SoLAR Summit
Posted by r3becca in Analytics, Esteem, Events, Presentations on May 8, 2012
Following the LAK12 conference, I was invited to join the learning analytics summit organised by SoLAR. The Society for Learning Analytic Research (SoLAR) is taking the lead in the field by organising the LAK conferences and working to coordinate research plans and new initiatives.
The summit brought together 60 people, including foundations, grant agencies, organisations, university leaders, industry, experts and researchers.
Topics included:
- Why are analytics important in education?
- What are analytics from your perspective?
- Open learning analytics
- Learning analytics in the future
I was invited to give a talk based on my technical report: ‘The State of Learning Analytics in 2012: A Review and Future Challenges‘
Abstract
Learning analytics is a significant area of technology‐enhanced learning that has emerged during the last decade. This presentation begins with an examination of the technological, educational and political factors that have driven the development of analytics in educational settings, and the challenges posed by these factors. It goes on to summarise the emergence of learning analytics, including their origins in the 20th century, the development of data‐driven analytics, the rise of learning-focused perspectives and the influence of national economic concerns. Finally, it sets out the current state of research, and identifies a series of future challenges.
Social Learning Analytics: Five Approaches
Posted by r3becca in Analytics, Conferences, Papers, Presentations, SocialLearn on May 8, 2012
2 May, and my main LAK12 conference paper on social learning analytics - co-authored with Simon Buckingham Shum.
This provides a context for the learning analytics research and development work that we are currently carrying out on SocialLearn.
This paper proposes that Social Learning Analytics (SLA) can be usefully thought of as a subset of learning analytics approaches. SLA focuses on how learners build knowledge together in their cultural and social settings. In the context of online social learning, it takes into account both formal and informal educational environments, including networks and communities. The paper introduces the broad rationale for SLA by reviewing some of the key drivers that make social learning so important today. Five forms of SLA are identified, including those which are inherently social, and others which have social dimensions. The paper goes on to describe early work towards implementing these analytics on SocialLearn, an online learning space in use at the UK’s Open University, and the challenges that this is raising. This work takes an iterative approach to analytics, encouraging learners to respond to and help to shape not only the analytics but also their associated recommendations.
Evidence Framework for Innovation and Excellence in Education
Posted by r3becca in Analytics, Conferences, Esteem, Events on May 8, 2012
While at LAK, I was invited to take part in a focus group to inform the U.S. Department of Education’s Evidence Framework for Innovation and Excellence in Education.
The team working on this has already produced a draft report, Enhancing Teaching and Learning Through Educational Data Mining and Learning Analytics, that references my state-of-the-art review as recommended reading.
Slideshare stats
Posted by r3becca in Analytics, Presentations, Tools on May 8, 2012
Slideshare emailed me recently to point out that my presentations have had 10,000 views.
It’s difficult to know how seriously to take this figure – after all, many of these ‘views’ may be people or bots browsing through and not reading anything. Perhaps more meaningful is the fact that I have currently had my presentations and documents downloaded 117 times. The reality probably lies somewhere between the two – but 117 to 10,000 is a very wide ballpark. Compared with publication in a journal with an impact factor of 1 or 2, though, either one is looking good.
Mentoring Analytics
Posted by r3becca in Analytics, Conferences, Presentations, SocialLearn on May 8, 2012
In Vancouver for LAK 2012, the second Learning Analytics and Knowledge conference. Lots of good representation from the Open University: Simon Buckingham Shum taking the lead as one of the programme chairs, Doug Clow joining the panel on building a data governance model for learning analytics, Fenella Galpin and Sharon Slade leading a workshop on the ethics of labelling students.
On 1 May I presented ‘Exploring Qualitative Analytics for E-Mentoring Relationships Building in an Online Social Learning Environment’ I was third author on this paper, with the lead taken by Haiming Liu and Ronald Macintyre.
Abstract
The language of mentoring has become established within the workplace and has gained ground within education. As work-based education moves online, we see an increased use of what is termed ‘e-mentoring’. In this paper we identify some of the challenges of forming and supporting mentoring relationships virtually, and explore the solutions afforded by online social learning and Web 2.0. Based on a conceptualisation of learning network theory derived from the literature and from qualitative learning analytics, we propose that an e-mentoring relationships is mediated by a connection with or through a person or learning objects. We provide an example to illustrate how this might work.
Use of Visual Analysis to Investigate Networked Learning in Online Forums
Posted by r3becca in Conferences, Methods, Presentations, Thesis on April 20, 2012
At the beginning of April, I took the Eurostar to Belgium and then travelled on to Maastricht to attend the Networked Learning conference at the School of Management. The conference included at a drinks reception at the nearby government building, where the Treaty of Maastricht was signed 20 years ago, leading to the introduction of the euro a decade later.
I presented a methodological paper on visual analysis, drawing on work in my doctoral thesis.
Ferguson, R. ‘Use of Visual Analysis to Investigate Networked Learning in Online Forums’. In: Hodgson, V., Jones, C., de Laat, M., McConnell, D., Ryberg, T. & Sloep, P., eds. Eighth International Conference on Networked Learning, 2012 Maastricht, The Netherlands (2-4 April 2012).
Abstract
Asynchronous online forums such as FirstClass are frequently used in many educational settings to link networks of learners. They offer opportunities for knowledge-building dialogue and for the exchange of learning resources, but many students struggle to make effective use of them. Researchers have therefore been concerned to investigate how learners successfully build knowledge together in online forums and which skills and literacies are likely to help users to learn in these environments. To date, much of this research has focused on the textual elements of online forum dialogue. This paper acknowledges the importance of studying these textual elements, but presents visual analysis as a complementary tool that can significantly extend understanding of activity in these forums.
