Group items tagged

A documentary by Kate Ray

Metaweb is a service that help you build your website around entities and not just words.

A data analysis service for the learning science community

This document is designed as being a simple but comprehensive introductory publication for anybody trying to get into the Semantic Web: from beginners through to long time hackers. Recommended pre-reading: the Semantic Web in Breadth.

I've been following developments in intelligent tutoring systems for a while,  and find it interesting to see how researchers are combining artificial intelligence, learning theory, affective computing, and sensor networks to create applications that might prove to be useful and effective.

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. EDUCAUSE's Next Generation learning initiative offers a slightly different definition "the use of data and models to predict student progress and performance, and the ability to act on that information". Their definition is cleaner than the one I offer, but, as I'll detail below, is intended to work within the existing educational system, rather than to modify it. I'm interested in how learning analytics can restructure the process of teaching, learning, and administration.

These, and other similar projects, promise the emergence of a new social and theoretical paradigm whose goal is to decipher the web of social interactions generated by social media.

After visualizing chat room dialogue earlier this week, I thought it might be neat to try and visualize some Twitter dialogue from the #LAK11 course.  For some reason I thought it would be simple to extract tweets from Twitter for analysis.  It wasn't!  So if you happen to know an easier way please leave a comment.

Ah… the semantic web. The saviour of the internet, and the evil empire enforcing its evil standardization upon my freedom. I've always been a little suspicious of this particular topic. Not that I'm opposed to any kind of stardardization, railroads and the lack of standardizations with bank cards at grocery stores come to mind (grrr…) But the semantic web and how data is 'linked' is pretty important to analytics. time to dive in.

The father of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee defines the Semantic Web as "a web of data that can be processed directly and indirectly by machines."

Academic analytics helps address the public's desire for institutional accountability with regard to student success, given the widespread concern over the cost of higher education and the difficult economic and budgetary conditions prevailing worldwide. Purdue University's Signals project applies the principles of analytics widely used in business intelligence circles to the problem of improving student success within a course and, hence, improving the institution's retention and graduation rates over time.

generating word clouds, interesting as a game, as analysis can be very simple, depending on what you want to search.

Several weeks ago, I posted a question on Quora asking for the best data blogs. There have been 26 replies with dozens of blogs recommended.

A way of using massive amounts of data for medicine and forensics (16 minute video)

"The Effective Lifelong Learning Inventory (ELLI) research first identified, then devised a scientifically rigorous way of assessing the essential characteristics of effective lifelong learners." Shared during Feb 18, 2011 web conference with Simon Buckingham Shum

"VizThink is a global community for visual thinkers and communicators who like to get beyond words and believe that visuals can be an effective tool whether you're just trying to work through your ideas or working to get your message across as simply as possible." Shared by Adam Weisblatt during Feb 18, 2011 web conference with Simon Buckingham Shum

"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." From Feb 18, 2011 web conference with Simon Buckingham Shum

Knowledge Cartography: Software Tools and Mapping Techniques. (Eds.) Okada, A., Buckingham Shum, S. and Sherborne, T. Springer: Advanced Information and Knowledge Processing Series. ISBN: 978-1-84800-148-0"

According to Eva Tardos, Jacob Gould Schurman Professor of Computer Science at Cornell University, the researchers' paper "is more the beginning of research than a definitive result or end product." The researchers' models make several simplifying assumptions - including the number of competitors - that make the math easier but limit their applicability. Nonetheless, "just raising the questions is an important step forward," Tardos says.

Among the greatest innovations might be the advent of real-time analytics, which allow the processing of information in real time to enable instantaneous decision-making.