Activity Data Synthesis

It's a double header blog round up as I look back over the past two weeks of blog and twitter activity within the Activity Data programme. Amazingly there's a Tabbloid for both weeks (wonders will never cease!). It's been busy couple of weeks for the synthesis team with multiple events in Milton Keynes, plus our third Online Exchange session - I'll talk more about those events in separate posts.

6 July update:

• The UCIAD project are continuing to do some deep thinking about user-centric activity data and have drawn up some concept diagrams which show (I think) that the organisational-centric activity data is simply an aggregation of user-centric data. Which means that an organisational-centric approach shouldn't preclude the potential that exists for releasing activity data to individual users too. It's got me thinking about what would happen if users were fed metrics about their usage such as 87% of the books/resources you've borrowed are off the reading list; 24% of your returns have been x days late etc - would it feed into a sense of self-responsibility or have a negative impact on under-achieving students. Would students welcome the additional data?

14 July update:


This week's issue might more accurately be called the OU RISE Weekly, since nearly all of the content comes from their blog:

• Reflecting on the analytics data they have available and whether it can be used to measure how successful the OU RISE project has been.
• Pondering the pros and cons of making recommendations based on EZProxy data.
• A step-by-step guide to getting recommendations from an EZProxy logfile.
• An exploration of Expected benefits vs Achieved benefits of the RISE project.

In addition to these posts on the OU RISE project blog, Richard Nurse was also pondering activity data and open metadata over on his personal blog.

Some other items of (leftfield) interest that I've stumbled across in the last couple of weeks:

• Google launched their dedicated search blog a couple months ago. There's already some interesting discussions around http://schema.org/ and also the importance of authorship as a signifier of quality.
• Brian Kelly's blog has had some interesting posts, particularly around gathering quantitative evidence and the news that the government will be forcing universities to publish more data.
• If you are in a particularly philosophical mood and have half an hour to spare then Brian Holmes' dystopian essay on cybernetics, analytics and tools of liberal control is worth a gander. [warning: even more leftfield than usual]