Test your writing:

• Drivel Defence (Plain English Campaign)
• Google reading level filter – using advanced search perform a blank search of a specific website and annotate results with reading levels; the search results will be topped with a chart showing what percentage of the website’s pages are considered basic, intermediate and advanced
• Gunning Fog Index – based on sentence length and number of long words (by syllables), a weighted average of the number of words per sentence and the number of long words per word; the text can be understood by someone who left full time education at a later age than the index, ie a Gunning Fog score of 14 means that a person needs roughly 14 years of schooling to understand; a score of 12 or less is thought to be widely readable, under 8, universally so
• Juicy Studio – includes example scores; from elsewhere, the official London 2012 website had an easy read area with content at a 7th grade reading level, with the rest of the content between 11th and 14th grade (ie over 16 – too difficult for sports fans and mainstream content?); Gov.uk went for a reading age of 9
• Readability Formulas – free tools and resources
• The Readability Test Tool –  gives a score for five popular readability tests (Flesch Kincaid Reading Ease, Flesch Kincaid Grade Level, Gunning Fog Score, Coleman Liau Index, Automated Readability Index (ARI)
• Up-goer Five - text editor which highlights any words outside the most common 1000 English words – trains you to find more simple and clear words that everyone can read
• WriterDietTest - aimed specifically at flabby academic writing; looks at elements of style such as  grammar variables eg overuse of be, weak and passive verbs, ideas not anchored in concrete language or too many nominalisations, long strings of prepositional phrases that drive verbs and nouns apart, overuse of adverbs and adjectives, too many waste words (it, this, that, there)
• Writing Tester – looks a bit low rent
• Wikipedia: readability | readability test
• plus Word has a readability tool (Tools > Spelling and grammar. Under Options, make sure Show readability statistics is selected), so maybe other WP progs do too

With added textual analysis:

• Lexicool text analyser - information on the readability and complexity of a text, as well as statistics on word frequency and character count

Articles:

• how to interpret the results | numbers are not enough
• in relation to open access issues, note that Wikipedia’s writing is too sophisticated for its audience; see Readability of Wikipedia
• in relation to accessibility issues, see low literacy | accessibility for web writers | should simple language be mandatory & the risks of standardising

I use the FD Word Statistics plugin to show readability scores while writing, and Reading Time to give an estimated seconds count on published posts (based on a default reading speed of 200 words per minute).

The post Readability tests and tools appeared first on Danegeld.

edSocial Media looks at dimensions:

• establish a conversation (one dimension) – chat topic and hashtag on Twitter, Google+ community; one dimensional because once the conversation ends the learning ends
  
• document the conversation –  (intermediate multi-dimensional aspect) – using an app or site eg Storify; two dimensional because participants can go back to review what was discussed, find resources and make contacts
• incorporate books, data, studies, authors and experts into the conversation (expert multi-dimensional aspect) – extended learning through resource connection; “once learning gets to this level the conversation continues long beyond the date and time established, the documentation of the conversation also continues, and the connections forged open a new level of collegiality among those who participated” right…ie a community

The future of tablets puts forward the following scale:

• consumption -> curation -> creation -> connection

Which is all fine, but for me the whole thing is still a cycle. One day I’ll polish off the DIKW post in my drafts.

Channelling Bloom (and remember, knowledge is at the bottom)…

swiped from sotonDE’s Slideshare presentation

The post Knowledge and social media appeared first on Danegeld.

Related to MOOCs is the issue of lurking, and various forms of activity being considered of lower value to others. In his post on metrics round a blog post Brian Kelly comes up with the following taxonomy:

• Lurker – someone who only reads a post (my emphasis)
• Contributor – someone who facilitates engagement with others by lightweight ‘frictionless’ sharing, such as a tweet, a RT, a vote on the blog post, a Facebook like or a Google +1
• Creator – someone who create new content by submitting a blog comment or commenting on Facebook

The 1-9-90 rule applied near as dammit, and Brian suggests this taxonomy as a “possible approach for monitoring the extent of engagement with digital content”.

