I have been having fun with Ghostery– visiting all sorts of pages and finding out who is tracking what. Â Wikipedia doesn’t have even one tracker it seems… and there was this message (about funding, but interesting all the same): Google might have close to a million servers. Yahoo has something like 13,000 staff. We have […]
Continue reading Wikipedia Posted in: Week 12: Social Analytics The Venture This is an open, online course in learning analytics; from the syllabus: “Learning and Knowledge Analytics 2011Â is a conceptual and exploratory introduction to the role of analytics in learning and knowledge development. Most of the topics do not require advanced statistical methods or technical skills. Topics covered during the six-week course will introduce […]
Continue reading A4 Venture Posted in: Week 12: Social Analytics
Hi Kristopher,
I agree with you that “there must be training and research that goes into understanding this new breadth of data”. As there are many limitations of social analytics, we educators and students, or audience in general require time to digest what social analytics are and what they do before using it. As it says in the Week 12 blog, “social analytics requres skillful analysts to statistically test findings to determine their significance, and to offer meaningful interpretations and explanations of them”. It took a while for me to understand what social analytics is. Although I understand what it is now, I still don’t see it very useful. In a teacher’s perspective, it would be useful for assessing students’ performances. But in a student’s perspective, I’m concerned about privacy issues that come with it. I personally feel uncomfortable that other people see my performance.
Deb
Hi all, There is a huge potential for design practices with learning and social analytics. Â I found it interesting the connection between analytics and assessment for learning; as educators, we are constantly assessing our students for the purpose of improving learning. Â This is ongoing, can be formal or informal, and much of what we receive […]
Continue reading A2 Week 12 Posted in: Week 12: Social Analytics
I definitely agree that the danger lies in thinking of these analytics as an ‘answer’ rather than one tool in a box. One of the worrying things for me with some of the analytics tools is how easily they can fit into the ‘no child left behind’ mode of assessing student, teacher and school performance. We wanted to include the Klout example because it does demonstrate how analytics isn’t the appropriate tool for measuring all kinds of social and qualitative things.
I thought that this week’s focus forms such a stark contrast to project-based assessments from a couple weeks back. They’re apparently so contrasting that i’m tempted to ferret out the points of contact between them.
Allie,
Interesting post comparing the two. We accepted PBA with opened arms but now we are having concerns about learning analytics. I just think we need to be more open-minded when embracing new ventures while ensuring that personal and critical information is protected.
Everton
This experience is designed to create an analysis of the current market for Learning Analytics Ventures. Its purpose is to help you understand critical information in the analysis, design and evaluation of a social/learning analytics venture. Multiple roles are presented: students, educators, instructional designers, venture analysts, entrepreneurs, and investors. Â You may respond to one or […]
Continue reading Activity 3 – Week 12 (Analysing Learning Analytics – Investors/Venture Analysts) Posted in: Week 12: Social Analytics
As Brenda mentioned in her post already, I think it’s a great idea to have a tool that analyzes that the data (e.g. graphs, tables, and digrams) represent.
If I see social analytics in a student’s point of view, it doesn’t seem that useful as an educational tool because I probably wouldn’t understand what those data (e.g. graphs, tables, and diagrams) represent. As an investor, I wouldn’t invest my money if I believed that students in general wouldn’t think it to be a helpful tool. As mentioned in ‘Limitations of Social Analytics’ (in Week 12 blog), “social analytics requires skillful analysts to statistically test findings to determine their significance, and to offer meaningful interpretations and explanations of them”. In other words, audience in general is not familiar with social analytics.
However, by adding the analysis of the data, audience would be able to understand the importance of social analytics and use it more often to monitor their interaction with others.
Deb
Hi Deb,
thanks for your post. I couldn’t agree with you more. As an investor I wouldn’t want to invest in something that I didn’t believe that my clients wanted. I completely agree that by educating (if you will) your clients about the importance of social analytics than they are more likely to be supportive. My one issue is that perhaps due to the inquisitive and personal nature of social analytics than perhaps clients can possibly be turned off from investing in this technology. Of course this is just a potential outcome, I believe that yours is far more likely.
thanks for the post.
David.
