Category: liveblogging

Liveblog notes from Tuesday afternoon at LAK12: Session 5B on Empirical Studies.

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Liveblog notes from Tuesday morning (1 May) at LAK12 –  Session 4A on Visual Analytics.

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Liveblog notes from the opening keynote on Tuesday at LAK12.

Shane Dawson welcomes everyone and outlines practical arrangements.

George Siemens talks about SoLAR. Last year, had a post-conference meeting. SoLAR is trying not to be prescriptive. SoLAR Flare – regional conferences, in different parts of the world, October 1-3rd is first at Purdue. Events planned in Australia and the UK. More of a practitioner emphasis. SoLAR Storm is a distributed research lab. There’s an advisory board. Then next layer is research leads. Third layer is doctoral students, postdocs, etc. Monthly meetings online. Connect up to an international network.

Simon Buckingham Shum updates on the Learning Analytics journal. ‘Learning Analytics: The International Journal of the Society for Learning Analytics Research’. Editors Simon, Phil Long, Dragan Gasevic. Triad of education, computation, and sense-making. Peer-reviewed, indexed, open access. Journal-conference synergy.

Dragan – in computation have lifecycle focused around conferences. Not the same in other communities. Not used to high bars to conference papers. Aim to innovate there, encourage educators to contribute to the journal, and those to be invited to the conference. To ensure balance, and avoid double-publishing.

Phil Long – new journal, want it to be credible and useful. Needs an impact factor. Also interested in open scholarship, want feedback and ideas. Journal will be open access. Interested in open publishing, sharing manuscripts and papers in draft, and community comment and discussion around that.

Simon – now thinking about inaugural issue, to be drawn from invited selection of papers at LAK11/12 plus other invited contributions.

Simon introduces the keynote speaker: Katy Börner, Prof at Indiana University. Energy in to outreach efforts as well as excellent research; model of transition from research to practice, and across disciplines.

Katy Börner: Visual Analytics in Support of Education

Continue reading “LAK12 Keynote: Visual Analytics in Support of Education”

Closing panel on Monday afternoon at LAK12.

Linda Baer, Donald Norris, Alfred Essa: Building Organizational Capacity in Analytics

Simon Buckingham Shum introduces: Linda is from i4Solutions (previously Gates Foundation), Donald Strategic Initiatives Inc, and Alfred is from Desire to Learn, one of the sponsors of LAK.

Large-scale survey of institutions and their learning analytics practices.

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This is liveblog notes from the Monday afternoon session at LAK12. It’ll be sketchy for the first session because I’m doing my talk then.

Session 2B: Institutional Perspectives

Tim McKay is chairing, introduces the four papers: one long, three short.

Continue reading “LAK12: Monday afternoon”

This is the first full day of the LAK12 conference.

Shane Dawson welcomes everyone, and outlines practical arrangements. Apparently there is only one toilet for all 210 attenders so tickets will be issued.

Simon Buckingham Shum and Dragan Gasevic introduce the programme. Simon talks about what makes LAK special: friendly, sharing, multidisciplinary and bringing researchers and practitioners together. Dragan outlines the submissions – LAK11 had 17 contributions; LAK12 has 40. All papers were peer-reviewed by at least three reviewers. Simon talks over the demographics – about 75%/25% M/F. Nationality of authors – US 54, UK 24, CA 20, GER 15, SP 15. About 50% education; less than that about 40%; 30% policy/sensemaking. Academics plenty; business here but not plentiful; a handful of government/public sector. And one other!

There’s the SoLAR AGM on Wednesday 2.30pm, and the reception/technology demo tonight 5-7pm.

Janet Giltrow, Associate Dean of Arts at UBC gives a welcome. Asks for help and input from the conference and learning analytics, particularly around curriculum change. Talks about how technology is changing her research area – new ways of making knowledge for researchers and genre participants. Talks about her research in to an online forum, exploring e.g. co-locations of utterances of interest. Thanks the organisers, welcomes us to Vancouver and says she expects we will need the conference umbrellas!

Caroline Haythornethwaite welcomes everyone, introduces Barry Wellman from University of Toronto, key expert in online social network analysis.
Continue reading “LAK12: Monday morning”

Liveblog notes from the Sunday afternoon workshop at the start of LAK12.

Lori Lockyer and Shane Dawson: Where Learning Analytics Meets Learning Design

Starting with introductions – there are people here with all sorts of backgrounds.
Continue reading “LAK12: Sunday afternoon”

I’m at the Second International Conference on Learning Analytics and Knowledge (LAK12) in Vancouver, Canada.

The conference hastag is #lak12, and updates are on @lakconf; there’ll also be a livestream video for the main conference.

This is the first of several liveblogs from me from the conference. There are notes mainly for me, but posted here in the hope they might be useful to others.

Today (Sunday 29 April) is the pre-conference workshops; the conference proper runs on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday.

The workshops are taking place on the UBC campus in Vancouver, which is a fascinating mix of buildings set in stunning Pacific coastal parkland. If I had to emigrate I wouldn’t mind working here.

Continue reading “LAK12: Learning Analytics and Knowledge, Vancouver”

Liveblog notes from an IET Technology Coffee Morning presented by Daniel Allington, from the OU’s Faculty of Education and Language Studies.

‘Losing is fun’ comes from Dwarf Fortress‘s original documentation. Losing can be fun – for the player. But also for the creator? And what are people trying to achieve when they make a game, and what do players want?

Dwarf Fortress is a work of art in a way that’s uncommon. Beautiful to look at – e.g. Myst when it came out – as the typical standard for games as art. But modern art isn’t beautiful to look at – think pickled sharks, not beautiful background.

Addendum, Dec 2012: For all those of you finding this blog post trying to find out ‘How does toady/Tarn make money out of Dwarf Fortress?’, the answer is simple: People who like the game give him donations. That’s it.

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An IET Technology Coffee Morning by Rhodri Thomas, on Mobile Connections: joining up OU provision for mobile learners. Rhodri’s slides are available as a Google doc presentation. (The main demos are being recorded.)

Some history, some progress reports, and some live demos.

Mobile Connections website is the best place for information and updates on what’s happening.

Continue reading “Mobile Connections: OU mobile learners”