conference
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5 things I think about Learning Analytics
<Ed Techs go in search of data in the wild> I am at the 1st Learning Analytics conference in Banff, which has been interesting. I came not sure of what it was, or what my take on it was. The conference has been good, very interdisciplinary in nature (for which you can read 'I didn't understand some of it'). I'm still not sure about a lot of it, but here are five things that have occurred to me over the course of the past few days. I don't believe they're strong enough to say I've learnt them, but rather they are things I now have come to a tentative viewpoing…
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Learning Analytics 2011 is the place to be
(This man wants your data) I'm pleased to say I've managed to get some funding to attend the first conference on Learning Analytics and Knowledge (LAK 2011), organised by George Siemens and the good folk at Athabasca. It's in Banff, Canada, Feb 27th to March 1st. Look at some of the people on the steering committee: Erik Duval, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium David Wiley, Brigham Young University, US Dave Cormier, University of Prince Edward Island, Canada Tony Hirst, Open University, UK Grainne Conole, Open University, UK Dragan Gasevic, CSIS, Athabasca University, Canada Simon Buckingham Shum, Knowledge Media Institute, UK Caroline Haythornthwaite, University of British Columbia, Canada I think this first conference…
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Let’s play OER Roulette!
(The academic version of sending your child up a chimney) This is the last in my trilogy of Open Ed 2010 posts. For my presentation at Open Ed 2010 I wanted to do something a bit different. I had the last slot on a long second day (ie ‘the graveyard shift’) and I was speaking after David Wiley (who gave an excellent presentation as always), so the odds were stacked against me. In addition my daughter accompanied me so I wanted to include her in some way. I remember seeing Elvis Costello in concert once and he had a large wheel at the front with a number of songs listed…
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Am I done with conferencing?
This is no reflection on Open Ed, I’ve been moving away from conferences for a while. I enjoyed giving my presentation at Open Ed, and I managed to make it interactive to an extent. But I’m coming to the conclusion that I’m done with the traditional conference format. I had a couple of discussions with Brian and Scott around this and talked about how difficult it was to break away from the traditional format. The reason comes down to money essentially, although it’s tied up with a host of other issues. There is a circular logic in organising a conference that is difficult to escape, let’s call it the Conference…
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The strange case of the unconnected conference
(An unexpected appearance by the Two Ronnies went some way to alleviate frustration about the lack of wifi at OpenEd 2010 – Richard Hall and Joss Winn in full flow). I was at the Open Ed 2010 conference last week. First off, I want to say that it was great to finally meet Brian Lamb and I really enjoyed presentations from Richard Hall, David Wiley, Erik Duval, Joss Winn and others. So this post is not a comment on the quality of the conference or the discussions I had there. The conference was held in the science museum CosmoCaixa. This is a great museum and my daughter loved it. It…
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OU conference – evaluation
Following on from the previous two posts looking at the OU conference, this final one in the trilogy looks at some evaluation. I am particularly indebted to Karen Cropper, Rebecca Ferguson and Juliette Culver for doing much of the analysis for this post. Evaluation took four main forms: A questionnaire of attendees in surveymonkey Statistics from cloudworks Analysis of twitter users adopting the #OUConf10 hashtag Analysis of the elluminate sessions Questionnaire There were 102 responses to the questionnaire. Below are some charts representing salient issues: Most attendees were central staff, but there was a significant audience that had no connection to the OU, and a mix across other categories.…
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OU conference – areas for improvement
In my last post I set out how we organised the conference, in this one I'll suggest (with input from Karen) some things we might do differently next time. Ensure that speakers have good mic and earphones and have practiced in Elluminate beforehand. Unless they are experienced with presenting online, it is probably a good idea to insist on practice session. If speakers are based in the same location then it might be better for them to be in the same or nearby room. The same applies for any standby speaker ready to step in if there are problems with the advertised speaker. If speakers are in other locations, we…
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How to organise an online conference
Or rather, how we (which is Karen Cropper and I) organised the OU online conference this year. You might like to take this as a template to use if you're thinking of running a similar event, although obviously you may want to vary the technologies, structure, etc. This is the first in a series of posts on the conference which will cover organisation, suggestions for improvement and evaluation. Technology We used two main technologies: Cloudworks and Elluminate The Cloudworks site acted as the main web site and the asynchronous discussion forum. We set it up as an ‘event’, which adds in a button ‘Mark as attending’, so we had…
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Online conferences & the legitimacy deficit
(Wordle of OU Conference – we asked participants to give us 3 words describing it) In the second post following up on the OU online conference, I want to explore some issues around perceptions of online conferences. The feedback from the conference thus far has been almost entirely positive (I'll blog the questionnaire results later), but I have also picked up a couple of issues which I think are worth pulling out. It strikes me that in some ways online conferences are in a similar position to distance learning 40 years ago, or elearning 10 years ago. They have a legitimacy deficit to some, and thus have to work extra…
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Some thoughts on open conference contributions
Over the next few posts I'll be commenting on aspects of the Open University conference which I've just finished running. You can view the playback of all sessions from here. I'll cover reflections on the conference and what we did in separate posts. In this one I wanted to look at some of the contributions we got from people in Cloudworks. We had a fixed agenda of speakers (I thought multiple strands would be too confusing in Elluminate), but asked for multi-media contributions from anyone, highlighting their project. You can see all the contributions here. To be honest I don't think we used these as well as we could have…
