There are still barriers hindering the widespread use of network and mobile technologies (NMTs) at school. The main issue is the diffusion of the new pedagogical approaches required to best exploit that technology for the improvement of learning processes. Take for example so-called ‘e-pedagogy’, which relies greatly on learning-by-doing, connectivity and the strong integration of formal education with the informal learning processes which are typical of peer-learning,
experiential learning, etc. At least two conditions favour wide propagation of e-pedagogy: (a) an organisational development of the school institution to foster didactic innovation in which NMT use is the normal condition, just as use of the blackboard, paper and pen were for a long time the normal condition;
and (b) a process of continuous professional development of teachers which is not only based on formal training so much as on informal learning processes specifi cally centred on NMT use. To act on both these conditions we must be aware of the rapid changes in the context and consequently of how the figure of the ‘e-teacher’ should be modelled to produce someone who is able to use NMTs both for their students’ learning and for their own continuous professional development.
Scientific communication demands more than the mere listing of empirical findings or assertion of beliefs. Arguments must be constructed to motivate problems, expose weaknesses, justify higher-order concepts, and support claims to be advancing the field. Researchers learn to signal clearly in their writing when they are making such moves, and the progress of natural language processing technology has made it possible to combine conventional concept extraction with rhetorical analysis that detects these moves. To demonstrate the potential of this technology, this short paper documents preliminary analyses of the dataset published by the Society for Learning Analytics, comprising the full texts from primary conferences and journals in Learning Analytics and Knowledge (LAK) and Educational Data Mining (EDM). We document the steps taken to analyse the papers thematically using Edge Betweenness Clustering, combined with sentence extraction using the Xerox Incremental Parser's rhetorical analysis, which detects the linguistic forms used by authors to signal argumentative discourse moves. Initial results indicate that the refined subset derived from more complex concept extraction and rhetorically significant sentences, yields additional relevant clusters. Finally, we illustrate how the results of this analysis can be rendered as a visual analytics dashboard.
Personalisation, adaptation and recommendation are central aims of Technology Enhanced Learning (?) environments. In this context, information retrieval and clustering techniques are more and more often applied to filter and deliver learning resources according to user preferences and requirements. However, the suitability and scope of possible recommendations is fundamentally dependent on the available data, such as metadata about learning resources as well as users. However, quantity and quality of both is still limited. On the other hand, throughout the last years, the Linked Data (LD) movement has succeeded to provide a vast body of well-interlinked and publicly accessible Web data. This in particular includes Linked Data of explicit or implicit educational nature. In this paper, we propose a large-scale educational dataset which has been generated by exploiting Linked Data methods together with clustering and interlinking techniques to extract import and interlink a wide range of educationally relevant data. We also introduce a set of reusable techniques which were developed to realise scalable integration and alignment of Web data in educational settings.
This paper proposes an analysis of current research research in learning design (LD), a field aiming to improve the quality of educational interventions by supporting their design, and in particular by focusing on the development, among educators and designers, of a participatory culture concerning the educational use of digital media. The paper draws upon the history of the field to advocate not only the importance of the objective of creating a participatory culture of LD, but also the need for a slight shift of emphasis in LD research, from the current approach focused on the quest for ways to represent the results of the design of an educational process to one where the focus is on supporting also the decision making process taking place during design.
Communities of practice; Learning design; learning design representations; Participatory culture; teacher professional development; teacher training
In this abstract we describe an initiative aimed at providing a public corpus of structured data covering the research literature on Learning Analytics (LA) and Educational Data Mining (EDM). This work is jointly promoted by the Society for the Learning Analytics Research (SoLAR) with the collaboration of the Institute for Educational Technologies of the National Research Council of Italy, and the LinkedUp project (http://linkedup-project.eu/). The resulting Learning Analytics and Knowledge (LAK) Dataset (solaresearch.org/events/lak/lak-dataset) contains more than 300 papers collected from: - the Proceedings of the ACM International Conference on Learning Analytics and Knowledge (LAK) for the year 2011 and 2013, - the special issue on "Learning and Knowledge Analytics" of the journal of Educational Technology & Society published in 2012, - the proceedings of the International Conference on Educational Data Mining (from 2008 to 2013). The dataset represents a so far unprecedented body of knowledge for researchers in the field of LA and EDM due to a number of reasons: - the LAK Dataset is published according to Linked Data principles in a machine understandable format using Semantic Web technologies - the corpus contains structured metadata as well as the full text body of all publications - some of the publications have not been publicly available before and were published with a dedicated license from the ACM Digital Library - the LAK Dataset is published using established (RDF) schemas and is publicly accessible via standard interfaces such as SPARQL - the dataset is being constantly updated to provide a living corpus for research into the emerging field of LA and EDM
In this paper four main perspectives are sketched as a framework to consider accomplishments in the educational technology research field and, in particular, in the school education sector: (a) the computational perspective which is focused on what technology makes possible; (b) the cognitive perspective which is focused on what the individual can learn under certain conditions; (c) the pedagogical perspective which considers how the design of ICT mediated situations can provide an answer to concrete educational problems; (d) the social and cultural perspective which is focused on the opportunities and needs brought about by different contexts. In the paper, these perspectives are exemplified making reference to research studies carried out at the Institute of Educational Technology of the Italian National Research Council (ITD-CNR) in the specific field of school education.