Category: liveblogging

SoLAR Flare UK – morning presentations

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Liveblog notes from the SoLAR Flare UK, #flareUK, held on 19 November 2012 in the Jennie Lee Building, The Open University, sponsored by JISC.

Simon Buckingham Shum welcomes everyone, on behalf of his co-chairs, Rebecca Ferguson and Doug Clow, Sheila MacNeil from JISC CETIS.

Prof Josie Taylor, Director of the Institute of Educational Technology, welcomes everyone to the building and IET. We think learning analytics is going to be very important, for a wide range of people. Wishes everyone a happy, stimulating and argumentative (in a good way!) day.

Simon Buckingham Shum, SoLAR

This is the first national gathering of people interested in learning analytics, hopefully the first of many. Self-organising, rapid dissemination. Not much lecturing, lots of networking opportunities. This is a rapidly exploding area. In Stanford, with Roy Pea and MOOC people – this is massive there. TIME magazine cover story was MOOCs. EdX – is about big data to allow us to ask big questions about learning. The data scientist is the sexist sexiest job for the C21st. Big business intelligence companies see an exploding market in education – IBM, SAS. Big data, small data, fine granularity of trace too to understand learning.

Similar SoLAR Flares have happened in Purdue, and elsewhere. SoLAR – bringing researchers in to dialogue with senior university managers, companies, practitioners. A systems kind of dialogue. Now incorporated as a not-for-profit, with founding institutions: Athabasca, Open University, UBC, U Queensland, U Saskatchwan. Open Learning Analytics white paper.

Image and story-based activity using cards activity – LAnoirblanc – pick an image and say why it tells you something about learning analytics, post it to the Tumblr.

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LAK12: Summary

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

Doug Clow’s blog

Sunday

Monday

Tuesday

Wednesday

Myles Danson’s blog

Twitter #lak12

Photos

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

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This work by Doug Clow is copyright but licenced under a Creative Commons BY Licence.
No further permission needed to reuse or remix (with attribution), but it’s nice to be notified if you do use it.

SoLAR AGM

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.

Funny Lass

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LAK12: Weds morning

Liveblog notes from Wednesday morning plenary session at LAK12 – George Siemens’ keynote.

Convention Centre

(This photo is taken from more-or-less where the conference centre/hotel is, and I have a view of this from my room’s window. Except this morning it was drizzly and almost totally grey. Welcome, as they say, to Vancouver.)

Shane Dawson thanks Al Essa and Desire2Learn for sponsoring the conference dinner at the Aquarium. Invites everyone to the SoLAR AGM. Gives out SoLAR T-shirts as prizes for helping, tweeting, and so on. Showed visualisation of reference map from the papers at the conference – it’s interactive so you can explore it; will be on the LAK12 website presently.

Dragan Gasevic introduces George.

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LAK12: Tuesday plenary 7 – EDM

Liveblog notes from Tuesday’s closing plenary session 7 – Educational Data Mining – at LAK12.

Simon chairs – Ryan Baker sends apologies. Will segue from a short paper to a panel.

George Siemens and Ryan S.J.D. Baker
Learning Analytics and Educational Data Mining: Towards Communication and Collaboration

Dalek egg ventral view

Paper didn’t make it in to the proceedings, is available here bit.ly/lak-edm

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