The BERA and the British Journal of Educational Technology invite you to this one day Seminar.

Keynote speakers: Professor Luciano Floridi(Oxford Internet Institute), Professor Jill Jameson (University of Greenwich) and PD Dr Ralf Klamma(RWTH Aachen University)

The aim of this one day seminar is to explore the consequences of developments in information and communication technologies on the ethics of research, publication and the sharing of data.

It has become increasingly apparent that the technology used by researchers is moving at a faster pace than the ethical guidelines. In particular, the accepted procedures to ensure the anonymity of the participants in educational research (the subjects) do not take sufficient account of the power of learning analytics. Learning analytics or educational data mining is a powerful tool for exploring large sets of learner-produced data, combined with analysis models to discover information and social connections in people’s learning. These techniques enable researchers to overcome some of the limitation of small scale research studies by combining data sets from a number of studies and discovering information that has greater statistical significance. However, as with other powerful tools, there can be unexpected –and undesirable –consequences.

The seminar will be of interest to: a wide audience of researchers, journal editors, members of research ethics committees, and funding bodies, both in the UK and Worldwide.

Programme:

09:30 Registration and tea and coffee

10:00 Introduction: Nick Johnson, BERA

10:15 Ethical leadership of educational technologies research: ‘Primum non nocere’ Jill Jameson: Professor of Education and Co-Chair of the University of Greenwich Faculty Research Ethics Committee in the Faculty of Education and Health

11:00 Do Mechanical Turks Dream of Big Data? PD Dr Ralf Klamma: RWTH Aachen University, Germany

12:00 Getting to Grips with Research Data: A Publisher’s Perspective Fiona Murphy: Publisher for Earth and Environmental Sciences, Wiley Journals

12:45 Lunch

13:45 Luciano Floridi, Professor of Philosophy and Ethics of Information, Oxford Internet Institute

14:45 Syndicate discussion and feedback

16:15 Closing remarks: Nick Rushby

16:30 Close