Last week I attended the 3rd ACM Learning Analytics and Knowledge conference (LAK13) in Leuven, Belgium. Beautiful city and gorgeous beer aside the 3 day conference and 2 days of workshops were a productive and interesting space and a great networking opportunity. Because it’s a bit closer to my area, and I’ve moved on since Texas, in terms of specific outputs and thinking that took place I’m going to save it for posts specifically related to my work (or, for the thesis) but here’s some general thoughts on the whole week.

1. “We should all be philosophers” John Beherens said (so it must be true)
   1. There is a real epistemological interest in the community re: research methods, student epistemic practices such as credibility checking, and what it means for people to ‘know’ content/skills in educational contexts (good job too as this was what Simon Karen and I wrote our paper on – epistemology, pedagogy, assessment and learning analytics)
   2. There is also a real interest in pedagogy – what systems fit well with LA (-ve/+ve impact); how can pedagogy be responsive in light of student data; how do we measure engagement/learning/collaboration/quality, etc.
2. Plenty of people are also working within current systems, looking at analytics to support and improve the current models, including in moocs – and that’s an entirely pragmatically sensible thing to do, I’d hate for us to forget about the ‘foundational’ element, but we also need to work on what we’ve got, particularly where there are obvious ways to do so and have an impact (although we shouldn’t forget to say “we’ve improved outcomes…but are these really the outcomes we want to improve” where appropriate)
3. Methodologically there are fascinating things going on and incredibly impressive developments – people are using some fairly low tech stuff to good effect, and really pushing at boundaries in other respects.  That said, having been to CSCW I also would’ve loved to bring some of more of the people there to LAK – Wikipedia and mediawiki work have such obvious potential in LA, but haven’t been used much so far, cscw people were doing amazing things with it so it’d be cool to have some of that activity in LAK too.  Similarly there were a few language processing tools from CSCW with possible LAK application (although there’s also really cool work going on in the community on that area for sure). Some new developments I’d guess won’t be from new techniques, but new (and integrated) applications.

Personally I was particularly pleased to meet some people I’ve only met online, and to meet some people working in somewhat similar areas to me on epistemic practices including Golnaz Arastoopour  (who aside from anything else, we can thank for the much improved appearance of my blog…at time of writing 😉 ) and David Williamson Shaffer (her supervisor) who work on ‘epistemic games‘ at University of Wisconsin-Madison – I’m hoping to pay a visit in the not too distant future to talk about the discourse analytics they’ve developed and its potential application in collaborative information seeking contexts :-).

This was also a particularly important conference for me as I had workshop paper: Discourse, Computation and Context – Sociocultural DCLA Revisited (presentation on slideshare with audio); and full paper (with best paper nomination): Epistemology, Pedagogy, Assessment, and Learning Analytics (presentation on slideshare, video to follow).  Both papers seemed well received – although in hindsight I would have framed the first slightly differently in the presentation – and I’ve finally broken out of my awful habit of presenting minimalistic plain text on black backgrounds.

The OU was well represented with involvement in (not necessarily lead involvement) at least 7 papers at the full conference (apologies if I’ve missed any) including the ‘best paper’ nominated paper Simon, Karen and I wrote, and plenty more at the workshops.  Those papers are below.  That meant we had probably around 10 attendees, which must’ve made us one of the best represented university (although Stanford certainly had quite a few too, and I’m sure other places too).

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