Category Archives: Career Guidance

Open and Linked Data and Mediation

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There has been an explosion of interest in Open Data and the potential for linking data to produce new social apps. Yet despite all this attentions, and the growing access to data in some countries such as the UK, the development of new apps has been less than impressive.

Rather than full apps, probably the main use has been the development of interactive visualizations allowing users to explore different data sets and quick visualisations of different data sets. The Guardian newspaper data blog has led the way in the UK and in particular has shown the value of open journalism such as in this discussion on how they got the colours of the maps right.

But the development of more advanced apps has been slower. Probably the biggest take off has been around transport allowing real time timetable tracking etc. But even here the problem of the social purpose and use of data apps is an issue. take this compelling app from the German newspaper Suddeutsche . Its hows graphic representations of train journeys in Germany, providing information on each train’s itinerary and the details of any delay. There is also an interactive timeline, allowing you to watch previous days’ travel play out. Its fun. But I can’t really see that it is much use! Or take this app – available in various forms – using crowd sourced data to find the nearest post box in the UK. Do we really need it? Why not just ask somebody / anybody?

In education there are a number of apps for finding schools etc. But there is little use of open and linked data for learning.

We have been working with a number of organisations to produce open and linked data apps for use in careers guidance. There are now three iterations of what we variously call a TEBO (Technologically Enhanced Boundary Object) or Careers dashboard.

The first was a quick demonstrator which we built to see how it might work. The second works through an API to the Careers Wales beta web site. And the third – more technically advanced – iteration is a database and API developed for UKCES which is not publicly available at present.

One of issues being raised in this work is mediation. In general government / agencies seem to regard data as just standing on its own. Within the TEBO concept we always stressed the need for social mediation and had ideas for a number of ways in which this might happen using social software e.g Question and Answer applications.

In fact mediation takes place at a series of levels – including the selection of data originally collected, and the way data is selected for use and display within an application. Different people will need different apps for interrogating the same data. For instance our Careers Dashboard may have potential interest and use for:

  • Young people thinking about career choices;
  •  Young people applying to further or higher education, seeking an apprenticeship or employment;
  • Adults who are newly unemployed;
  •  Long term unemployed adults;
  •  Adults considering re-entering education and training (e.g. women returners);
  • Adults thinking about a change in career direction (e.g. mid-career changers);
  • Parents and carers supporting young people wishing to enter further education, vocational training or employment
  • Career professionals – careers teachers, careers advisers and subject teachers; and
  • Various others (e.g. educational planners and policymakers, professionals preparing funding applications, researchers).

However, mediation seems to be commonly understood as intervention and then posed as a dichotomy between non intervention or intervention or to put it another way – let end users access to data or only let professionals access to data. This seems to me a misunderstanding of both the potentials and limitations of the data but of the potentially rich ways in which mediation happens and the ways in which technologically can be used in such processes.

It would be interesting to look at mediation within physical communities and through extended web and social media based communities. It would also be interesting to link mediation to the potential quality of careers interventions (i.e. after mediation takes place.)

More to follow…..

 

 

 

 

What we’ve been doing

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the last three months have been pretty hectic. So much that I have been somewhat lackadaisical in posting on this blog. Partly it has been due to the sheer volume of work and also traveling so much. For some reason I always find it difficult to blog when I am on the road. Another reason is that a lot of the work has been developmental and has naturally generated a series of notes and emails but little writing. Its time to make amends.

In this post I will give a short run down on what we have been up to. Over the next couple of weeks I will post in a bit more detail about the different projects and ideas. All the work shares a series of ideas in common:

  • The work is based on the ideas of open education and open data
  • The projects seek to enable practitioners to develop their own learning materials
  • Most of the project incorporate various elements of social software but more importantly seek to utilise social software functionality to develop a shared social dimension to learning and knowledge sharing
  • Most of the work supports both face to face and online learning. However we have been looking hard at how learning and knowledge development is socially mediated in different contexts.

Open Data

Over the last year we have been working with a series of ideas and applications for using open data for careers guidance. Supported by the Mature-IP project, by Careers Wales and Connexions Northumberland and more lately UKCES, we have been looking at how to use open data around Labour Market Information for careers advice and guidance. Needless to say, it has not proved as easy as we thought, raising a whole series of issues around target users, mediation,  and data sources, data reliability and data interpretation, amongst others.

We have encountered a series of technical issues but these can be overcome. More important is understanding the social uses of open data for learning and decision making which is much harder!

