Monthly Archives: March 2015

March 21, 2015 · 12:30 am

Personal Learning Environment

This post encourages the support of personal learning environments over structured work focusing on the end result, in order to also promote the use of library services during the research process.

What is a personal learning environment?

Image of ‘looking into’ research. Taken from http://pixabay.com/en/research-find-loupe-search-390297/. [Creative Commons licensed].

Personal learning environments enable more active interaction by engaging learners through several methods rather than adhering to the structured norm that is given by educators. It also increases motivation as it is what specifically interests the learner. This may draw more people into specifically looking into doing additional research and utilizing library services in which they can do further research on their topic area.

Benefits of a PLE:

The following lists the main benefits of PLEs, though additional benefits can be found here.

  • helps with creating learning environments that are tailored to the learners
  • focuses on encouraging innovation
  • emphasizes the value of the learning process than the finished product

Problems in the Real World Application:

One of the issues that I have noticed with personal learning environments does not simply arise from the educator’s responsibility but also because of the lack of responsiveness to new ways of doing assignments. There have been instances in which professors have tried to create a more flexible research assignment that did not require specific guidelines.

student

Image of confused student. Taken from https://www.flickr.com/photos/83633410@N07/7658298768/. [Creative Commons licensed].

In one of my undergraduate classes, a professor had given us free reign over choosing any topic of interest to on a research paper based on the field of Psychology. There were example topics given as well as a word count limit and that was set for the assignment. However, the students in the class did not respond well to the assignment as they had been very used to having a set structure that was determined through a particular rubric. Although they were given the chance to explore their own interests, they were left confused and unmotivated to continue on with their work. This type of behaviour shows how the norms have made it difficult for even students to respond positively to a personal learning environment catered towards their interests. Another interesting note was a paper that was written which highlighted the concern over a lack of structure. It seemed to be that it deterred students from being successful in academia.

Questions: What other ways can educators try to use personal learning environments for helping others learn? What can be done to help students become more receptive to person learning environments if they are not used to it?

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March 18, 2015 · 10:44 pm

Analytics

Altmetrics and Web Analytics

Altmetrics is defined as being an alternative to the typical way of measuring the amount of impact that journals or authors have had in academia. It is an interesting parallel to looking at web analytics as they can both be used to validate the content that is published online. Web analytics uses the web data in order to measure whether the website is easily used and whether there are ways in order to improve its usability. Both methods serve to demonstrate the amount of impact that the creator has had in giving information to the targeted population.

Web Analytics:

analytics-282739_640

Web analytics. Taken from http://pixabay.com/en/analytics-red-people-tracking-282739/. [Creative Commons licensed].

With web analytics, those who are in charge of organizing and creating a website can use the information in order to improve its content and the navigation around the website. For example, web developers can find information about pages that are viewed the most and the least in order to determine which web pages hold important information to the users. Moreover, there are statistics that show information on the number of new or returning website visitors. This can help web developers determine what web pages are useful for those who are coming back to a website as well as information that might be important to new visitors.

Useful web analytics tools for social media:

Some of the popular web analytics tools include the following:

Question: Have you heard of any others that have been very useful for analyzing data on social media?

Altmetrics:

altmetrics

Altmetrics and related words. Taken from https://www.flickr.com/photos/ajc1/6795008004/. [Creative Commons licensed].

On the other hand, altmetrics is typically used for journals and authors that are mentioned in social media. If a paper is mentioned within a social media platform, this will increase the score associated with the paper. Moreover, the type of source (e.g. a newspaper article compared to a tweet) will give more points as well. Different authors will also give a certain number of points according to how often it is posting (e.g. a professor sharing a link with other professors will be worth more points than a journal sending out the link). The total score is then calculated based off of these three points.

Questions: Have you seen any instances of altmetrics used? What was their usefulness? What were the limitations?

Therefore, analytics can be a useful tool in order to validate the work that has been completed – whether it is the impact it has had in academia or the impact that has been generated on websites.

Read about more information on common challenges that people are facing when using social media for community outreach after completing an analysis of your own work.

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