[Open-education] open-education Digest, Vol 10, Issue 16

Sun May 11 19:40:31 UTC 2014

Hi Ottavio,

[David you are cc'd in case you might like to contact Ottavio about his 
research project]

I think that your proposal [please see Ottavio's email below] is a 
really excellent idea. I certainly would be very interested to read your 
paper, once it has been published or put into the public domain. It is 
great to hear an update from your research in Rio, I remember we had 
once emailed before I think.

It seems a very practical way to go forward, to identify a couple of 
case study countries and then engage in a discussion around that. But 
how do you see the 'discussion' taking place ?

In the UK we have had a long debate over many years about the merits of 
league tables and this kind of 'open data' about school performance. The 
UK approach might be quite different from other countries, it would 
certainly be interesting to try to build understanding of how this 
effects public policy in different ways. I am not sure how to understand 
exactly the way that you would characterise 'externalities'. How do you 
define these in your research?

Each country has different ways of publishing and presenting data on 
schools, and I guess it is also consumed in different ways to by 
different groups within them. I'd be interested in seeing how different 
constituencies might have potentially different access and uses for data 
within a country as well. For example, if you are from an area for 
example living in relative poverty, can you find out which school is 
good at helping students who might be similar to you in their 
educational needs ?

The UK has its own system of collecting data about schools and 
presenting it. I know that in Australia there is a portal system to give 
you data on schools, but it is quite limited and explicitly selected 
data on performance is presented. New Zealand also makes public data on 
its schools and I have heard that there are some apps that will tell you 
for example which is the 'best' school in your area to help you buy a 
house there. It would be interesting to know what data that is not 
'league table' data is used and consumed by people too I think.

I liked the questions that you have proposed for data-orientated 
debates. To me they seem like quite wide, high level questions. Are you 
looking for expert knowledge to gain insight? I would imagine that 
policy makers would be able to give an interesting range of responses to 
some of those questions. But are you interested in their 'views' on 
these questions or not?

It seems to me that you were not looking for this, or possibly seeking 
to challenge this way (the expert driven way) of answering those 
questions. I understood that you would like to see if we could encourage 
a debate of non-policy experts to engage with the data to see what they 
might find in terms of new responses to those questions using open data. 
Are you hoping to have a data driven discussion?

How would see this working? I think that what you would need would 
almost be a portal or site similar to the OECD one that allows 
researchers or even non-experts and if you like, the 'non-policy' person 
to engage with data around policies in each country in an easy way using 
data. As far as I know there isn't a platform anywhere for this kind of 
thing. But I think that you could make a valid case for this kind of 
thing to exist, with the right kind of support.

Well these are just some thoughts. It would be great if we could 
continue the discussion in some way, potentially come up with some ideas 
for how these kind of debates might be put together.

I know that in academic circles there are now plenty of papers coming 
out on similar topics, usually with a focus on 'big data' or 'data 
mining'. One of the journals that I would recommend to check out might 
be 'Policy Futures' from New Zealand. They had an issue not long ago on 
the topic of big data. I wonder if they could be convinced to run some 
on the topic of open data ? Michael Peters, who is a great academic 
involved in this journal is someone who might be interested in this, 
potentially.

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/learninganalytics/2yMgsdW7aBA 
<https://groups.google.com/forum/#%21topic/learninganalytics/2yMgsdW7aBA>
http://www.wwwords.co.uk/pfie/pdf/Cal-for-papers-Big-Data.pdf

There has been a lot of debate in the US around data mining and MOOCS, 
for example at Stanford.
http://edf.stanford.edu/readings/big-data

In addition there is also stuff from Brookings in the US as well on Big 
Data:
http://www.brookings.edu/research/papers/2012/09/04-education-technology-west

But in short it seems the world is obsessed with big data, and not so 
much with open data, or with how data relates to accountability. It 
would be great to continue to hear news from your research and your 
approach to this. Please do let me know if I can help out with anything 
specific here in the UK.

[ I have cc'd David Turner, a Professor in Comparative Education who is 
also in interested in work on Open Data in this area to this email. He 
is working on related topics to your research ]