I’m troubled by the equating of reading with lurking at its most pejorative. I may not have slung up a comment on Facebook, but I read the post and took some knowledge from it. You may not be able to measure it, but I would suggest that reading (as opposed to scanning) is of rather higher value than frictionless sharing. This will become a growing issue in MOOCs, where the stress is on quantifiable measures.

I refuse to give in to the stream metaphor and the scroll of death! Stepping in and out quickly becomes not getting my feet wet, and that, I suspect, is what the rest of the 90% are doing – reading things of value to them and taking out of it what they wish. So there. Every time I come back from a holiday I feel less of a compulsion to get back to dipping into/following? the stream – there’s a point for your own particular focus (see above), but otherwise it’s a distraction.

We need other forms of presentation, offering context and proper opportunities for engagement. Think of a timeline – still a stream, but the time dimension has (or should have) a point to make.

Of more interest is something which stays with you rather longer and is worth going back to. Three Guardian articles have lurked (ha!) in my todo tasks for a while:

• News is bad for you (posted 12 April, skipped the 449 comments) – “People find it very difficult to recognise what’s relevant. It’s much easier to recognise what’s new.” Rolf Dobelli in praise of thinking. I’m at my most productive and creative walking the dogs – one reason why I want to take a look at the art of walking. See also Oliver Burkeman’s response.
• Internet detox (posted 5 May, 161 comments) looks at the urge to disconnect concluding that it’s autonomy that’s needed or perhaps rather
  
• Conscious computing (posted 10 May, 106 comments) – Oliver Burkeman veers dangerously close to tl;dr here, perhaps a bit of editing called for, but makes some good points re the slow movement applied to computing as a way of escaping the endless distraction and interruption of the stream; “continuous partial attention isn’t motivated by the desire to get more done…but rather by a desire not to miss anything and to be a live node on the network” – note, while detoxing he even went for a walk…

What you focus on, hour by hour, day after day, ends up comprising your whole life. “To be diverted isn’t simply to have too many stimuli but to be confused about what to attend to and why.”

Would sharing, frictionlessly or otherwise, these links have made any difference to my understanding? Contributing to the comment stream? I don’t think so.

Back to one of my focuses, here’s an event tool update:

• Tumblr for event coverage - #HEASTEM13 | Parliaments on the Net  not sure, still too streamy for  my taste, not convinced any more effective than Storify, so how about a board? see Tagboard, eg for #acadmooc
• chat tools for following events - TweetGrid (multiple chats) | Twchat (chatroom)
• TweetBinder | @TweetBinder - “analyze and classify tweets to create amazing Twitter impact reports”, dunno, needs authentication, see @BonJovi example; related to @FHashtags, might be useful to see spread of tweets of different types
• a Google + event, who knew…
• liveblogging plus livedrawing | example - that’s one helluva lot of content and effort, presented in a stream seems a waste, if it’s not to be throwaway stuff – ebook?
• from EventTech Circus, a top end gathering of startups, a couple of handy slidesets on the tech they used and the importance of the lifecycle and engagement

Finally, here’s some ‘interesting links’ particularly worth highlighting:

• Bloom’s taxonomy, God bless it…another layer for the DIKW pyramid/cycle; here are 14 Bloom visualisations, some of which are very pretty and some of which are actually quite useful
• on the subject of useful visualisations, the Good law diagram showing the perspectives of citizens, professional users and legislators on content, language and style, architecture and publication crams a lot into a small space and is a useful model
• I still have problems with “websites are for tasks”, but Gerry McGovern’s latest polemic does highlight that you don’t have to have news, images, a stream or social icons, or that your website isn’t just a home for marketing and branding messages – all of which feels like a step in the right direction; see Paul Boag on this as well, plus the mindbending figures from GDS themselves

The post Update: creating focus appeared first on Danegeld.

Most of my MOOCs (see posts on theory | practice) have been “CPD for the well educated” or metaMOOCs looking at pedagogical issues, but what about ‘real’ MOOCs, aimed more squarely at replacing conventional highered courses?