This experience is designed to create an analysis of the current market for Learning Analytics Ventures. Its purpose is to help you understand critical information in the analysis, design and evaluation of a social/learning analytics venture. Multiple roles are presented: students, educators, instructional designers, venture analysts, entrepreneurs, and investors. Â You may respond to one or […]
Continue reading Activity 3 – Week 12 (Analysing Learning Analytics – Entrepreneurs) Posted in: Week 12: Social Analytics
Data is essential for good decision-making. Unfortunately, data alone can result in poor decisions. We tend to focus on data and interpretations that support our preconceived notions, and ignore data that conflicts with our ideas. Even when it comes to analytics for the web, there are search engine optimization specialists who have to analyze the data and make reasoned suggestions to clients on what to do with it to achieve certain goals.
The value of analytics is in collecting data on real behaviours because people lie. They don’t necessarily lie maliciously, but they do lie. They will say something is a great idea but when it comes down to the moment of paying… suddenly things can change very quickly. I’ve seen businesses built on ideas that seemed to make sense and that generated lots of enthusiasm and investment, but in the end customers weren’t willing to pay for the products. Somehow the product managers and executives and investors got lost in a filter bubble and never accessed the data they really needed to identify and capitalize on a problem that people would be willing to pay to solve.
We do the same thing in learning. We believe we are “working hard” when reality shows we are wasting time daydreaming, surfing, Facebooking, reading news clips. Analytics represent a way of helping us gain insight into the reality of our behaviour. I remember a major corporation brought in a consultant who had employees record the time they spent on each task. As a lawyer, I had to do the same thing. That kind of discipline can make you highly aware of your efficiency (or lack thereof). Think of students who insist they read the textbook or the instructions and yet fail to understand the basic requirements. Think of how long it can take to read journal articles when you are tired, anxious and distracted, and how quickly they go by when you can skim them effectively.
How much of our time is really used effectively? How might insight into the time we spend teaching or learning things help us recognize the value of changing our strategies? How might analytics help us identify where most of our time is going, and how efficiently we are using it? If we connect analytics with learning outcomes, how might this information help us change the way we study, the way we teach, and the kinds of activities we use to reinforce learning?
Analytics could help balance our preconceived notions and provide more real-time feedback about our approaches than end of term exams. The more we get real time feedback on performance, the more control we can feel about how we choose to do our teaching and learning.
The next step is to connect the analytics of behaviour and learning outcomes to practical advice. Imagine this kind of assistance:
“You seem to spend 10 minutes reading each page of the journal article. The time you spend causes you not to be able to finish your readings. You tend to be unprepared in class and ask or answer few questions. You could improve your performance with some simple reading techniques: (list, scaffolding through using them)”
As an addendum, I’m wondering if we might say that people mis-represent, rather than lie about the time they spend on task; part of lying is intending to deceive, which I don’t think is true in all cases.
But the broader thing I find quite interesting about this is the notion that we might develop learning analysis tools for students to help them enhance their personal productivity as learners by helping them identify what their optimal conditions for learning are (such as time of day, or environment). That is something I haven’t yet seen. There may be something within the non-learning tech marketplace (certainly there are enough productivity apps out there and apps that restrict one from visiting websites during certain times of day) that could be used as a model for something learning oriented.
very interesting post, David. I like how you emphasize the importance of connecting analytics to learning outcomes – something I don’t think is especially well represented in the social/learning analytics marketplace at present, with the exceptions of those products that are specifically designed for teachers and learners to use – such as School of One and Socrato.
This experience is designed to create an analysis of the current market for Learning Analytics Ventures. Its purpose is to help you understand critical information in the analysis, design and evaluation of a social/learning analytics venture. Multiple roles are presented: students, educators, instructional designers, venture analysts, entrepreneurs, and investors. Â You may respond to one or […]
Continue reading Activity 3 – Week 12 (Analysing Learning Analytics – Educators/Instructional Designers) Posted in: Week 12: Social Analytics
Learning analytics would be helpful as they provide a huge amount of information in regards to how the learner is interacting with the internet. There are of course limitations, the biggest of which is falling into the trap that that type of data collection can be used exclusively instead of combining that type of information gathering with other assessments.
As an instructional designer, I would use this type of information to note what learners are doing, so that I could cross reference with what learners should be doing. This would give me a sense of where the content/activities are lacking relevance or excitement.
