This short piece is about how the use of learning analytics data might break into students’ consciousness and help overcome innate resistance to change
A US study (http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2010/Social-Media-and-Young-Adults.aspx) has indicated that younger internet users are losing interest in blogging and switching to shorter and more mobile forms of communication. The number of 12 to 17-year-olds in the US who blog has halved to 14% since 2006, according to a survey for the Pew Internet and American Life Project.
"I have lost track of the number of times I have heard educators repeat the stereotypes about the Net Generation: short attention span, expert mutitaskers, technologically savvy etc etc. Countless Michael Wesch-like You Tube videos are circulating urging us to wake up and change our ways or else risk losing an entire generation of learners who we are failing to engage. The answer, we are told, is more digital technology. We are letting consultants, futurists, technology sales people and others with a limited understanding of education set the agenda. We blindly accept their recommendations and repeat them as fact"
Kraut, R. E. & Resnick, P. (Under contract). Evidence-based social design: Mining the social sciences to build online communities. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
To help researchers investigate relation extraction, we’re releasing a human-judged dataset of two relations about public figures on Wikipedia: nearly 10,000 examples of “place of birth”, and over 40,000 examples of “attended or graduated from an institution”. Each of these was judged by at least 5 raters, and can be used to train or evaluate relation extraction systems. We also plan to release more relations of new types in the coming months.
In the framework of the International Seminar "Evidence-based research: methodological approaches and practical outcomes", the UNESCO Chair in Education & Technology for Social Change of the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya will organize an Open Session with International experts
The Experience API (xAPI for short) is far more than just an update to SCORM, the popular standard for tracking data from a learning management system. xAPI opens up a whole new world of possibilities for learning analytics. Examples of what real organizations are doing with it in real-life situations make it easier to grasp the scale of this advance and apply the learnings to your own situation.