On the main MOOC platforms:

• Coursera (7) - includes the University of London International Programmes on English Common Law starting in June, with Hazel Genn and supported by @patlockley, and the University of Copenhagen on Constitutional struggles in the Muslim world, starts 30 September
• edX - HLS1X on copyright ran in early 2013 – instructor William Fisher has made the CopyrightX materials available, and there is also a CopyrightX student site; ER22x on Justice, based on Michael Sandel’s political philosophy course, started in March and has caused some controversy; see also a course review
• Canvas – American Counter Terrorism Law, US Criminal Law
• CourseSites (Blackboard) – Legal and ethical governance
• P2PU – Copyright for educators: US | Australia

On other platforms:

• Basics of acquisition agreements - one of LawMeets’ open courses; see article
• Le droit des enterprises - Sorbonne, starts in September
• Topics in digital law practice - CALI MOOC, ran in early 2012; materials available

Moving on to papers, presentations etc about MOOCs, during the spring UK legal education conference season three sessions on MOOCs were sighted:

• HE Academy Discipline lead Michael Bromby presented on All consuming MOOCs (slides) at ALT 2013
• Catherine Easton (Lancaster) spoke on MOOCs in the BILETA 2013 education stream (Storify); see also her post  on MOOCs at Vanderbilt University
• Jenny Hamilton, Patricia McKellar and Pat Lockley (University of London International Programmes) presented a paper on MOOCs at CLEA 2013, no further info available

Other law teachers may well be participating in MOOCs, and blogging or tweeting about their experiences, but this is difficult to track down – could a #lawmoocs tag help?

Finally, three sites are now aggregating/curating articles about MOOCs – see Alt-Ed | MOOCs and Libraries | MOOC News and Reviews. A search brought up the following, primarily on legal issues relating to MOOCs:

• Are you MOOC-ing yet? A review for academic libraries – including copyright and digital literacy issues; see also the video on the copyright session at the MOOCs and Libraries conference
• MOOCs, distance education and copyright: two wrong questions to ask

• Telling tales out of school: do privacy expectations differ in online classrooms?

• plus Could free online law courses be the wave of the future? – online law school St Francis on MOOCs

Updates:

• 5 June: another review of the Property and Liability MOOC
• 22 May: review of Coursera’s Property and Liability MOOC
  
• 17 May: Are MOOCs for legal education just a lot of ‘hype’, or is this democratisation of education to be welcomed? (Twitter thread)

The post #lawmoocs: law schools, law teachers and MOOCs appeared first on Danegeld.

In the latest on MOOC infrastructures, Wordpress is increasingly used in UK based MOOCs – in particular the FeedWordPress plugin to aggregate blogs (alternative is gRSShopper). This could be more reader friendly - in two senses as far as I’m concerned, I’d like to see these endless streams made more navigable and even curated, perhaps by participants.

Recipe cards ie what platform/s are being used are also popular, see #edcmooc | #h817open | #octel: ingredients & participants (see also course information | daily newsletter using MailPress | full recipe). And there’s even a G+ community on using Google apps as an LMS.

There seems to be an emerging consensus that discussion forums are difficult given the M part of a MOOC (in particular introduction threads).  ”Let’s have a heated debate” isn’t enough to maintain engagement and collaboration light can quickly equal no collaboration.

So what does work? A mix of approaches can help to sustain engagement, combining ‘sit back and watch’, discursive and action based activities, as used extensively in #h817open.  Breaking things down into chunks using different formats gives participants something more concrete to talk about, but the challenge is to design activities that appeal and which offer a reasonable return on the commitment – this didn’t work for me in either #ivmooc or #h817open.

An early activity is often to try out all available comms platforms, demonstrating the need for digital literacies, but rather than an easy way to motivate and reward participants this front-loaded approach can often be a shortcut to overload and even panic. See James Clay on what each tool is suited for - like me he’s a blog and G+ fan, with Twitter for broadcasting links – how about integrating the tools into the activities? This would allow participants to listen (not lurk) until they have found the platform which suits them and are ready to participate. See also Sheila Macneill on the alone together concept (last three paras).

