social learning – Simon.BuckinghamShum.net

Analytics for learning outside the LMS

Just kicking off, a project funded by Australian OLT which I’ve long been dreaming about under the heading of Social Learning Analytics [1-2], and now brought to life by Kirsty Kitto and her team at QUT, in collaboration with Mandy Lupton who is developing the concept of teaching+learning in the wild.

The point of departure is their Connected Learning Analytics (CLA) Toolkit:

“The CLA toolkit helps students and teachers to harvest data about their activities in standard social media environments, and then provide immediate feedback and reports. It is currently in development, but the basic design is sketched out below:

The release of the Experience API (xAPI) makes it possible to capture student behaviour in a highly flexible manner and send it to a Learning Record Store (LRS) for immediate or later analysis. We currently have tools in development that will interface with the API’s of

Google+

Twitter

StackExchange

Google Docs

Facebook

More details can be found in this paper:

K. Kitto, S. Cross, Z. Waters & M. Lupton. Learning Analytics beyond the LMS: the Connected Learning Analytics Toolkit. Learning Analytics and Knowledge (LAK’15), In Press, ACM.

And if you want to go and check out the source code, then it is available on GitHub.

This project has now been funded by the Australian Government’s Office for Learning and Teaching (OLT). The Proposal that we submitted can be found here if you would like more details.”

[1] Ferguson, R. and Buckingham Shum, S. (2012). Social Learning Analytics: Five Approaches. In: 2nd International Conference on Learning Analytics & Knowledge, 29 Apr – 02 May 2012, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, pp. 23–33. Open Access Eprint: http://oro.open.ac.uk/32910

[2] Buckingham Shum, S., & Ferguson, R. (2012). Social Learning Analytics. Educational Technology & Society, 15 (3), 3–26. Open Access Eprint: http://www.ifets.info/journals/15_3/2.pdf

ResilienceThinking.edu

Thanks to our Hewlett Foundation funded Open Learning Network Project, I was in Barcelona last week for the co-located Open Education Conference and Mozilla Drumbeat Festival, which was an interesting mix of people and ideas. OpenEd is an annual international gathering of OER movement sharing primarily around the strategy and practice of “doing OER”. Drumbeat was in the spirit of an unconference/hackfest/activist event, with tech and edu-geeks meeting around laptops and in discussion groups, within the marvellous Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona complex around the Plaça dels Àngels. Here’s a Q&A I did building up to Drumbeat, which really met my expectations.

So, we had the chance to air some thoughts on Resilience Thinking as it applies to open social learning, and demo associated technologies.

We gave a demo of Cohere at the opening night’s Drumbeat Science Fair, and at OpenEd presented it as part of our thinking on what a Collective Intelligence infrastructure might be not only for social learners, but also as a resilience platform for stakeholders in the open educational resources movement (or indeed, any knowledge-intensive community):

Buckingham Shum, S. and De Liddo, A. (2010). Collective intelligence for OER sustainability. OpenEd 2010: Seventh Annual Open Education Conference, 2-4 Nov 2010, Barcelona. Eprint: http://oro.open.ac.uk/23352

YouTube replay

I’ve put up an open google doc which further develops these thoughts. Do take a look, and add your own comments and links, or just drop me a note 🙂 It was exciting to see this connect with a strand of work I hadn’t known about, Technology, open education and a resilient higher education, a paper by Richard Hall and Joss Winn, part of the revolutionary University of Utopia collective.

Resilience thinking places significant emphasis on the importance of social capital. As part of our work on conceiving a social learning space tuned for open, social learning, I gave this paper on SocialLearn at OpenEd, reviewing some of its design rationale:

Towards a social learning space for open educational resources. Buckingham Shum, S. and Ferguson, R. (2010). OpenEd 2010: Seventh Annual Open Education Conference, 2-4 Nov 2010, Barcelona. Eprint: http://oro.open.ac.uk/23351

LAK11: 1st Int. Conf. on Learning Analytics & Knowledge

The 1st International Conference Learning Analytics & Knowledge will be held February 27-March 1, 2011 in Banff, Alberta. This is an extremely exciting development, reflecting what in many people’s view is going to be a key dimension to future learning environments, with a strong Open U. presence in the steering committee (join the Learning Analytics Google Group).

From the conference announcement:

The growth of data surpasses the ability of organizations to make sense of it. This concern is particularly pronounced in relation to knowledge, teaching, and learning. Learning institutions and corporations make little use of the data learners “throw off” in the process of accessing learning materials, interacting with educators and peers, and creating new content. In an age where educational institutions are under growing pressure to reduce costs and increase efficiency, analytics promises to be an important lens through which to view and plan for change at course and institutions levels. Corporations face pressure for increased competitiveness and productivity, a challenge that requires important contributions in organizational capacity building from work place and informal learning. Learning analytics can play a role in highlighting the development of employees through their learning activities.

In enterprise settings, information flow and social interactions can yield novel insights into organizational effectiveness and capacity to address new challenges or adapt rapidly when unanticipated event arise.

Thirdly, as we witness the expansion of learning and knowledge work beyond formal institutional boundaries, myriad platforms in the cloud hosting the activity of individuals will be providing/exchanging analytics.

Advances in knowledge modeling and representation, the semantic web, data mining, analytics, and open data form a foundation for new models of knowledge development and analysis. The technical complexity of this nascent field is paralleled by a transition within the full spectrum of learning (education, work place learning, informal learning) to social, networked learning. These technical, pedagogical, and social domains must be brought into dialogue with each other to ensure that interventions and organizational systems serve the needs of all stakeholders.

Learning Analytics 2011 will focus on integrating the technical and the social/pedagogical dimensions of learning analytics.

Learning analytics is the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of data about learners and their contexts, for purposes of understanding and optimising learning and the environments in which it occurs