Webquests 2.o

The original idea of  Webquests was based around a series of questions designed to encourage learners to search for new meaning and deeper understanding using web based tools and resources. Although Webquests have been used for some time in schools and colleges, we have been working to adopt an updated Webquest 2.0 approach to the needs of learners in Small and Medium Enterprises. These inquiry–oriented activities take place in a Web 2.0–enhanced, social and interactive open learning environment (face to face and/or on–line) that combine at the same time collaborative learning with self–paced learning.

Once more, this work has posed a series of challenges. While we have been pretty successful in using webquests 2.0 with SMEs, it has proved harder to enable practitioners to develop their own online learning materials.

Work based learning

We have been continuing to explore how to use technology to support work based learning and in particular how to use mobile technologies to extend learning to different contexts in Small and Medium Enterprises. We are especially interested in focusing on work practices and how technology can be used to support informal learning and practice in the workplace, rather than the acquisition of more formal knowledge. In order to finance this work we have developed a number of funding applications entailing both background research and (more enjoyably) visits to different companies.

We are fairly confident that we will get support to take this work forward in the near future.

Social media and social empowerment

We have been looking at how to use social media and in particular internet radio, not for promoting social inclusion, but for giving a voice and opportunity for expression to those excluded form access to traditional education and media. Once more, we are confident that we will be able to launch a new initiative around this in the next couple of months.

We will be publishing more about this work over the next couple of weeks. If you are interested in any of these ideas or projects please get in touch.

Using and visualising data

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Lincoln ddj
View more PowerPoint from Tony Hirst

Although this presentation is entitled ‘Data Driven Journalism’, it provides a great introduction for anyone wanting to use data – and more particularly data visualisations for research and development. Tont Hirst’s blog, OUseful blog, is a brilliant source of ideas for those interested in this fast growing area of work.

Finding and visualising Labour Market Data

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Following my last post on creating a database for the LMI for All project, I am now beginning to explore what you can find out from the database.

One of the main sources for labour market data in the UK is the quarterly Labour Force Survey. Data on employment is collected under two main categories, the Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) about the industries in which people work, and the Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) about their occupation. Using our database API we can query the two classification systems against each other to find out how many people in a particular occupation work in which industries. We did this query on Friday for Computer Programmers. This gave us a long spreadsheet which was not particularly easy to understand. I cleaned the data and uploaded it to the IBM ManyEyes site and used the bubble visualisation which gives the graphic above. OK it is not perfect. The industry titles are too long for the index box. And maybe it provide too much data (I will look at what we get using a 3 figure SIC classification, rather than the present 4 figure SIC).

However I think it show potential. And there is no reason why we could not provide longitudinal and comparative data with a  bit of work.

 

LMI for All

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Over the last year we have been working on a series of ideas for using open data in careers guidance. We call these applications under the generic name of Technology Enhanced Boundary Objects.

In the last six weeks we have been working with the Institute for Employment Research, University of Warwick and Cambridge Econometrics on a project for the UK Commission for Employment and Skills on a database, code named ‘LMI for All’.

The Stakeholder Briefing explains:

LMI matters: accessible and intelligible labour market information (LMI) is vital for the effective functioning of the UK labour market. Young people entering the labour market for the first time, and people of all ages re-entering it or seeking to move between jobs, need up-to-date information on the opportunities available. But too often this information is located in a number of places and highly technical, reducing its value to non-experts.

The government has emphasised the importance of careers information to its plans for growth. The National Careers Service’s new web portal, which will launch in April 2012, will provide up–to-date information on occupations, progression routes, wages and employment trends. But over the longer term more can be done to provide nuanced information, more closely connected to the original data sources.

One way in which this could be achieved, which this project will explore, is through the creation of a comprehensive database that pools information from key LMI sources into one place. This database would be accessible to web developers who could develop targeted interfaces: connecting the right information to the right audiences…….

The database will be developed in line with the UK Government’s open data principles3 and will be accessible to web developers from the private or non-profit sectors to use to develop targeted interfaces that provide the information that their target audience requires, in the way that best meets their needs. This will ensure that the data can be used flexibly and creatively to meet real demand for LMI.

The prototype database draws on a number of different data sources including the quarterly Labour Force Survey, O*NET data and Job Centre vacancies. We have developed an API to provide access to the data and last Tuesday UKCES organised a hack-day where, in a one day workshop, developers from Rewired State took part in a competition to develop applications based on the database.  The Rewired State blog provides screen shots and brief details of the different apps developed.

The results of the project will be fed through to the English government with recommendations as to how this work might be further developed.