Moving on, #sotonmooc on 24 April (programme | report) looked at some issues around #moocs from the institutional point of view. Here’s some soundbites which resonated from Twitter:

• making money from MOOCs - paid assessments, certificates, corporate learning, sponsorship and ‘human tutors’ –> the supported MOOC
• issues include managing expectations and cultural differences (a lot of xMOOCs are veeery American)
• MOOCs can re-engage learners and breath new life into highered
• MOOCs should not be dumbed down – but watch out for ‘academic stars’; OTOH OER give opportunities to cascade expertise
• you can’t make everybody happy – not ‘everything goes’
• slides: MOOCs and FutureLearn | 5 reasons to do a MOOC and 5 reasons not to

At the moment at least, MOOCs aren’t taking the place of regular higher education courses, so should they be compared in that way?  Alastair Creelman on who MOOCs are really for: “The real target group of MOOCs …[new learners, people outside higher education] are not in focus at present due to the vast numbers of “curious academics”.

Finally, some general MOOC linkage:

• MOOCs go #longform: MOOCs and open education: implications for higher education (CETIS, March 2013) | Amber Thomas’ blog book
• MOOC ebook - set up your own MOOC!
• Grading the MOOC – enjoyable article from the New York Times which makes some good points
• aggregations/curations: Alt-Ed | MOOC News and Reviews | JISC Infokit | The Chronicle

The post MOOC update 3: what’s the use? appeared first on Danegeld.

My record on completing MOOCs isn’t great. Which isn’t to say I haven’t learnt anything – if not as much as I had hoped.

The most visible MOOC participants are those who commit 110%, the ones who make the forums unusable : P I’ve been pretty visible early on in three of the MOOCs I signed up for, while slowly disengaging. These less visible participants are an issue from the organiser point of view, and a recent paper (subscription required) identifies a set of course engagement labels and longitudinal engagement trajectories (no, me neither) for MOOCs – see Sheila Macneill’s post and Learning analytics at Stanford for more.

The paper is a first step in helping MOOC designers to ‘target interventions or develop adaptive course features for particular subpopulations of learners’, for example learners who stay engaged through the course without taking assessments, and in identifying patterns of learners.

From the findings:

• completing learners were most active on forums – the more participants interacted with others the better they learned; depends on the nature of the ‘interaction’, however the creation of community has been a key factor in my MOOC experience, and should be explicitly designed in
• auditors should be encouraged, not reprimanded for not taking quizzes they don’t need - many participants take MOOCs for intellectual stimulation or soft CPD, so drop the formal learning labels

Here are the engagement labels:

• T = on track – did assignments on time
• B = behind – did assignments but finished after due date
• A = auditing – watched vids but did not do assignments
• O = out – did not interact via videos or assignments

And the trajectories:

• auditing – watch lectures but attempt few assessments
• sampling – explore course by watching a few videos
• completing – attempt majority of assessments
• disengaging – attempt assessments at the beginning of the course but then watch videos sparsely or disappear entirely

And my MOOCs broadly slotted into the trajectories:

• auditing/ed – #octel
• sampling/ed – Networked Life, #etmooc, #h817open
• completed – zilch
• disengaged – #snac, #dataviz, #ivmooc

Interesting that the disengaged category consists of those I actually got the most out of, indicating perhaps that there is hope! To be disengaged you do have to be engaged at some point.

On which note, I’ve just signed up for Academia and the MOOC aka #acadmooc, head on over to my CPD blog for progress.

The post (Dis)engaging from MOOCs: can it be a positive? appeared first on Danegeld.

Events…many are still completely unamplified or curated, but for this seminar on the power of social media to support knowledge sharing this was particularly ironic. However checking back I can see that slides and MP3s are now available – hurrah! Better: make your intentions clear upfront.

