Day: May 3, 2012

Here’s an organising summary of stuff from the Second International Conference on Learning Analytics and Knowledge, LAK12, held 29th April to 2nd May 2012 in Vancouver, BC.

Official resources

• LAK12 conference website
  • Pre-conference workshops
  • Main programme – includes abstracts, and full papers (password protected)
  • LAK12 conference feedback
• Society of Learning Analytics Research (SoLAR)

Doug Clow’s blog

Sunday

• Pre-conference workshop: Ethical Perspectives
• Pre-conference workshop: Where Learning Analytics meets Learning Design

Monday

• Keynote: Barry Wellman, The Triple Revolution and Networked Individualism
• Session 1A: Social Learning Analytics
• Session 2B: Institutional Perspectives
• Plenary: Building Organizational Capacity in Analytics

Tuesday

• Keynote: Katy Börner, Visual Analytics in Support of Education
• Session 4A: Visual Analytics
• Session 5B: Empirical Studies (1)
• Session 6A: Empirical Studies (2)
• Plenary: Educational Data Mining
• Conference dinner: Learning from dolphin learning

Wednesday

• Keynote: George Siemens, Envisioning a research discipline and a domain of practice
• Session 8B: Predictive Modeling
• Plenary: Data Governance (no liveblog, I was presenting)
• SoLAR Annual General Meeting

Myles Danson’s blog

• Learning Analytics and Knowledge Conference (LAK12)
• Demonstration sessions
• Institutional experiences session
• Session 3 Building organisational capacity for Analytics
• Day 2 morning sessions
• Day 2 afternoon sessions
• Day 3

Twitter #lak12

• Tony Hirst‘s (@psychemedia) analysis of #lak12 tweets [PDF] 
• #lak12 Twitter archive, set up by Sheila MacNeill (not tested by me)
• TweetLevel visualisations for #lak12
• Official conference Twitter account @LAKconf

Photos

• Cyprien’s #lak12 Flickr set – many photos of #lak12 attenders
• mnlambert’s Flickr set – stunning shots of the dolphin tricks at the Aquarium

LAK13 – in Leuven, Belgium, 8-12 April 2013

• Conference website
• Erik Duval’s slides showing it off

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Notes from the Society of Learning Analytics Research Annual General Meeting, held after the LAK12 conference in Vancouver.

George Siemens welcomes everybody.

Looking for reviewers, conference. We are still a bit biased towards the male gender, looking to improve that balance.

For 2013, have set up a few goals, to knit together a wide, fragmented community. Informal discussions so far.

• One to host monthly session to showcase learning analytics activities. Maybe bringing in Knewton, or interesting researcher in a related field. Build regular contact.
• Formalising the legal structure, creating a transparent process that has a democratic model for who leads, and what, how decisions are made.
• Regional events – SoLAR Storm. Contact through the Google Group, maybe a listserv instead.
• Research lab, some students interested. Looking at about 5-6 students, maybe more. If you as researchers have interests in working with them, is an option.

Executive Committee is the people who are supposed to be doing things. Steering Committee is the people we connect with to get a sense of direction, advisory board; guidance around activities. Need to improve our relationship, clarify. Better quality information flows. Making it clearer – currently can’t trace decision-making process. Fine while small group; not scalable.

Continue reading “SoLAR AGM”