Posted via web from George’s posterous

Or, at least that is one possible reading of this following example from HESA’s Guidelines for the use of the DLHE Longitudinal Survey Dataset.

To illustrate how this is done:Black, mixed and other ethnic group graduates accounted for 21.9% of the selected Sample A.

From the initial census it is known that these graduates represent just 4.9% of all graduates

To ensure that these graduates feature in the analysis in their correct proportion, the ‘black’, ‘mixed ethnic group’ and ‘other ethnicity’ graduates in the sample would be given a weight of 4.9/21.9.

You mean weight the results by 5/20 because most of the respondents were black! What is the correct proportion? This is a small example of how marginalised groups appear to have to work five times as hard just to be level.

Posted via email from George’s posterous

Posted via web from George’s posterous

I was talking with our Head of Elearning at Brookes about why I find Twitter a-good-thing. He worked for many years in Italy. I described Twitter as the passaggiato of the Internet. I have also heard it described as the virtual office corridor or the space around the water cooler. But, this led me to a wider reflection about public and private spheres, the work-life balance and third spaces.

The work-life balance discourse takes the work space and sets it apart from all the others that might operate in a person’s life. This move, however, privileges work and might be seen as a oppressively structuring move, which in third space theory, anyway, gives work an equal weight to at least two other spaces: the domestic and the individual/transgressive third space.

Read the rest of this entry »

An interesting question is raised by a Design Pattern problem, Others First, identified by Yishay Mor in the Pattern Language Network wiki:

Parents who create an online identity for themselves that includes any images of and text about their children inevitably create an online identity for those children. The children have no control over how they are presented or who they are presented to.

I include images of my child in online repositories, some open some private. So this led me to ask whether the problem identified, for it is a problem, was expressed to address a narrow and particular issue or a broad and general issue. Read the rest of this entry »

The term PLE is going to come into its own in 2009, because of the prominence of the digital literacy/academic literacy and lifelong learning debates. There has been much discussion of PLEs over the past four or five years (yes, that long). I was led to this reflection by Graham Attwell’s post, How my Personal Learning Environment is Changing.

Read the rest of this entry »