Day: February 27, 2011

Liveblog notes from the afternoon of the pre-conference workshop (Sunday 27 Feb 2011) of the Learning Analytics and Knowledge (LAK11) conference.

There was an excellent discussion over lunch about the power of simple measures to infer great – and privacy-threatening – amounts of information. So, for instance, you can guess well at what appliances someone has in their house simply by looking at the usage of electricity over a 24-hour period, using a smart meter. And then that raised the possibility of identifying an appliance that was about to break down simply from a change in its use in electricity over time. Which would be gold dust for advertisers, since they could potentially target you with an advert for a new washing machine before you even know that you’re going to need to buy one in the next few weeks, because they know yours is about to break down.

Continue reading “LAK11 – Sunday afternoon”

I’m at the 1st Learning Analytics and Knowledge conference, at the Banff Centre in Banff, Canada.

Today – Sunday 27th February 2011 – is the Pre-Conference Workshops . It’s being streamed live. The hashtag is #LAK11, which is also the tag for the pre-conference open course on learning analytics.

We are right in the middle of the Rocky Mountains, and the views all around are stunning.

This is the first of (probably) six or more liveblog notes – my plan is one per half day.

Continue reading “LAK11: Learning Analytics And Knowledge, Banff”