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The biggest barrier to exploiting data analytics for teaching and learning at my institution is lack of access to the actual data. The useful stuff that we are required to analyse and reflect on is packaged for us either in PDF reports or as unstructured tables on web pages. Presumably this is done to make our analysis easier, but it also has the effect of aggregating and filtering the data into forms that the University finds useful, or assumes that we will find useful, or perhaps are most useful for national statistics agencies....

Why can’t the developers of educational platforms create a decent forum? You’d think that there’d be several decades of experience of what works and what doesn’t to call on. However, like most of the (Managed/Virtual) Learning Environments I’ve had to use, and MOOCs that I’ve tried, the edX forum which being used for the Data, Analatics and Learning MOOC (#DALMOOC) is broken. The particular issues that I have are 1) that there’s no mark all items as read button and 2) no way to edit your own posts....

Cloud9 is a cloud-based interactive development environment (IDE) with some killer features. Amongst these is the possibility of creating and hosting a WordPress blog completely free. The blog runs in a Ubuntu instance on Docker and you have complete access to the WordPress’s PHP files using the very capable browser-based IDE. No need for virtual hosting, FTP, or any of that arcane stuff. The IDE provides terminal access to the Docker instance over ssh through the browser and there’s a MySQL database, Git support and built-in support for Bitbucket and GitHub....

So, yesterday I was browsing my twitter feed and favourited a post from Helen Keegan tagged #whyIteach accompanied by the #ccourses hashtag. Today I noticed a tweet from DML Research Hub “Channelling Engelbart: Augmenting Human Education” in which Howard Rheingold interviews Gardner Campbell — also tagged #ccourses. Digging a little deeper I find that #ccourses refers to the Connected Courses course and realised that it’s another connected MOOC-like thing facilitated by some of the usual suspects....

I am very excited by Smallest Federated Wiki (SFW) – the latest project from Ward Cunningham, the inventor of the wiki. I’ve been watching the videos and playing with the software most of yesterday and today. I’ve also been inspired by Mike Caulfeild‘s explorations of the teaching and learning applications of SFW on his blog and on YouTube. Follow up After a bit of a struggle, I have managed to install my own copy of SFW as a node app, backed by a MongoHQ database on Heroku....