Group items tagged

"A majority of courses that used adaptive learning had "no discernible impact" on grades, with just four out of 15 that could be assessed resulting in "slightly higher" averages. SRI found no evidence that adaptive learning had had an effect on course completion in the 16 grantee-provided data sets "appropriate" for estimating that impact."

I wonder how often this opportunity is there but the person isn't . . . seems like the very definition of computational thinking. "In the end, the tool was very crude but accomplished something very useful: It had a flow that ensured all the reports required by people on the ground, and above, were sent in a timely and orderly manner. Each step of that flow was almost entirely automated. Each button filled a template and put the text in the clipboard for copy-pasting in the chat. Events were timed automatically. Distances and time of travel were computed automatically. A dropdown menu facilitated entering common values. Big warning signs were visible when a time critical step was ongoing, or some important data was missing."

""I think this next generation of systems is really going to be about data and analytics and relationship management," LeBlanc said. "The whole shift in conversation, it seems to me, is about student-centeredness."" How to reconcile those two statements?

"The most widely read paper of Jeffrey Hancock's career was not conceived in a university laboratory. The data were collected by machines. The subjects were unwitting. The methods were not approved by an institutional review board."

"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."

""That's our goal: To make a computer much more like a human being, in the sense that it integrates data and can make decisions," Littlewood told me. "So the future definition of computer may be like the original. It may be like a person after all.""

" a web application to select video quotes from a video, to embed in a article. it uses Spoken data API to generate a transcription of the video. The user can then search, and select a quote. This can be exported, and the application trims the video, and generates the HTML code to embed it with the corresponding part of the video associated as a dropdown."

Just watched the video. Will have to explore further...and share with my students. Thanks!

data visualizations for the art world

Really need to think about how to do more with this internally for some of the routine support stuff. "It's no secret that newsrooms are increasingly using bots to cut down on busy work. Software now routinely churns out quarterly earnings stories for The Associated Press and earthquake alerts for Los Angeles Times, freeing reporters to pursue more in-depth projects. And while no bot can write 3,000-word investigative stories, it can assist reporters by alerting them to new data and filtering the information for them."

"The Formation by Design Project is a learner-centered and evidence-centered approach to reinventing our institutions around whole person development and doing so in ways that are thoroughly responsive to the emerging learning ecosystem that characterizes this moment in history-the increasingly data-rich environment that, while enabling personalization and customization of learning, at the same time risks de-centering and dis-empowering learners. The Project engages internal and external stakeholders in a process of defining, designing, and measuring formation of the individual within the context of higher education." h/t Shelly Fowler

"Duolingo for schools offers a window into the future of education technology. It shows us how interactive digital technologies can be used to create a more equitable educational landscape, not just in the U.S., but globally. It reminds us why we all bought into these networked technologies in the first place. Data-driven solutions don't have to be all about corporate growth, they can also be about creating innovative ways to improve humanity's lived experience in the world."

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.