The sessions by Hare and Dale are the most worthwhile:

• Hare on networks – more powerful than the node? – quoting John Husband on the notion of a wirearchy ( “a dynamic two-way flow of power and authority based on knowledge, trust, credibility and a focus on results, enabled by interconnected people and technology”), and running through Dave Snowden’s Cynefin framework
• Dale on the need for network literacy, highlighting community management/facilitation and social/digital curation (high level and with a narrative, not scrapbooking – more is not better) as two emergent roles; new values – collaboration and cooperation, CMs make collaboration possible and profitable, communicate, coach, disseminate, evangelise…

For a more vibrant event, this review of Pi Day has several ideas about how to generate online engagement via a mix of ‘sit back and watch’, discursive and action based activities. Also consider demanding more from your speakers.

Curation…the lawyer as trusted curator. Is this more than buzzword bingo? What’s next, estate agents as curators of property? A body of knowledge is part of the definition of a profession, no?

Blog portals…in the news for MOOCs, but can bring together any bunch of blogs. What’s The Blogging Tribe using? What are blogs for anyway? Mine is for personal reflection, but others are alternative news sources, they say. This is causing a bit of a ruction in Denmark, where niche is the new black, with blogs now being awarded the (to me controversial) mediestøtte – financial support from the state. Update: see When is an online digital magazine not a magazine for more on the blog vs news etc theme – aka start-up journalism.

Finally, boredom can be good for you. Our old friend ‘research’ finds that many are inspired to creative activities through boredom and silence. So take a moment to be alone, silent and without any particular plan next week, to see how it feels.

The post Sunday linkage appeared first on Danegeld.

• website - programme (5 page PDF) available from conference proceedings page, together with yay! 44 pages of abstracts (PDF warning) and nine other docs
• Twitter - @bileta | #bileta13 (not on site) – see the searchable archive | network and statistics
• pre-conference buzz – up to 10 April there were 144 tweets by 27 tweeters, with 15 tweeting more than once; biggest hitter is our host @j_savim, responsible for over half the tweets
• as a result the stream is at the moment showing a higher level of interaction than the norm with 27 threads (19%), but also a healthy number of links and RTs – a more varied stream can work better in terms of engagement

My role is mainly in ensuring easy access to conference resources, both during and after the event, and in making the most of the Twitter backchannel.

Starting with Twitter, there are some prolific tweeters among the delegates, which will hopefully lead to some effective livetweeting. I’ve put together a BILETA 2013 list including all the delegates I can trace – at the moment this has 31 42 members out of the total of around 100. Other tools were considered, but TAGSExplorer offers sufficient access to the stream.

I’ve set up a Storify and Scoopit for the conference. There are hordes of aggregation and curation tools to choose from, but these two fit the bill the best. Storify is being used as a live diary, to give access to what is, or has just, happened, pulling in conference and other resources plus key tweets. Further Storifies will be created if merited – it works fine as first level semi live tool, especially if eye candy in the form of photos and links is available, but the stream style is not great for the long term. Hence the conference memory is being built in Scoopit, chosen for its non-linear display (no long lists or endless streams!) and filtering options – see for example the papers tag. I have also set up a  BILETA 2013 Bit.ly bundle.

Having spent much of the last six months researching different ways of visualising information across a community I’m still trying out a number of approaches. For a wordy bunch such as lawyers this is perhaps not such an issue, but full textual analysis will have to wait for now. Maybe I’ll look at visualising Twitter data in Infomous and possibly some word clouds…

The programme (PDF) is exciting, including some innovative sessions such as a moot, Ignite sessions and masterclasses. The parallel sessions range widely and will be difficult to capture in 140 characters, so fingers crossed for some blogging and presentations made available in a timely fashion. Subhashtags could perhaps have been an idea, but ultimately Twitter can only be a first step in capturing the knowledge here!