In addition, analytics can help us to understand the context in which the learner is operating. By understanding the context, we can improve the relevance and engagement of the learner with the content. Again, the same pitfall (that we may be relying to heavily on one set of data) exists.
Kristopher
I did an experiment with learning analytics in my ETEC 511 final report. I used the Social Network Analysis (SNA) software to analyze the course discussion groups and found the results very interesting and useful from the perspective of future instructional designs for online training for the workplace.
During my investigation of this technology I found research by Shen et al (2008) that directly related a student’s perception of community on an online environment with their interactions in the discussion forum. The social network analysis (SNA) was seen to be a valuable tool for exposing the interactions. Shen et al’s key argument is that of the ability to determine optimal learning environments, density of network, centrality (# of ties, how inter-related the nodes are, how close to the centre). I think that the effective use of the technology requires the active involvement of the instructor to see if learners are either lurking or dominating in discussions and to take proactive action to encourage discussions where everyone participates.
The challenge with the technology was that it could only be used within controlled discussion forums and didn’t take into account alternative communication channels or social networking applications. So, I agree with Kristopher’s perspective that it shouldn’t be used exclusively as it can only provide part of the picture. However, it still could help the instructor from a monitoring perspective.
Reference:
Shen, Demei, Nuankhieo, Piyanan, Huang, Xinxin, Amelung, Christopher, Laffey, James. (2008). Using Social Network Analysis to Understand Sense of Community in an Online Learning Environment. Educational Computing research. Vol. 39(1). 17-36, 2008.
It would be neat / useful if, in a course that was being monitored this way, a student could input the sites / channels / avenues they would be communicating in so that everything that “counted” was recognized.
As an educator, I have been reflecting on the use of social analytics to personalize and target instruction. I’ve been thinking a lot about the TED talk presented, and struggling with the benefits of personalization on one hand, and the drawbacks of restricting query results to those areas that have been identified as important. There is an ethical issue to targeting a person’s learning preferences based on what they have done in the past. If a tool is targeting information and activities to our past behaviour (I keep hearing Dr.Phil’s voice: “the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior…”) then how do we have the opportunity to change and adjust our habits (in other words, to learn new behaviors)? When working within the realm of education, we often focus on learning about our students preferred learning styles, and making sure that our teaching incorporates activities that target them. However, within a classroom, there are often so many learning styles that all students would be getting exposed to different avenues for learning at some point – not just the ones they like the best at the time. If hidden analytics are individualizing an activity, then how do we have the opportunity to consider other ways of doing things; to gain exposure to how someone else may approach an exercise? When it comes to tracking a whole site (or a whole course), and using the information to improve the usefulness of it, I don’t see the dilemma. When it comes to targeting people, though, it seems restrictive. Sometimes I love that Amazon can predict what I want, but other times, I’d just like to see a bird’s eye perspective on what is out there and what is popular (and not just popular with people like me…).
Emily
Thanks for your thoughtful response, Emily! It seems to me, and please correct me if I’m paraphrasing you incorrectly, that your primary concern with social/learning analytics as used to guide personalized learning plans (as with School of One) is that it risks being too individualizing? Like, a classroom would be full of, say, 30 little learning silos but no social learning happening between them?
I think that’s a really interesting point and critique of personalized or 1:1 learning – especially since much online learning environments seem to depend on the sharing and social building of knowledge.
The TED talk made a great point that may be getting lost. It’s not that Google is doing anything differently than we already have. We’ve always had curation. There’s too much information to understand and we need trusted curators. Even within a classroom, we tend to rely on the professor as a curator. We are willing to pay vast amounts of money to have people curate knowledge for us… essentially that’s what role specialization is all about. We take recommendations from friends and family instead of doing research ourselves. The amount of information available is staggering.
Re “learning styles”, try Googling “neuromyths learning styles”. It’s an example of an educational “trend” with blinders on and the trend seems perfectly related to the concept of getting lost in a filter bubble. People are still talking about left-brain and right-brain activities long after the concept has been thrown out the window in neuroscience.
indeed, human perception itself is a curatorial act of sorts as what we actually see when we’re looking at something is filtered in culturally specific ways.
