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Eric Calvert

Differentiating with Self Paced Units - 0 views

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    PowerPoint on pedagogy of "science cafes," including connections between wikis and differentiating instruction.
Eric Calvert

What are Learning Analytics? (Siemens, 2010) - 0 views

  • Learning analytics is the use of intelligent data, learner-produced data, and analysis models to discover information and social connections, and to predict and advise on learning
  • I’m interested in how learning analytics can restructure the process of teaching, learning, and administration.
  • LA relies on some of the concepts employed in web analysis, through tools like Google Analytics, as well as those involved in data mining (see educational data mining).
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  • Learning analytics is broader, however, in that it is concerned not only with analytics but also with action, curriculum mapping, personalization and adaptation, prediction, intervention, and competency determination.
  • For now, it’s sufficient to state that our data trails and profile, in relation to existing curriculum, can be analyzed and then used as a basis for prediction, intervention, personalization, and adaptation.
  • Effective utilization of learning analytics can help schools and universities to pick up on signals that indicate difficulties with learner performance. Just as individuals communicate social intentions through signals well before they actually “think” they make a decision, learners signal success/failure in the learning process through reduced time on task, language of frustration (in LMS forums), long lag periods between logins, and lack of direct engagement with other learners or instructors.
  • Curriculum in schools and higher education is generally pre-planned. Designers create course content, interaction, and support resources well before any learner arrives in a course (online or on campus). This is an “efficient learner hypothesis” (ELF) – the assertion that learners are at roughly the same stage when they start a course and that they progress at roughly the same pace. Any educator knows that this is not true and will eagerly resist the assertion that their teaching assumes ELF. But systems don’t lie.
  • Learning content should be more like computation – a real-time rendering of learning resources and social suggestions based on the profile of a learner, her conceptual understanding of a subject, and her previous experience.
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    Elearnspace blog post by George Siemens on ideas for using analytics tools with online teaching tools and student profile data to to personalize teaching and learning.
Eric Calvert

Snowflake Effect for Learning - 1 views

  • At least in the digital world, there is an evolution from scarcity to abundance in many domains. This evolution creates important new opportunities and challenges for (higher) education and strongly influences the expectations of students and, increasingly, of teachers. In the media in general and music in particular, this trend is clear. The average young person in the 70s had a collection of maybe 20 LP's, which were heard at home. The average young person now has virtually all music ever recorded at her disposal, and can listen to it anywhere and anytime, via an iPod and other devices. She can share her music with friends - legally or not. Because of this great abundance of material and its availability anytime and anywhere, it is no longer meaningful to deal with music in the traditional way. One can manually manage the music on 20 physical carriers. This approach no longer works with 3,000,000 songs. A first workaround is to provide sophisticated search, so you can create playlists of songs by title, artist, etc. Then the playlist can be played without further intervention by the listener. That is roughly the original model of iTunes. It is also roughly the model of the teacher who searches for relevant learning resources, modifies and packages them and expects the student to work through the material in a more or less controlled way.
  • But this approach is now passé, because there is too much overhead in searching for music and creating playlists, and because it is often not at all evident to search for music that you do not know. Indeed, users now exchange playlists as well as songs. Newer applications such as last.fm, pandora, finetune, jango and seeqpod follow a different approach: they support personalized recommendations and generate playlists themselves, on the basis of user interactions. The effect is that of a radio station which is specifically tailored to the needs and characteristics of one listener. It is interesting to note that these applications rely on very different technologies to achieve this effect: last.fm is based on "social recommending", while pandora relies on a very extensive set of metadata developed in the "music genome project".
  • In "social networking" applications such as facebook, this evolution is taken one step further: the user can follow what his "friends" are doing and be guided in this way to interesting material, relevant applications or even face-to-face events. Such an approach could certainly prove useful in education, where social networks can facilitate "community based learning": learners can refer one another to relevant resources in much the same way that such resources spread virally on social networking sites. Note that resources in this context include teachers or other learners, as well as applications, besides content!
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  • In the same way that all snowflakes in a snowstorm are unique, each user has her specific characteristics, restrictions and interests. That is why we speak of a "snowflake effect", to indicate that, more and more, the aforementioned facilities will be relied upon to realize far-reaching forms of personalization and "mass customization". This effect will be realized through a hybrid approach with push and pull techniques, in which information is actively requested or searched by the user, but also more and more subtly integrated in his work and learning environment. In this way, a learning environment can be created that is geared to the individual needs of the teacher or student.
  • What could, for example, a "snowflaked" learning environment look like? The teacher will not have to search for learning resources (in google or repositories), but can draw on suggestions that are automatically prepared for him, including, for example: Material that he already used in a similar context; New material that meets queries which he earlier submitted to search engines in a similar context; Material that other teachers with a similar teaching approach have used in a similar context. The student will see: the material his fellow students have used and how long they have spent time on it; What questions his colleagues had - including the answers to those questions from other students or teachers; What fellow students are working at the same time with the same material - an excellent step to collaborative learning; What feedback his colleagues have given to the teacher about the quality of the material.
  • PPS. The reader could also ask whether the implications for education will be as drastic as the way in which these technologies have shaken up the music industry. The author of this piece could say that this is probably so, but that formal education can provisionally hide behind the accreditation of diplomas in the probably vain hope that it can skip this cycle of innovation...
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