The Speed of Tech: #owd11
I had the distinct pleasure and rather humbling honor of doing the opening keynote at De Onderwijsdagen (education days?) in Utrecht, NL. My talk was on learning analytics, a topic that is really booming, especially in The Netherlands…
What struck me this morning is how technology has sped up how we interact and debate nowadays.
On twitter, #owd11 became a trending topic within two hours after the start of the conference. There are hundreds of tweets by now, and if you think twitter is all empty talk, then you should really read this stream! As a presenter, this is a wonderful way to get Much More feedback on what you presented than you could ever hope to get in coffee breaks!
My slides are on slideshare:
The recording of my talk is available on youtube:
Trendmatcher did a follow-up interview, which is posted on cinch:
We are fours hours into the conference, and there are 5 posts on the conference blog.
And all this ‘just happens’ while we still talk and have lunch and go to presentations, etc.
I am no doubt a bit of an techno-optimist, but it seems to me it is hard to not see the Added Value of technology in this context. Only 5 years ago, creating this kind of web presence would have been a major undertaking – now it ‘just happens’… These are rather nice times to live in!
Erik Duval's Weblog 
hi erik,
just read your “attention please: Learning Analytics for Visualization and Recommendation” article, https://lirias.kuleuven.be/bitstream/123456789/315113/1/la2.pdf.
very interesting stuff BUT!
is this approach something any post-secondary institutions (or any kind of school for that matter) using? it would seem impossible to negotiate with (?) or sell it (?) to students, who I assume would be very concerned about privacy, and then the perception that if i don’t participate i’ll be at a disadvantage, etc.
thanks.
Well, I think you would need to have a conversation with the students about WHY you are doing this… But if you can make it clear that this enables you to help them take more control over their own learning, and help one another, and help you to help them, then maybe it will be less difficult to convince them?
For instance, in one of my courses, we track everything the students do in lab sessions: URL they visit, messages they send, software code they compile or check in, etc. Wasn’t too hard to explain them that we do this so they have a better overview of what they and their peers do…
In m’n blogpost over de Khan Academy http://www.innovatieregeling.nl/khan-analytics/ verwijs ik naar deze post.
Op het gebied van learning analytics is er nog zoveel vooruitgang te boeken…
‘t Mooie aan de Khan Academy vind ik dat je hiermee learning analytics op een gebruiksvriendelijke manier al in de praktijk toepast.
Hm, neither one of those contexts reallly apply to an online university such as ours (Athabasca U). In the lab, the students know you’re watching so they won’t be banking, checking Facebook, , reading blogs etc. as they would be (I would be) from home.
Then with Khan, the only data being captured is about Khan itself, so again, there’s no real risk of any personal info getting out.
Thanks
Reblogged this on Luuk Linssen.