Asynchronous dialogue, like written text, is typically both verbal and visual, with much of its meaning carried by a range of visual features, including layout and typographical elements. These aspects of forum data require analysis of the composition of the dialogue alongside its content. In the case of such composite texts, with meanings realised through different semiotic codes, visual and verbal elements interact and should be analysed as an integrated whole. This semiotic approach draws attention to the syntax of images as a source of meaning and to the structuring principles that enable viewers to make sense of the layout of text and images. These principles include salience, frames, vectors and reading paths.
This paper demonstrates ways in which analysis that makes use of these structuring principles can increase understanding of online exchanges between learners. It takes as an exemplar a series of forum postings that were shared in the formal setting of an online course at the UK’s Open University. It shows that the construction of knowledge in an online forum is heavily reliant on visual elements of the online interaction, and that a focus on words alone does not make it clear either how this construction takes place or why it fails to take place on some occasions. Visual analysis shows that groups of learners use affordances of forum software to increase the salience of some elements of the dialogue and to increase the coherence of their discussion.
Towards a social learning space for open educational resources (chapter)
Posted by r3becca in Chapters, SocialLearn on April 20, 2012
In November 2010, Simon Buckingham Shum travelled to Barcelona to present our jointly authored paper at OpenED2010. That presentation evolved into a chapter for Collaborative Learning 2.0: Open Educational Resources, ‘a collection of the latest research, trends, future development and case studies within the field’.
Abstract:
This chapter examines the meaning of “open” in terms of tools, resources, and education, and goes on to explore the association between open approaches to education and the development of online social learning. It considers why this form of learning is emerging so strongly at this point, what its underlying principles are, and how it can be defined. Openness is identified as one of the motivating rationales for a social media space tuned for learning, called SocialLearn, which is currently being trialed at The Open University in the UK. SocialLearn has been designed to support online social learning by helping users to clarify their intention, ground their learning and engage in learning conversations. The emerging design concept and implementation are described here, with a focus on what personalization means in this context, and on how learning analytics could be used to provide different types of recommendation that support learning.
Distributed cognition in a virtual world
Posted by r3becca in Articles, Second Life on February 7, 2012
New article out, in a special issue of Language and Education on literacies and sites of learning.
Gillen, J., Ferguson, R., Peachey, A., & Twining, P. (2012). Distributed cognition in a virtual world. Language and Education, 26(2), 151-167.
Abstract
Over a 13-month period, the Schome Park Programme operated the first ‘closed’ (i.e. protected) Teen Second Life project in Europe. The project organised diverse educational events that centred on use of a virtual world and an associated asynchronous forum and wiki. Students and staff together exploited the affordances of the environment to develop skills and enhance community spirit. One popular activity, initiated by students, involved sailing boats around the project’s virtual island, a technically challenging task for beginners. This paper studies the records of one of these sailing regattas. Organising and implementing this event involved considerable technical and interactional challenges. We analyse the following: How do people work together, including through the use of (virtual) artefacts, to solve problems? What particular qualities of the literacy practices surrounding the regatta appear to us to involve learning? Simultaneously, we contribute to the development of methodologies for studying learning in virtual worlds by employing a virtual literacy ethnography. Findings include a diversity of creative approaches that are used when solving problems, the significance of adult behaviour in authentically modelling learning and the value of humour in fostering a learning community. The notion of distributed cognition has implications for characterising learning and analytical approaches to analysis.
2012 Horizon Report
The report on social learning analytics that I wrote with Simon Buckingham Shum last year has been cited in the 2012 Horizon Report. Each year, the Horizon Project describes findings from the NMC Horizon Project, a decade-long research project designed to identify and describe emerging technologies likely to have an impact on learning, teaching, and creative inquiry in higher education.
Learning analytics first figured in the report last year. This year, our paper is one of six articles and resources recommended for those who wish to learn more about learning analytics. The report says:
This paper studies the technological needs of implementing accurate learning analytics in an online academic setting. Unprecedented amounts of digital data are now available from online social platforms, but the goal is to narrow analytics to only pedagogically relevant information.
Tools for digital scholarship
On 31 December 2011, I came to the end of a year-long project to record a screenshot a day on Tumblr.
This was prompted, in part, by a post on Martin Weller’s Ed Techie blog about the tools used by digital scholars.
I can sum up some of the key tools I use fairly quickly, just by listing the ones that appear on my Firefox one-click favourites toolbar. They include blogs, the university library, Google Scholar, Twittter, email, Flickr and YouTube. These seem the most obvious at first glance, but are they the ones I really use all the time?
My year-long project overlaid screenshot upon screenshot, to give a sense of the interconnections between my online work on different days. The original idea was to do just a whole-screen grab, but that would often include people’s names and photographs that I didn’t necessarily want to share globally. So I made a selection each day, and only occasionally showed my entire desktop. I tried to select a key representative image each day – when I was on holiday I uploaded photographs, and when I’d had a day mainly offline I tried to find a website to represent it. The piece evolved into an online diary documenting my year – and I’m now continuing the project into 2012.
The picture above is my image for 3 January 2012, which captures my entire desktop. It brings together international events (New Year firework pictures from Google Images), personal interest (a mashed up manga-style pic that used iPhoto, Comic Life, Google and screen Grab), national events and online tools (I note the changes in Twitter with a Jing-ed picture, but also note the trending hash-tag on the racially motivated murder of Stephen Lawrence and reactions to the final verdict after 18 years).
When I have some spare time, I’m planning to look back over the year and try some analysis.
Rebecca
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