Group items tagged

" twXplorer, which allows you search for a specific hashtag or term, giving you the most recent 500 tweets along with some basic analysis of the content found therein."

Nice application of network analysis to literary/film studies.

Text analysis tool

"The studies analyzed here document that active learning leads to increases in examination performance that would raise average grades by a half a letter, and that failure rates under traditional lecturing increase by 55% over the rates observed under active learning. The analysis supports theory claiming that calls to increase the number of students receiving STEM degrees could be answered, at least in part, by abandoning traditional lecturing in favor of active learning."

"Another way to look at Wikipedia's influence: Wikipedia reaches almost one-third of the total mobile population each month, according to Knight's analysis, which used data from the audience-tracking firm Nielsen. "

"Although massive open online courses (MOOCs) are seen to be, and are in fact designed to be, stand-alone online courses, their introduction to the higher education landscape has expanded the space of possibilities for blended course designs (those that combine online and face-to-face learning experiences). Instead of replacing courses at higher education institutions, could MOOCs enhance those courses? This paper reports one such exploration, in which a Stanford University Machine Learning MOOC was integrated into a graduate course in machine learning at Vanderbilt University during the Fall 2012 semester. The blended course design, which leveraged a MOOC course and platform for lecturing, grading, and discussion, enabled the Vanderbilt instructor to lead an overload course in a topic much desired by students. The study shows that while students regarded some elements of the course positively, they had concerns about the coupling of online and in-class components of this particular blended course design. Analysis of student and instructor reflections on the course suggests dimensions for characterizing blended course designs that incorporate MOOCs, either in whole or in part. Given the reported challenges in this case study of integrating a MOOC in its entirety in an on-campus course, the paper advocates for more complex forms of blended learning in which course materials are drawn from multiple MOOCs, as well as from other online sources."

"A recent Twitter conversation that cast doubt on the conclusions of a genomics study has revived a debate about how best to publicly discuss possible errors in research. Yoav Gilad, a geneticist at the University of Chicago in Illinois, last month wrote on Twitter that fundamental errors in the design and data analysis of a December 2014 study2 led to an unfounded conclusion about the genetic similarities between mice and humans."

"We're rich in data-but the returns are diminishing rapidly, because after a certain point the more information you have, the harder it becomes to extract meaning from it. Ironically, an excess of information resists analysis and comprehension in much the same way a lack of it does. As a result, the more that new technology floods our world with complex information, the more we end up calling on a much older field of human endeavor, one that has always been devoted to making complexity comprehensible and extracting meaning from chaos, namely, art. "

Quoting Mr. Russell from the introduction to his book,

"These studies tell me that there is nothing inherent in the technologies that elicits improvements in learning. Having said that, let me reassure you that difference in outcomes can be made more positive by adapting the content to the technology. That is, in going through the process of redesigning a course to adapt the content to the technology, it can be improved."

This idea is reflected in the history of the No Significant Difference literature. Over the last 50 years, the question for media comparison studies (MCS) has evolved from, "Can students learn at a distance?" to "What is the effect of distance delivery on student outcomes?" Over the years, especially since the internet revolution, the conviction that distance delivery is necessarily inferior to face to face instruction has faded a bit. As we accept that it is not the technology itself, but the application of technology, that has the potential to affect learning, it is our hope that future research will strive to identify the instructional methods that best utilize technology attributes to improve student outcomes.

Education research has shown that an effective technique for developing problem-solving and critical-thinking skills is to expose students early and often to "ill-defined" problems in their field. An ill-defined problem is one that addresses complex issues and thus cannot easily be described in a concise, complete manner. Furthermore, competing factors may suggest several approaches to the problem, requiring careful analysis to determine the best approach.

"In this portfolio, there are only four pieces so far. I plan on adding to the collection and changing the format of the site around as I get used to blogging like this. I decided the best pieces to showcase how I started out would be the first few things I wrote and then some of the last things I did. So, I posted the first journal we did: Preliminary Self-Analysis. Upon reading it now, I remember how I decided just go for the "type like I talk" format just to see what would happen. It doesn't look too bad, but I can tell I overdid it a little. "

Assessment: What are students really learning?

h/t Laura via Jon

Digital text-mining tools can help researchers understand document collections that are prohibitively large for a close-reading. Our collection of runaway slave advertisements from Texas, Arkansas, and Mississippi totals over 2,500 individual ads! Not only would it be extremely time consuming to read this entire collection, the consistently short, boilerplate format of runaway ads can make it difficult to really distinguish between them. The ads from Texas, Arkansas, and Mississippi start to all look practically indistinguishable, making it difficult for close-reading alone to recognize pattern breaks between the states, without the assistance of computational data. This is where Voyant comes in. We hoped that the "distant-reading" capabilities of Voyant would be able to pick up on larger word usage trends that are not immediately apparent when reading with the human eye.

What an insightful assignment- I will keep this one in mind for teaching cultural awareness and empathy

"Mapping Networks of Reprinting in 19th-Century Newspapers and Magazines" Really cool digital humanities project