The Twitter numbers:

• Weds 10 April – 33 tweets, mainly around travel arrangements, the AGM and pre-conference networking event
• Thurs 11 April:
  • 419 tweets, following avid livetweeting from in particular @BabyLegalEagle (total: 114), @IGFTowardAccess (71), @PaulbernalUK (66) and @LawTechGadget (42)
  • 72 threads (12%) showing a healthy amount of discussion, although more takes place off tag
  • 166 RTs and 108 links so far – the latter is low compared to non-law events, with no tweeted pics of slides and barely any photos spotted at all – words rule!
• Fri 12 April – 326 tweets; masterclass sessions on social media and freedom of information and jams on MOOCs and Raspberry Pi less tweeted – Friday afternoon and that end of conference feeling can lead to lower numbers!
• total @ close of conference – 1024 tweets from 90 tweeters, 51 of whom tweeted more than once; average of 11.39 tweets/person, median: 2. 177 links, 277 RTs; 122 threads (12%)

The Storify of day 1 turned out pretty lengthy, even with a separate tag used for the moot trial (see the #biletamoot Storify). Further subhashtags could have been considered for the keynotes and plenaries, which attracted a level of discussion on Twitter. For the parallel sessions tweets were more spotty – for example, two of the five streams on Thursday afternoon attracted no tweets at all. Efforts to enforce Twitter grammar, ie including the speaker name at the start of the tweet, had some success and should help place archived tweets into some sort of context. The Storify of day 2, made up primarily of parallels, was hence rather shorter, with a separate Storify for the education stream and late show.

Resources and coverage are trickling in and being added to the conference memory. Kudos to @AndrewDMurray for turning round the full text of his keynote so quickly. For Steve Fuller’s keynote on The historic quest for a ‘world-brain’: learning from the past to govern the noosphere of tomorrow see the abstract | bio | interview PDF.

Pre-event documents are available for the Thursday plenaries on Smart cities and big data (PDF | Eventbrite) and Autonomous systems (PDF | Eventbrite), and for Friday’s specialist streams on children, technology and law (PDF), launching Liverpool European Children’s Rights Unit‘s Young Technology Ambassador Series, and on education and technology enhance learning (PDF) featuring Raspberry Pi PDF. See also Brown & Marsden’s interview (PDF) on Regulating code: good governance and better regulation in the information age.

Resources and statistics for BILETA 2012 – see the BILETA 2012 resources page for full details:

• 591 tweets from 37 tweeters
• liveblogs on the plenaries and legal education stream by Paul Maharg, plus a post-conference post musing on the way forward
• reports from Emily Allbon and Sefton Bloxham
• 13 papers and/or presentations
• two collections of papers:
  • European Journal of Law and Technology 4 (1) 2013 - papers from the legal education stream, open access – see Paul Maharg’s introduction
  • International Review of Law, Computers & Technology 27 (1-2) 2013

No liveblogs this year. While this batch of conferences are often ‘work in progress’ rather than formal papers, it’s interesting that not many law teachers are trying out alternative forms of publishing for their research, in particular as they are wedded to words.

For conference organisers, the time is overdue to consider formalising the conference memory. Bottom up amplification can only go so far! Hopefully 2014 will see further use of innovative session styles such as Ignites which lend themselves well to streaming and recording – for keynotes too this must surely be a given.

Still to do - look at easy SNA options in TAGS, compare 2013 confs and with 2012, textual analysis of my corpus, mention #lutwit.

The post #bileta13 diary (10-12 April) appeared first on Danegeld.

Following the Society of Legal Scholars 2012 conference I took a first look at the law teacher Twitter tribe and drew attention to some dirty laundry! In 2012 there was an average of 400 tweets per conference by ~50 tweeters – it will be interesting to track the 2013 conferences to see if the increasing take up of #socme seen at SLS can lead to effective bottom-up amplification and curation. How well will #socme be embedded as a tool to exploit conference content and promote conversation?

This diary post will track the three + one conferences taking place during March and April, to be followed by a post-event round-up (see my SLS 2012 review for an example). Plus I’m planning on trying out some information visualisation approaches gleaned from my MOOCing activity over the winter. In the spirit of H817 Open, it’s time rethink the conference as an open practice.

