Over the last week I’ve been in Boulder, Colorado for the 11th International Conference of the Learning Sciences (ICLS). I was over co-chairing a workshop on ‘Learning Analytics for Learning and Becoming in Practice’, and giving a talk on ‘Epistemic Networks for Epistemic Commitments’. # Workshop -Analytics for Learning and Becoming in Practice The slides below give a bit of a flavour of the workshop, and you can also see [our collaborative notes]1 and download all the [papers from the schedule]2. From questions during the day, and the notes, a few ‘burning questions’ were posed: * Is the distinction between process and practice meaningful? If so, what are the key differentiators / implications for learning analytics? * Practice is a very high level construct, do we need something more modest to work with?Ideas? * Is data mining/geology (Shaffer)/archaeology (Wise) a useful analogy? What else might we describe? * What are the different ways that theory can play a role in learning analytics (e.g. top down vs bottom up approaches)? * How do we ‘theorise’ which events (or features) make up our data for analysis and how does this relate to ‘practice’? (Issues of granularity and segmentation may relate here) * How do we consider both process- and outcome-data in using learning analytics to look at learning (practices)?
Learning analytics for learning and becoming in practice –#category/conference/ICLS2014 workshop from Simon Knight
Look out for the special issue of the Journal of Learning Analytics on Learning Analytics and Learning Theory (http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/JLA/announcement/view/96).
The main conference
This was my first ICLS, and I’m happy to say it’s probably one of the conferences which provides a ‘natural home’ to me. Colorado has been a real pleasure (if you’ve not been, it is by far the most beautiful place I’ve gone for work yet. The whole event has a set of [collaborative notes]3, and twitter was also fairly active (#icls2014). It’s difficult to sum up overall conference experiences because they’re often a) fairly intense, and b) involve sometimes fleeting (but important) conversations. I do, though, have notes on a couple of sessions which I’ll be posting here shortly.
My Talk
My talk was in the “epistemic cognition theory and practice” session (alongside two other great talks incidentally), and you can find the slides/video below.
Epistemic networks for Epistemic Commitments from Simon Knight
Or the video: