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Wmatrix is a software tool for corpus analysis and comparison. It provides a web interface to the USAS and CLAWS corpus annotation tools, and standard corpus linguistic methodologies such as frequency lists and concordances. It also extends the keywords method to key grammatical categories and key semantic domains. Wmatrix allows the user to run these tools via a web browser such as Opera, Firefox or Internet Explorer, and so will run on any computer (Mac, Windows, Linux, Unix) with a web browser and a network connection. Wmatrix was initially developed by Paul Rayson in the REVERE project, extended and applied to corpus linguistics during PhD work and is still being updated regularly. Earlier versions were available for Unix via terminal-based command line access (tmatrix) and Unix via Xwindows (Xmatrix), but these only offer retrieval of text pre-annotated with USAS and CLAWS.

"This toolkit assembled by the Social Media Lab seeks to provide an overview of some of the many open access tools available for the study and analysis of social media and online communities. The table below presents the tools in alphabetical order and highlights the social media platforms they support and the features they provide. The list is not exhaustive and will be reviewed, updated, and enhanced in the coming months. The tools in this list offer varying degrees of analysis."

About Cohere The Web is about IDEAS+PEOPLE. Cohere is a visual tool to create, connect and share Ideas. Back them up with websites. Support or challenge them. Embed them to spread virally. Discover who - literally - connects with your thinking. Publish ideas and optionally add relevant websites Weave webs of meaningful connections between ideas: your own and the world's Discover new ideas and people We experience the information ocean as streams of media fragments, flowing past us in every modality. To make sense of these, learners, researchers and analysts must organise them into coherent patterns. Cohere is an idea management tool for you to annotate URLs with ideas, and weave meaningful connections between ideas for personal, team or social use. Key Features Annotate a URL with any number of Ideas, or vice-versa. Visualize your network as it grows Make connections between your Ideas, or Ideas that anyone else has made public or shared with you via a common Group Use Groups to organise your Ideas and Connections by project, and to manage access-rights Import your data as RSS feeds (eg. bookmarks or blog posts), to convert them to Ideas, ready for connecting Use the RESTful API services to query, edit and mashup data from other tools Learn More Subscribe to our Blog to track developments as they happen. Read this article to learn more about the design of Cohere to support dialogue and debate.

"Built as a Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) integration for the learning management system Canvas, Threadz is a discussion visualization tool that adds graphs and statistics to online discussions. Online discussions provide valuable information about the dynamics of a course and its constituents. Much of this information is found within the content of the posts, but other elements are hidden within the social network connection and interactions between students and between students and instructors. Threadz is a tool that extracts this hidden information and puts it on display. The visual representations created from social network connections and interactions between students and instructors in a discussion assist in identifying specific behaviors and characteristics within the course, such as: learner isolation, non-integrated groups, instructor-centric discussions, and key integration (power) users and groups. By identifying these behaviors and characteristics, the instructor can affect change in these interactions to help make the discussions and classroom discourse more accessible to all."

What is LOCO-Analyst? LOCO-Analyst is an educational tool aimed at providing teachers with feedback on the relevant aspects of the learning process taking place in a web-based learning environment, and thus helps them improve the content and the structure of their web-based courses. LOCO-Analyst aims at providing teachers with feedback regarding: *  all kinds of activities their students performed and/or took part in during the learning process, *  the usage and the comprehensibility of the learning content they had prepared and deployed in the LCMS, *  contextualized social interactions among students (i.e., social networking) in the virtual learning environment. This Web site provides some basic information about LOCO-Analyst, its functionalities and implementation. In addition, you can watch videos illustrating the tool's functionalities. You can also learn about the LOCO (Learning Object Context Ontologies) ontological framework that lies beneath the LOCO-Analyst tool and download the ontologies of this framework.

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.

REFRAME REFRAME is a university-wide project reconceptualising QUT's evaluation of learning and teaching. REFRAME is fundamentally reconsidering QUT's overall approach to evaluating learning and teaching. Our aim is to develop a sophisticated risk-based system to gather, analyse and respond to data along with a broader set of user-centered resources. The objective is to provide individuals and teams with the tools, support and reporting they need to meaningfully reflect upon, review and improve teaching, student learning and the curriculum. The approach will be informed by feedback from the university community, practices in other institutions and the literature, and will, as far as possible, be 'future-proofed' through awareness of emergent evaluation trends and tools. Central to REFRAME is the consideration of the purpose of evaluation and the features that a future approach should consider.

