they host your blog for you. Obviously, I am most familiar with blogger, but I did have a play with the OU tool and a chat with another student at in IET , Anesa Hosein , about her experience with W ordpress .com. With respect to the OU blogging tool (you can find this via the StudentHome websi...

In good news, I have managed to get myself some part-time work! I'm quite excited about it not just because it's a chance to gain some useful experience and earn some extra cash but I think the post is going to be a bit of an experiment in and of itself. I'm going to be helping out on a 20 week OU course called "Practice based research in educational technology" (H809) , which ran for the first time last year. The course aims to help students locate, understand and evaluate empirical research within the area of technology enhanced learning in order to answer questions such as "How strong is the evidence for claims made about the use of ICT in edcuation?", and "How can we use theory to improve things?". It can be taken as part of a masters program or seen as a stepping stone to further study (e.g. PhD) and is aimed at teachers, lecturers, and education professional who have an interest how ICT is being used and evaluated within education. You ca...