Association of Law Teachers conference, 24-26 March: All consuming legal education

• website – programme available as 9 page PDF, joining instructions uploaded as PDF on 22 March (tone: formal), final programme (5 page PDF) on 23 March; around 100 participants
• Twitter - @alt_law | #altlaw13 (not on site) – see the archive | network and statistics
• pre-conference buzz – up to 23 March there were 35 tweets by 13 tweeters, with just @alt_law and the three members of the Twitter team tweeting more than once
• posters – according to the programme six posters will be on display – digital versions? (the NSMNSS has guidance on virtual posters)
• Routledge/ALT Teaching with Technology Award and Annual Stan Marsh Prize presented at conference dinner on 25 March –  the former tweeted by @hea_law in the evening

During Sunday 107 tweets were made, with 25 people now using the #altlaw13 tag at least once.  Along with the usual suspects a new livetweeter emerged – step forward @DanRbarrister. The number of links and RTs looked fairly standard, with some photos of slides. Is law suited to 140 characters? The livetweets were in the main straight reportage, with not much discussion sighted and coverage pretty sporadic.

Monday saw 112 tweets, with a long tail of 38 tweeters (22 using the tag only once). Tuesday saw 57 tweets and one lonely tweeted presentation – an interesting take on MOOCs from Michael Bromby. There were just four post-conference tweets, making 316 tweets in total from 48 tweeters over the conference life cycle (19-31 March), with 61 links, 110 RTs, 14 threads (4%).

As at 8 April the conference page has not been updated, however a news item points to photos on the new ALT Facebook page and some further details on the annual conference page, with papers and presentations to be added after a 1 May deadline. Update, 23 May: happy to see the conference papers page with 10 entries in a range of formats.

So, Twitter was not really used as a way of amplifying the conference and #socme remained a complement to the conference at best, not an embedded tool which non-attendees could use to get a reliable report of proceedings. And with few slides or other resources tweeted and no live or other blogging the event will more than likely not be amplified across time either. While some resources may surface in May, this is too late to be part of the conference experience.

Done for this year! #altlaw13 is over. See @annindk tweet diagram ow.ly/1U0xq7 follow @jess_guth for #altlaw14 Leeds 13 April 2014

— HEA Law (@HEA_Law) 26. mar. 2013

Socio-Legal Studies Association conference, 26-28 March

• website - outline programme available as 2 page doc, programme – 36 page PDF! (but still no room for abstracts) – uploaded 23 March; as at 8 April not updated, but some stats on SLSA annual conference page (350 participants, 250+ papers)
• Twitter - @slsa_uk | #slsa13 (not on site) – see the archive | network and statistics
• pre-conference buzz – up to 25 March there were 31 tweets by 13 tweeters, with @slsa_uk tweeting 10 times and five others tweeting more than once
• also has a Facebook group (124 members; coverage of Baroness Hale’s keynote added post-conf and tweeted) and LinkedIn group (activity limited)
• poster competition – digital versions? prizegiving during conference dinner on 27 March, no tweetage

As #altlaw13 closes #slsa13 kicks off…several top tweeters are attending both. Looks like a slightly different crowd, will be interesting to see if this is reflected in the backchannel.

Picked up on this again on 8 April due to holiday – while it is tedious running through an archive it does pay off in some ways. This time it is possible to get a reasonable idea of some streams at least, but there must be a better way to get the content.

Basic Twitter stats…Tues 26 March: 213, Weds 27 March: 332, Thurs 28 March: 159, post-conf: 18. Total: 756 tweets from 88 tweeters, 44 of whom tweeted only once. 45 links, 137 RTs, 39 threads (5%).

A couple of welcome innovations sighted – a Twitter wall was on display in the publishers area, and a list of individual hashtags was published in the conference handbook (PDF warning) – this could have been better publicised!

Want to follow tweets from #SLSA13? Here is a list of hashtags being used for all the different streams and themes twitter.com/sarah_hirons/s…

— Sarah Hirons (@sarah_hirons) 26. mar. 2013

See top hashtags in TAGSExplorer for full counts, showing #rm in the lead with 78 tweets, followed by #gsl (62), #ield (54), #hale (keynote; 39), #rrhr (30), #le (25), #aj (21) and #adr (10). Some of these could benefit from curation, with the addition of related resources, although it is easy enough to oull out the tweets in the archive.