Features Gephi is a tool for people that have to explore and understand graphs. Like Photoshop but for data, the user interacts with the representation, manipulate the structures, shapes and colors to reveal hidden properties. The goal is to help data analysts to make hypothesis, intuitively discover patterns, isolate structure singularities or faults during data sourcing. It is a complementary tool to traditional statistics, as visual thinking with interactive interfaces is now recognized to facilitate reasoning. This is a software for Exploratory Data Analysis, a paradigm appeared in the Visual Analytics field of research.

"Introduction In this discussion paper, we define learning process analytics as a collection of methods that allow teachers and learners to understand what is going on in a' 'learning scenario, i.e. what participants work(ed) on, how they interact(ed), what they produced(ed), what tools they use(ed), in which physical and virtual location, etc. Learning analytics is most often aimed at generating predictive models of general student behavior. So-called academic analytics even aims to improve the system. We are trying to find a solution to a somewhat different problem. In this paper we will focus on improving project-oriented learner-centered designs, i.e. a family of educational designs that include any or some of knowledge-building, writing-to-learn, project-based learning, inquiry learning, problem-based learning and so forth. We will first provide a short literature review of learning process analytics and related frameworks that can help improve the quality of educational scenarios. We will then describe a few project-oriented educational scenarios that are implemented in various programs at the University of Geneva. These examples illustrate the kind of learning scenarios we have in mind and help define the different types of analytics both learners and teachers need. Finally, we present a provisional list of analytics desiderata divided into "wanted tomorrow" and "nice to have in the future"."

"Connected Learning is a modern pedagogical approach holding that knowledge and learning is distributed across a social, conceptual network. It holds that when people forge, negotiate and nurture connections for themselves (between people, information, knowledge, ideas and concepts), learning is more powerful and sustainable. Ideally, such learning could happen anywhere. People would create Personal Learning Networks within a Community of Inquiry. They would use whatever tools they consider relevant to this process, and connect with whoever they consider relevant to their network... However, this open connectivism is difficult to achieve in our current educational paradigms. How can we help people to teach "in the wild"? Learning Management Systems maintain a dominant position in the education sector, which means that technical support is generally provided only for those teachers who choose safety over openness."

Attempts to imagine the future of education often emphasize new technologies-ubiquitous computing devices, flexible classroom designs, and innovative visual displays. But the most dramatic factor shaping the future of higher education is something that we can't actually touch or see: big data and analytics. Basing decisions on data and evidence seems stunningly obvious, and indeed, research indicates that data-driven decision-making improves organizational output and productivity.1 For many leaders in higher education, however, experience and "gut instinct" have a stronger pull.

"The Social Networks Adapting Pedagogical Practice (SNAPP) tool performs real-time social network analysis and visualization of discussion forum activity within popular commercial and open source Learning Management Systems (LMS). SNAPP essentially serves as a diagnostic instrument, allowing teaching staff to evaluate student behavioral patterns against learning activity design objectives and intervene as required a timely manner. Valuable interaction data is stored within a discussion forum but from the default threaded display of messages it is difficult to determine the level and direction of activity between participants. SNAPP infers relationship ties from the post-reply data and renders a social network diagram below the forum thread. The social network visualization can be filtered based upon user activity and social network data can be exported for further analysis in NetDraw. SNAPP integrates seamlessly with a variety of Learning Management Systems (Blackboard, Moodle and Desire2Learn) and must be triggered while a forum thread is displayed in a Web browser."

George Siemens's PPT at ELI focus group

Data presentation can be beautiful, elegant and descriptive. There is a variety of conventional ways to visualize data - tables, histograms, pie charts and bar graphs are being used every day, in every project and on every possible occasion. However, to convey a message to your readers effectively, sometimes you need more than just a simple pie chart of your results. In fact, there are much better, profound, creative and absolutely fascinating ways to visualize data. Many of them might become ubiquitous in the next few years.

Listing visualizations of data. IBM Research and the IBM Cognos experiment.

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