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People | Member | Simon Buckingham Shum Snr Lecturer in Knowledge Media I am fundamentally interested in technologies for sensemaking, specifically, which structure discourse to assist reflection and analysis. Examples: D3E, Compendium, ClaiMaker and Cohere.

Simon Buckingham Shum Ruth Deakin Crick 2012 (In review) Theoretical and empirical evidence in the learning sciences  substantiates the view that deep engagement in learning is a  function of a  combination of learners' dispositions,  values,  attitudes and skills. When these are fragile, learners struggle to  achieve their potential in conventional assessments, and critically,  are not prepared for the novelty and complexity of the challenges  they will meet in the workplace, and the many other spheres of  life which require personal qualities such as resilience, critical  thinking and collaboration skills. To date, the learning analytics  research and development communities have not addressed how  these complex concepts can be modelled and analysed. We report  progress in the design and implementation of learning analytics  based on an empirically validated  multidimensional construct  termed  "learning power". We describe a  learning analytics  infrastructure  for gathering data at scale, managing stakeholder  permissions, the range of analytics that it supports from real time  summaries to exploratory research, and a particular visual analytic which has been shown to have demonstrable impact on learners.  We conclude by  summarising the ongoing research and  development programme.

Simon Buckingham Shum

Technical Report KMI-11-01 June 2011 Simon Buckingham Shum and Rebecca Ferguson Abstract: We propose that the design and implementation of effective Social Learning Analytics presents significant challenges and opportunities for both research and enterprise, in three important respects. The first is the challenge of implementing analytics that have pedagogical and ethical integrity, in a context where power and control over data is now of primary importance. The second challenge is that the educational landscape is extraordinarily turbulent at present, in no small part due to technological drivers. Online social learning is emerging as a significant phenomenon for a variety of reasons, which we review, in order to motivate the concept of social learning, and ways of conceiving social learning environments as distinct from other social platforms. This sets the context for the third challenge, namely, to understand different types of Social Learning Analytic, each of which has specific technical and pedagogical challenges. We propose an initial taxonomy of five types. We conclude by considering potential futures for Social Learning Analytics, if the drivers and trends reviewed continue, and the prospect of solutions to some of the concerns that institution-centric learning analytics may provoke. 

Theoretical and empirical evidence in the learning sciences substantiates the view that deep engagement in learning is a function of a complex combination of learners' identities, dispositions, values, attitudes and skills. When these are fragile, learners struggle to achieve their potential in conventional assessments, and critically, are not prepared for the novelty and complexity of the challenges they will meet in the workplace, and the many other spheres of life which require personal qualities such as resilience, critical thinking and collaboration skills. To date, the learning analytics research and development communities have not addressed how these complex concepts can be modelled and analysed, and how more traditional social science data analysis can support and be enhanced by learning analytics. We report progress in the design and implementation of learning analytics based on a research validated multidimensional construct termed "learning power". We describe, for the first time, a learning analytics infrastructure for gathering data at scale, managing stakeholder permissions, the range of analytics that it supports from real time summaries to exploratory research, and a particular visual analytic which has been shown to have demonstrable impact on learners. We conclude by summarising the ongoing research and development programme and identifying the challenges of integrating traditional social science research, with learning analytics and modelling.

Drawing on sociocultural discourse analysis and argumentation theory, we motivate a focus on learners' discourse as a promising site for identifying patterns of activity which correspond to meaningful learning and knowledge construction. However, software platforms must gain access to qualitative information about the rhetorical dimensions to discourse contributions to enable such analytics. This is difficult to extract from naturally occurring text, but the emergence of more-structured annotation and deliberation platforms for learning makes such information available. Using the Cohere web application as a research vehicle, we present examples of analytics at the level of individual learners and groups, showing conceptual and social network patterns, which we propose as indicators of meaningful learning.

This paper proposes that Social Learning Analytics (SLA) can be usefully thought of as a subset of learning analytics approaches. SLA focuses on how learners build knowledge together in their cultural and social settings. In the context of online social learning, it takes into account both formal and informal educational environments, including networks and communities. The paper introduces the broad rationale for SLA by reviewing some of the key drivers that make social learning so important today. Five forms of SLA are identified, including those which are inherently social, and others which have social dimensions. The paper goes on to describe early work towards implementing these analytics on SocialLearn, an online learning space in use at the UK's Open University, and the challenges that this is raising. This work takes an iterative approach to analytics, encouraging learners to respond to and help to shape not only the analytics but also their associated recommendations.

We propose the concept of Contested Collective Intelligence (CCI) as a distinctive subset of the broader Collective Intelligence design space. CCI is relevant to the many organizational contexts in which it is important to work with contested knowledge, for instance, due to different intellectual traditions, competing organizational objectives, information overload or ambiguous environmental signals. The CCI challenge is to design sociotechnical infrastructures to augment such organizational capability. Since documents are often the starting points for contested discourse, and discourse markers provide a powerful cue to the presence of claims, contrasting ideas and argumentation, discourse and rhetoric provide an annotation focus in our approach to CCI. Research in sensemaking, computer-supported discourse and rhetorical text analysis motivate a conceptual framework for the combined human and machine annotation of texts with this specific focus. This conception is explored through two tools: a social-semantic web application for human annotation and knowledge mapping (Cohere), plus the discourse analysis component in a textual analysis software tool (Xerox Incremental Parser: XIP). As a step towards an integrated platform, we report a case study in which a document corpus underwent independent human and machine analysis, providing quantitative and qualitative insight into their respective contributions. A promising finding is that significant contributions were signalled by authors via explicit rhetorical moves, which both human analysts and XIP could readily identify. Since working with contested knowledge is at the heart of CCI, the evidence that automatic detection of contrasting ideas in texts is possible through rhetorical discourse analysis is progress towards the effective use of automatic discourse analysis in the CCI framework.

While generic web analytics tend to focus on easily harvested quantitative data, Learning Analytics will often seek qualitative understanding of the context and meaning of this information. This is critical in the case of dialogue, which may be employed to share knowledge and jointly construct understandings, but which also involves many superficial exchanges. Previous studies have validated a particular pattern of "exploratory dialogue" in learning environments to signify sharing, challenge, evaluation and careful consideration by participants. This study investigates the use of sociocultural discourse analysis to analyse synchronous text chat during an online conference. Key words and phrases indicative of exploratory dialogue were identified in these exchanges, and peaks of exploratory dialogue were associated with periods set aside for discussion and keynote speakers. Fewer individuals posted at these times, but meaningful discussion outweighed trivial exchanges. If further analysis confirms the validity of these markers as learning analytics, they could be used by recommendation engines to support learners and teachers in locating dialogue exchanges where deeper learning appears to be taking place.

Learning Analytics: Dream, Nightmare, or Fairydust? From today's keynote at Ascilite 2011, here's the podcast plus the slides. I am grateful to Gary, Renee and everyone else at Ascilite for their understanding and flexibility, since after months of planning this trip, unfortunately I could not be there in person after my father passed away last weekend. For those of you who like to download and watch offline: podcast [Hi-Res version: 93.3Mb] + slides [PPTX/PDF] For detailed descriptions of work presented here, see other posts tagged learning analytics and the references below.