Best

Thomas Salmon

On 09/05/2014 15:04, open-education-request at lists.okfn.org wrote:
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> Today's Topics:
>
>     1. Friday Chat: Open data in education (Otavio Ritter)
>     2. Re: Friday Chat: Open data in education (Marieke Guy)
>     3. Re: Friday Chat: Open data in education (Marieke Guy)
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Fri, 9 May 2014 09:06:57 -0300
> From: Otavio Ritter <otavio.ritter at gmail.com>
> To: open-education at lists.okfn.org
> Subject: [Open-education] Friday Chat: Open data in education
> Message-ID:
> 	<CAH1pEecet0X9QzbS5TUeuJYQWyB-0jMvzmLExWHGePHqAynzuA at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
>
> Dear All,
>
> My name is Otavio Ritter and I am a researcher at the Getulio Vargas
> Foundation (an university) in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
>
> I am working on a paper doing a comparative analysis of school open
> data use in England and Brazil and the availability (transparency) of
> government information related to primary/secondary education area.
>
> My intent is to focus on administrative data (including pupil/social
> data) and its externalities: schools (pupil data analysis), parents
> (choice), community (social accountability/active engagement), government
> (policy outcome analysis), innovation (open data products, hackathons,
> civil entrepreneurs).
>
> I would be interested in data-oriented debates like  "where the education
> money goes? what is the cost per pupil?", "what is my school quality or
> outcome?", "Who sponsor academies? With how much public money?", "Schools
> in my area have social stratification?", and other examples to foster
> accountability, better public policy planning and evaluation, and analysis
> within an area that is critical for all countries in the world.
>
> For instance Education GPS from OECD is a initial effort to create this
> debate using open data within education. http://gpseducation.oecd.org/
>
> I saw that this group has a lot of information and debate about Open
> Education Resource (OER) but I would like to propose the discussion about
> incentives, uses, externalities, unintended consequences of
> publishing/releasing open data in the education system (specially within
> primary/secondary levels).
>
> What say you ?
>
> Best Regards from Brazil!
>
> Otavio Ritter
> -------------- next part --------------
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> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 2
> Date: Fri, 09 May 2014 14:09:49 +0100
> From: Marieke Guy <marieke.guy at okfn.org>
> To: open-education at lists.okfn.org
> Subject: Re: [Open-education] Friday Chat: Open data in education
> Message-ID: <536CD39D.1080303 at okfn.org>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"; Format="flowed"
>
> Hi Otavio,
>
> Some great questions.
>
> These are definitely the sort of discussions we'd like fed in to the
> Open Education Handbook
> <http://booktype.okfn.org/open-education-handbook/_draft/_v/1.0/why-write-an-open-education-handbook/>
> we are collaboratively writing - see the section on open data - it needs
> a lot more work. I tried to sum up some of the current initiatives in a
> post on open education data
> <http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/2014/03/11/guest-post-open-education-data/>.
>
> I can point you to a few posts we've had that start to look at what open
> education can achieve:
>
>    * http://education.okfn.org/open-education-holland/ - Alette Baartmans
>      talked about activities that Open State has been leading as part of
>      the Open Education Data Network.
>    * http://education.okfn.org/open-education-tanzania/ - Ben Taylor
>      wrote about  Shule.info which uses open education data from the
>      Tanzanian government to compare Form Four exam results
>
> There is also the Education Open Data Challenge
> <http://theodi.org/education-open-data-challenge-series> from the ODI,
> which is competition looking specifically at this area. Is the World
> bank SABER Project <http://saber.worldbank.org/index.cfm> doing
> something similar to the OECD GPS project?
>
> I'm sure people can point to a lot more activity and debate that's going
> on. Long-term I'd like to see some sort of data census (similar to the
> Open data index <https://index.okfn.org>) going on.
>
> Marieke
>
>
>
>
>
> On 09/05/2014 13:06, Otavio Ritter wrote:
>> Dear All,
>>
>> My name is Otavio Ritter and I am a researcher at the Getulio Vargas
>> Foundation (an university) in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
>>
>> I am working on a paper doing a comparative analysis of school open
>> data use in England and Brazil and the availability (transparency) of
>> government information related to primary/secondary education area.
>>
>> My intent is to focus on administrative data (including pupil/social
>> data) and its externalities: schools (pupil data analysis), parents
>> (choice), community (social accountability/active
>> engagement), government (policy outcome analysis), innovation (open
>> data products, hackathons, civil entrepreneurs).
>>
>> I would be interested in data-oriented debates like  "where the
>> education money goes? what is the cost per pupil?", "what is my school
>> quality or outcome?", "Who sponsor academies? With how much public
>> money?", "Schools in my area have social stratification?", and other
>> examples to foster accountability, better public policy planning and
>> evaluation, and analysis within an area that is critical for all
>> countries in the world.
>>
>> For instance Education GPS from OECD is a initial effort to create
>> this debate using open data within education.
>> http://gpseducation.oecd.org/
>>
>> I saw that this group has a lot of information and debate about Open
>> Education Resource (OER) but I would like to propose the discussion
>> about incentives, uses, externalities, unintended consequences of
>> publishing/releasing open data in the education system (specially
>> within primary/secondary levels).
>>
>> What say you ?
>>
>> Best Regards from Brazil!
>>
>> Otavio Ritter
>>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> open-education mailing list
>> open-education at lists.okfn.org
>> https://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/open-education
>