Social analytics could help me identify students who are disconnected from social network. I can also identify high and low performing students. I can see who has been interacting with whom. By identifying them before marking their work, I can plan interventions so that I can help them increase their participation.
Moreover, I can monitor students’ posts (e.g. the total number of posts per student). This can help me monitor their participation level.
Deb
If you do Google searches for ideas, you don’t get balanced results. Say you want a review on a product you’re considering. If you Google for “product review” you often get a lot of highly positive results. When I was shopping for a car many years ago, I found you could get endless glowing reviews of new cars and their features and capabilities, even from reputable car magazines.
So what’s missing? A simple word: “problems”. Try doing the same searches for reviews but instead of “product review” search for “product problems”. Suddenly that fabulous car you’ve been reading great things about doesn’t look so good at all. Suddenly that amazing computer monitor seems like an overpriced, flaky chunk of frustration.
We get absorbed in hype and trends. People honestly chase optimism. It doesn’t mean they are necessarily malicious, calculating or controlling.
How could analytics help us? Analytics could be a performance support to ensure better critical thinking and more balanced design and teaching by tracking “problems” and “issues” and “controversy” even while they are not trending large in pure numbers. What if analytics were a sidebar on our search engines, tracking the pitfalls and challenges and concerns behind our searches? It’s like a friend who taps you on the shoulder and says, “I overheard you talking about X. X has a lot of good features, but did you know it has pitfalls A and B?”
How do we apply this to learning? I think the whole left brain, right brain, visual-auditory-kinesthetic learning styles trends are a good example. A number of articles came out a few years ago that basically said science does not support these concepts. Many teachers and instructional designers use techniques that have no scientific basis or worse have been proved ineffective. Analytics could provide an ongoing balanced view showing trends in scientific research vs. popular trends. Popular trends tend to trail science by years if not decades. Perhaps analytics could provide corrective information by plotting the scientific directions vs. the popular direction and you could see divergence much faster and follow up on it.
Hi David,
Great points. I love your tracking ‘issues’ idea. This would be very valuable. The only issue I see arising from it is how strongly we value a negative review over a positive one. When I’m reading reviews from 10 people about a pair of snowshoes, even if it has been rated 4 and a half stars overall, I’m still hesitant to buy them if there is one bad review. I can’t let it go. You’re right that we chase optimism (like a herd, really), but we get swayed by pessimism very easily as well. We are so swayed by anecdotal evidence as it is – it seems like we may be stoking the fire by providing such ready access.
How many of us got flu shots this year? Consider the reasons.
Emily
This experience is designed to create an analysis of the current market for Learning Analytics Ventures. Its purpose is to help you understand critical information in the analysis, design and evaluation of a social/learning analytics venture. Multiple roles are presented: students, educators, instructional designers, venture analysts, entrepreneurs, and investors. Â You may respond to one or […]
Continue reading Activity 3 – Week 12 (Analysing Learning Analytics – Students) Posted in: Week 12: Social Analytics
I could see a display of trending / current topics as a way for me to discover some related research classmates are using, ideas they may be talking about / searching. It might be a neat and quick way for me to see what’s going on without asking every single person or reading every single message.
I could use learning analytics to know how my level of participation has been, if I have missed something. Also it would be useful for tracking what is going on with all the members of the class and the topics of the course. As Stephen mentioned it would be very useful for not needing to ask everything.
Angela.
Clearly, I could use learning analytics as a tool to keep track of my progress and that of others. Through this, I will avoid the traffic of sifting through many posts to locate exactly what I want to see. Also I would be able to keep track of my fellow classmates’ topics of interest and what they are doing and discussing.
Everton
Socrato is an interesting concept which personalizes learning on a different level. Customizing learning compliments the learning process – I could certainly use this in analyzing how I was doing and where my deficiencies were.Tracking my progress would assist on focusing my efforts. I have never used analytics before but certainly could see the benefits of having a personalized tutor to guide me.
In addition to the responses above, I could use learning analytics for social networking. I could keep track of my communication and that of others and use the information I gather from others to generate new information again.
Deb
Hi Deb,
I would also use the learning analytics for social networking, personal progressive tool as well as the others listed above.