Big thanks to @bristol21, S Halliday and J Sims for organising such a stimulating & vibrant #RM stream. Edited collection? ; ) #SLSA13

— Sarah Hirons (@sarah_hirons) 27. mar. 2013

Further signs of developing Twitter usage were the identification of some heavy hitters plus different types of tweeter – expert livetweeting from @sexuality_info and @clumperino, RTs taking discussion forward from @MrJohnBates and @nic_monaghan, nice curation and link sharing from @sarah_hirons. It could also be interesting to look for clusters of tweeters, such as a #gsl (gender, sexuality and law) cluster.

The low number of links demonstrates among other things that this crowd do not tweet pics of slides. Sometimes this can work better than a gnomic tweet.

Is there anything more frustrating than a misleading title? #slsa13

— Jen Hendry (@mortonjen) 27. mar. 2013

Apologies to Bradney for over simplification of his ideas. Paper was fantastic. hope I conveyed a sense for those not here. #SLSA13 #RRHR

— Jessica Guth (@Jess_Guth) 27. mar. 2013

In terms of resources, we have one set of slides (Chris Hanretty on lawyer rankings) plus the full text of Baroness Hale’s address.

Why so few resources from both conferences? Can’t just be scholarly publishing model. Will MOOCs affect this? Finally, just who was using the phone:

Dr Howard Davis is giving an interview live from the #SLSA13 conference to BBCradiosolent on Abu Qatada using the law school’s phone!

— Jed Meers (@jed_meers) 27. mar. 2013

BILETA conference, 10-12 April 

See separate post.

Commonwealth Legal Education Association conference, 13-14 April 

• website - programme available as 9 page PDF, but we have a searchable list of papers and (some) abstracts, on the Web!
• Twitter - @clea1971 | #? (not on site) – archive | network and statistics to be set up IDC
• also Commonwealth Student Moot and Street Law workshop, plus a student conference

The post It’s law conference season! appeared first on Danegeld.

• Is it constructivist/connectivist to blog about MOOCing – and not share? Lurkers, lurking and labels implies yes, but also that the practice may be disruptive in xMOOCs, as in #ivmooc (sorry guys!), while Emerging patterns in MOOCs develops a full classification for participation – on this basis I’m a drop-in, in the main
• A tale of two MOOCs looks at four different pedagogies – while I liked the linear syllabus of #ivmooc I was frustrated by the lack of a connectivist angle, so maybe it’s not that straightforward – see Dave’s Whiteboard: “the biggest factor in my leaving was that I hadn’t made enough connections with people whose interests overlapped sufficiently with mine”; plus you need to focus, ie have a way to apply what you have learned, if your mind is not to wander half way through…
• Barbara Fillip: “the main challenge for me will be figuring out a useful way to navigate the discussion forums or decide to completely stay out of them… it’s just not possible for 70,000 students to have a useful conversation”
• a Digital Viking concept seems to have become popular, groan – there must be a Danegeld riposte in there somewhere
• Sheila MacNeill on alone and together pretty much nails it: “Despite the frenzy of activity there are, imho, only a few real touch points of engagement…I engage as and when it suits me.”

Meanwhile, I’m just as interested in the 3Cs (content, community, curation) in relation to MOOCs. UNESCO’s new MOOCs Observatory may get to that at some point, it’s just looked at business models, presented rather intriguingly as a Storify. @mhawksey is exploring Learning Analytics and Knowledge on the Canvas Network, which offers a varied portfolio – another platform to try!

MOOC collecting…two universities in Denmark have joined forces with Coursera – UCPH (press release; includes courses on, inevitably, Kierkegaard, the Nordic Diet and Scandinavian film and TV) and DTU.

Onward…I’ve signed up for H817 Open, head on over to my CPD blog to see how that goes…

The post MOOCing update: the anti-social angle appeared first on Danegeld.