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July 18, 2012 College Degrees, Designed by the Numbers By Marc Parry Illustration by Randy Lyhus for The Chronicle Campuses are places of intuition and serendipity: A professor senses confusion on a student's face and repeats his point; a student majors in psychology after a roommate takes a course; two freshmen meet on the quad and eventually become husband and wife. Now imagine hard data substituting for happenstance. As Katye Allisone, a freshman at Arizona State University, hunkers down in a computer lab for an 8:35 a.m. math class, the Web-based course watches her back. Answers, scores, pace, click paths-it hoovers up information, like Google. But rather than personalizing search results, data shape Ms. Allisone's class according to her understanding of the material.

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.

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.

Learning Emergence deep learning | complex systems | transformative leadership | knowledge media

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.

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.

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

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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.