News Story

National Women’s Month at KMi

Kate Dungate, Monday 7 Apr 2014

As National Women’s month comes to a close we’re reflecting on a couple of our successful women at KMi.

Among other projects, both women are involved in engaging and empowering the public through their research. While Ale inspires students with science and helps to provide young people with scientific literacy, Anna helps to inform citizens about policy decisions and opens the eyes of voters with illuminating data and analysis of political debates.

Ale Okada is a Research Associate at the Knowledge Media Institute at The Open University and consultant to the Association of Science Education UK. Her research interest focuses on knowledge and social media tools to foster scientific and digital literacy – future citizens embracing the potential of science and technology.

Currently, she is developing a national research project with the Brazilian University UNEB to promote digital citizenship. She contributed to the Massive Open Event promoted by Telefonica foundation in Spain about Education of the 21st Century last year, in which she was invited as keynote in the finale event for more than 700 educators. She also worked as a curriculum developer and teacher in computer supported learning and science projects for schools for more than 15 years where she developed a school network which is now collaborating with KMi through our weSPOT and Engage projects. She has also been leading the CoLearn open research network on collaborative open learning for the last 10 years.

Anna De Liddo is a Research Associate at the Knowledge Media Institute at The Open University. Her research focuses on the socio-technical factors influencing the design and uptake of Online Deliberation and Collective Intelligence (CI) infrastructures for social awareness and citizen engagement in policy and decision-making. She has a particular interest in knowledge construction through discourse, and the role of technology in scaffolding dialogue and argumentation in contested domains.

At present, Anna is leading The Open University’s work in the European Research Project CATALYST http://catalyst-fp7.eu, which aims to develop collective applied intelligence and analytics for social innovation; and the EPSRC’s EDV project http://edv-project.net/, which aims to develop augmented video replays of the 2015 UK Election Televised debate, in order to improve citizen engagement in policy making.