Just a note to say on 26th April at 4pm BST (in your timezone) I’ll be giving a webinar on using Google Apps Script to extract data from Canvas (LMS by Instructure). Even if you’re not a Canvas user hopefully there will be some general techniques you’ll find useful. It might also be useful for ...

There have been a couple of very interesting WordPress/FeedWordPress recipe cards for open courses from Anne-Marie Scott for #edcmooc and Martin Weller for #h817open. Below is the ingredient list for #octel. Added to the pot is some homegrown veg which gives us some very personal customisation. A lot of this is to tweak the functionality ...

Here’s some posts which have caught my attention this month: Sheila’s work blog » Badges? Certificates? What counts as succeeding in MOOCs? – March 25, 2013 Groups, Clay Shirky and Online Education | online learning insights – March 24, 2013 Learning Technologies: International Perspectives on Technology in Higher Education – March 22, 2013 Visualising Data ...

Twitter has recently frustrated a number of developers and mashup artists moving to tighter restrictions on it’s latest API. Top of the list for many are all Twitter Search API requests need to be authenticated (you can’t just grab and run, a request has to be via a Twitter account), removal of XML/Atom feeds and ...

Google Readers demise is unfortunate but before it disappears I thought it would be useful to raid some of the functionality for an open course reader (using WordPress/FeedWordPress

“Sankey diagrams are a specific type of flow diagram, in which the width of the arrows is shown proportionally to the flow quantity.” In this post I introduce a basic wrapper to render data from a Google Spreadsheet with a d3js generated sankey diagram

As part of LAK13 I’ve highlighted a couple of ways to extract data from Canvas. Prompted by a question by On and my colleague Sheila MacNeill I wanted to show you a way of getting feed data into a spreadsheet without using any code. The solution is to use Yahoo Pipes, but as this post will highlight this isn’t entirely straight forward and you need to be aware of several tricks to get the job done.

At 4pm GMT today (see in your own timezone) I’ll be doing a Google Hangout On Air with Marc Smith one of NodeXL’s creators and coordinators. NodeXL is a handy free add-in for MS Excel (Windows) allowing you to generate, explore and analyse network graphs. I started using NodeXL a couple of years ago as ...

In this post I’ll cover three main areas: a very quick introduction into techniques/opportunities for analysing threaded networks using SNA; how I retrieved data from the Canvas platform for the #LAK13 discussions; and finally some analysis using the NodeXL add-on for Microsoft Excel (Windows).

Here's some posts which have caught my attention this month: The Most Thorough Summary (to date) of MOOC Completion Rates |e-Literate – February 27, 2013 How To Download Your Google Reader Feeds As An EPUB Or MOBI File – February 24, 2013 Eric Schmidt confirms Google+ content is given search priority | The Drum – ...

For this post I want to start looking at what’s available around the Canvas Network platform which is being used to host Learning Analytics and Knowledge (LAK13). Ignoring the official API for now I've had a quick look at what you can do with the Discussions atom feed.

I’m enrolled on the Learning Analytics and Knowledge (LAK13) which is an open online course introducing data and analytics in learning. As part of my personal assignment I thought it would be useful to share some of the data collection and analysis techniques I use for similar courses and take the opportunity to extend some of these. ...

For a couple of years I've been sharing a Google Sheet template for archiving searches from Twitter. In September 2012 Twitter announced the release of a new version of their API (the spreadsheet uses this to request data from Twitter). Around the same time Twitter also announced that the old version of their API would be switched off in March 2013. So here is a new version...

Some notes on University of Phoenix's recent 'academic activity streams' and some existing examples of ranked lists based on user events and some fumblings around using Yahoo Pipes to add social share counts to feeds.