Activity Data Synthesis

In true tabloid vernacular I think it's fair to say that this week's Tabbloid is 'a whopper' and I can tell that the OU RISE project team are certainly back from their holidays.

Some of the projects have posted their official 'final blogpost' {wipes tear from corner of eye} but I have a feeling that we will continue to see further blogposts from them in the weeks to come. Here are the project's final blogposts, no doubt there will be another flurry of them before the week is out:

• Leeds Met STAR-Trak
• Open University RISE [I particularly like the way they've sneaked in an extra lesson learnt by prefacing it with "If we were allowed a Lesson 4".]
• Huddersfield LIDP

Other newsworthy news (ahem) this week:

• The OU RISE team released their code for all to plunder as they see fit - I'm guessing there will be no way of tracking who makes use of it (is there?) but as time goes by it will be interesting to see whether anyone takes advantage of the work done by the RISE team in developing their own applications (I really wanted to use the phrase 'long tail' there but managed to stop myself).
• The AGtivity team published a few gems this week:
  
  • Recipe for 'Plotting Calendar Data with GNUPlot'
• Case Study 2: Testing, Testing, Testing [analysing their data to identify and evaluate the effectiveness of their QA service]
• Case Study 3: To Book or Not To Book
• Case Study 4: CO2, Loads Of It [about quantifying the CO2 savings from holding meetings using their video conference facilities]

• I know I use the phrase 'thought provoking' a lot in these synthesis posts but that is the perfect descriptor for Leeds Met STAR-Trak's post on the domain knowledge chasm that they discovered in the course of running feedback workshops with students and staff.
• Both the OU RISE and the SALT projects have been thinking deep thoughts about licensing this week (which is handy for me as I'm just finalising the draft guide on that very topic).

And finally, some other links of interest regarding activity data within academia and without the wider world:

• Tony Hirst recommended a book on Tesco's early use of customer data
• Ben Showers tweeted a link to the Ariadne article 'Looking for the Link between Library Usage and Attainment' authored by none other than Graham Stone et al from Huddersfield (published earlier this month).
• Google's public data visualiser thingymajig