Jenaca
For me, it’s not just knowing what people are up to. Social networking is supposed to do that but I don’t find that it does. I think the lack of anonymity causes a lot of filtering and posturing in social networking which skews the “data”.
I would like to identify my own research interests and use analytics to find out where the most conversation on those topics is happening, and what the direction of those conversations is. By direction, I mean where they are going with an idea. We may all be researching a concept, but taking it in different directions.
Analytics may also identify historical trends. In my research, I’ve identified waves of studies over the years. Analytics could visualize those waves and help me zoom in on trends and characterize them. This is something we end up doing anyway, through hours of queries and readings, but it would be nice to get a quicker context, an advance organizer almost of research.
I found this weeks topic to be very interesting as I have never really thought about  social analytics before. I think activity 1 says it all “the eyes are watching”. It is crazy to me to think that everything we view or read online, is monitored by websites and other people. For Activity #2 I […]
Continue reading Springer Realtime Posted in: Week 12: Social Analytics
Thanks for your post, Jenaca, and I’m glad you’re finding this week’s content interesting!
It’s true that the monitoring of our online practices through analytics can feel creepy. One thing I’ve really learned through discovering and experiencing how pervasive analytics is that I need to have a decent grip on it if I plan to develop my career in creating digital tools for learning.
“How can we use learning analytics to foster more effective design practices?” Learning and social analytics are important in understanding how people interact with your online content. In my world, where I create content for people I may never meet, I can use surveys to ask people about what they liked or didn’t like, found useful or […]
Continue reading Activity #2 – Conole’s questions Posted in: Week 12: Social Analytics
I like how you point out how analytics can be an effective supplement for surveys. It reminds me of one of the old adages of anthropology – what people *say* they do (in your case, surveys), and what they *actually* do (say, as perceived through analytics) can often differ. Both are significant pieces of data, and the points of difference and overlap between them can be illuminating.
This is an amazing database! Â I have been accessing Springer journal articles for some time now, but usually only through the UBC library access since most articles were not free. Â However, on this site, I was able to do many keyword searches and had no issue with downloading article after article – so that was […]
Continue reading Day 2 Springer Realtime Posted in: Week 12: Social Analytics
Thanks for your post, Brenda!
I think that tools such as Springer Realtime can be really helpful as a teaching tool for having students identify what are the most important or influential articles and authors; I think it can also be useful as a learning tool to think about why certain works are more influential than others. I know that when I teach (undergraduates), I always try to stress that the first (X) number of sources that pop up in a search aren’t necessarily going to be the best ones for their papers – things like Springer Realtime, and cited reference searches on Web of Science and Google Scholar can help all of us identify the best sources for our research needs.
Great ideas Allie…thanks for that
Before you publish your posting, please make sure that you select a category (eg. Introductions) as well as assign some meaningful tags (keywords).
Julie S 11:24 am on November 23, 2011 Permalink | Log in to Reply
The Ghostery was a really good activity but I must say it’s freaking me out a bit. I think I’ve now gotten up to about 12 trackers on a single site. Yikes. I knew about the trackers before this exercise but I had no idea that there would be this many or that the News sites seem to be the worst. So far, the Vancouver Sun has been the single worst in terms of number of trackers.
I was so happy to see this post about Wikipedia and sure enough I went there and there are no trackers. Sweet! I will be surprised if they can keep the model up much longer. I’m not sure how long the donation model will continue to work.
kstooshnov 3:03 pm on November 23, 2011 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Hi Julie,
I am still a bit in the dark with what Ghostery will be doing about the websites I’ve been visiting (since I have been floating between four different computers this week to get assignment 3 done, I’m not expecting to find out anytime soon). I suspect that it is indicating that Wikipedia is on its way out, if it still #5 on the hit list, but not a single tracker. It would be a shame to see Wikipedia have to break its own rule about ads to bump their brand up the hit list. One excellent account of how Wikipedia beat Encyclopedia Britannica (and their fledgeling website) appears in Don Tapscott and Anthony D. WIlliams’ Wikinomics. A must read for digital venturists!
Kyle
Julie S 5:26 pm on November 23, 2011 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Thanks Kyle – I have that book 🙂 Read it a while back but I think I might read it again after this term is done. I remember it being a really good read.