Author: Thomas Ullmann

  • Quick Zotero guidance to start collaborating on a paper

    Zotero is a great open-source software for managing your references. Zotero allows the creation of a repository of articles (Zotero group). This allows group members to add references to the same library, a great feature when collaborating on an article. Everyone can store their articles in that group, and all articles are then synced to…

  • Simon Penn’s viva success

    Please join us in congratulating our EdD student and WELS colleague Simon Penn, who successfully defended his thesis entitled ‘A comparative analysis of the comprehension of text and screencast feedback by distance learning students’. The examiners recommended a pass without corrections. The panel chair noted that the three examiners were impressed with the quality of…

  • Randomising the word order of a text

    To share texts with others, it occasionally may be necessary to obfuscate what was written so that it is not so easy to understand what a person has said. The following approach randomly changes the word order in a text. This makes it hard to understand the person’s writing, which helps towards anonymisation. Of course,…

  • List of useful commands

    Here is a list of commands that I use on a regular basis to explore texts: grep -Ir –exclude=”*\.svn*” “pattern” *It searches recursively, ignores binary files, and doesn’t look inside Subversion hidden folders. grep mit colour option: grep -ri –color=auto “needle” . only tex files: grep -ir –color=auto –include=’*.tex’ ‘needle’ . Searching in the BAWE…

  • Viva success of Huda Alrashidi

    Congratulations to Huda Alrashidi, who passed her PhD viva. Well done for your excellent work entitled ‘Reflective Writing Analysis for Computer Science Education using a Machine Learning-based Approach’ from your supervisors, Mike Joy and myself, and from the whole of the Institute of Educational Technology and the Computer Science Department of Warwick University. Her external…

  • PhD studentships 2021

    Every year, the Open University announces several opportunities to apply for PhD and EdD studentships. These grants typically cover any study fees, provide a monthly tax-free bursary, and on top of that a research training grant. If you are interested in Educational Technology, there are currently two good opportunities for you to apply for a…

  • A comparable reflective writing corpus of multiple languages

    Wouldn’t it be great to have a large data set of annotated reflective writings written in various languages? We might get there but let’s start with a bit of brainstorming. At first sight, the task to create a multiple languages reflective writing corpus looks like a relatively straightforward task. For example, we could use a…

  • Text Analytics to Improve the Student Experience

    It takes about two hours to skim read all student comments of a single popular module of the Open University. But, reading alone is not enough to make sense of all those comments, which is a process that takes much longer. Everyone who has ever done a content analysis knows how much effort it takes…

  • Published: Automated Analysis of Reflection in Writing

    The International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education just published my paper on the Automated Analysis of Reflection in Writing. It is currently freely available at Springer. Find it here: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40593-019-00174-2 The paper brings together much of the research into this new area of research that seeks to understand whether automated methods can be used…

  • PhD Studentships in the Faculty of Wellbeing, Education and Language Studies

    My institute – the Institute of Educational Technology – and the other Schools within the Faculty of Wellbeing, Education and Language Studies (WELS) are offering full-time funded PhD studentships for an October 2019 start. The PhD programme is located in an environment that supports world-leading quality research. In the latest Research Excellence Framework (REF 2014)…