Category Archives: Professional

Some recent Work (Expression, Manifestation, Item)⤴

from @ Sharing and learning

I blame John. He got me interested in FRBR, and long ago he helped me with a slightly mad attempt at FRBRizing Learning Resources. Of course FRBR is for Bibliographic Records, isn’t it? and according to several people I respect it doesn’t work (though other people whom I respect equally say that it does). Personally I always struggled around the expression/manifestation distinction for many types of resource, and always wanted it to play more nicely with the resource/representation approach of the WWW Architecture. But I did keep coming back to it when trying to explain the need to be clear about what exactly was being described in RDF, for example. If you’ve heard me go off on one about Romeo and Juliet, and the play-on-the-stage vs play-on-the-page, or the difference between novels and books, then you’ll know what I mean. So that’s why I got involved in the W3C OpenWEMI working group, certainly I didn’t contribute any expertise on WEMI that wasn’t already covered, but I hope I helped with some of the RDF stuff because I’ve certainly learnt a lot, and now:

Dublin Core announces openWEMI for community review

openWEMI is an RDF vocabulary based on the concepts of Work, Expression, Manifestation, and Item (WEMI) that were first introduced in the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) document produced by a working group of the International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA). That work and subsequent versions form the theoretical basis for library catalog metadata.

This DCMI work product defines a minimally constrained set of classes and properties that can be used in a variety of contexts. Unlike the IFLA work, openWEMI elements are purposely defined without reference to library catalog functions….

See the news item on the Dublin Core website for more information about how you can comment on the work.

Kudos to Karen Coyle for leading us through this work, and thanks to all the other working group members.

The post Some recent Work (Expression, Manifestation, Item) appeared first on Sharing and learning.

Talking about how we use range of Jisc Survey Tools at Jisc Building Digital Capability and Digital Experiences Insights Conference⤴

from @ ...........Experimental Blog



Great to have an opportunity to share way we use a range of Jisc survey tools to inform our approach to digital learning and bench mark our journey with institutions across the UK 

Great learning too to attend event and hear how other institutions use these tools.

You can get a glimpse here too of what we have learned and the tools we are using with staff and students to digitally transform. 


Get off of my cloud.⤴

from @ lenabellina

You said you wanted to help

But actually you just took a big fat silver sharpie

And tried to glow up my enormous cloud.

When all I really needed was the loan of a sharpened pencil

To prick the surface and allow the hurt

And anger

Loss

Confusion

Fear

To flow

Drop by drop

Tear by tear

Until our buckets can’t contain the flood.

What doesn’t kill you

Nearly killed me

And when you try to take away that truth

You hammer yet another nail

Into the coffin that you hoped to bury.

But secrets float and when the waters rise

You’ll see that all the hammering’s in vain.

So now I ask you, simply, to move on

And take your scribbling elsewhere

While I stay

And swim upon the tide of fallen rain

And know that this, alone

Will heal my pain.

Stir Up Sunday⤴

from

Today is Stir-up Sunday, the day when families gather around stir their homemade Christmas pudding on the last Sunday before advent begins. I made mine yesterday, as it takes seven hours to steam and we take lunch over to my MiL on Sundays. It’s a Mrs Beeton recipe, and fingers crossed it tastes as good as it smells.

Xmas Pudding

“Xmas Pudding” flickr photo by NomadWarMachine shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-SA) license

Thinking about charms to put into this for a DS106 pudding. Here’s what I’m adding.

  • A coin for creativity
  • A wishbone for inspiration
  • A thimble for remix
  • A ring for connectivity
  • An anchor for community

Where is the wisdom in AI?⤴

from

Hello dear reader, it’s been a while.  Over the past year I have been finding it harder to write  as regularly as I used to for this blog.  Or perhaps it’s actually that I am finding it hard to focus on what to write, and so half formed ideas in my head never quite make it to the draft then “publish on the blog” stage. 

It’s not that I am not writing. I am writing lots of different “things” for work.  Like everyone else I’ve been experimenting with ChatGPT as a writing aide.  I’ve found it slightly discombulating watching “the beast” devour my text almost instantaneously represent it.  To be honest, what it has given back has been ok, more than OK in some cases. The results have also caused a few wry smiles, as I suddenly see all too clearly  the homogeneity of language it perpetuates.

This post isn’t about the using GenAI.  Thankfully there are many far more qualified people doing that. I rely on them to help my understanding of the challenges and opportunities GenAI is creating.  I have to give a special mention to Helen Beetham’s amazing Imperfect Offerings substack (I aspire to that level of imperfection in my writing! ).

But to the point of this post.  I was listening to Elif Shafak talking about story telling on the Great Women Artists podcast the other day.  Shafak is a very wise woman, that’s what makes her writing so good.  During the interview the conversation got around to information, knowledge and wisdom.  She was reflecting on how there was a presumption that with “t’internet” (my word, not hers!) there was a presumption that we would all have access to information, and so knowledge would be more fairly distributed and democracy would spread and develop. As we all know that hasn’t happened.  But access to information is still critical. The neo-liberal politics of silicon valley are still driven by the control of access to information.

GenAI provides a way to access information in an apparently efficient and most importantly speedy way. No need for anyone to write anyone, because ChatGPT and its ilk can do that for us now.  It will “help” us produce the information and by default the knowledge the world needs. But, and this was the bit that really struck me in the interview, what about wisdom? There doesn’t seem to be time now to value the time that it takes to develop wisdom. To understand, critique, ponder information and create our own personal corpus of knowledge which we can share. 

There is a lot of noise in society in general about the ethics involved in AI, but again the “need for speed” to get products “out there” wins over taking time to think how wise these early releases  with their biases are.  The men at the top (and sadly it still pretty much is men) who share their “profound” statements about AI doing everything for us, are in my mind, not wise. The do not have wisdom. They do not value wisdom. They don’t have the time for that. They want to provide seemingly simple and speedy answers to “everything”.

Where is the space for wisdom around AI in education?  The sector is reacting incredibly quickly in terms of policies particularly around assessment.  There is a lot of collective wisdom around how to avoid students “just getting ChatGPT to write their essays” and using GenAI in more considered ways.  But what about the AI learning design tools that are popping up?  Are they wise? Where are they getting their ideas and information from? Where is the wisdom in increasing homogeneity of courses?  Or does the economic “wisdom” of cutting back on expensive human resource (aka teachers) take precedent?

Education should always evolve in  parallel with society.  But if information is so readily available now, shouldn’t we be thinking more of how we develop and value wisdom? Could we (re)develop society so that people can once again have informed, rational discussion and debate, where we understand and appreciate the ambiguities of society, where polarisation of opinion isn’t used as a tool for personal, political and monetary gain?

Who knows, maybe I should try one of those AI learning design tools to develop course around wisdom . . .

Did a (cc) search on google images for “wisdom” . . . lot to ponder there too. . .