Associations – Page 18 – Digital Learning Dispatches

This year’s conference was held in Sligo (1st & 2nd June) and had a theme of “TEL in an Age of Supercomplexity: Challenges, Opportunities and Strategies”. As the conference website reports:

‘Supercomplexity’ is the shorthand term used by Professor Ron Barnett to describe the state of affairs in which we find ourselves: one of uncertainty, unpredictability, challenge and change.

This year’s keynotes included Dr. Paul LaBlanc, Professor Meg Benke and Professor Grainne Conole. Both Meg and Grainne are well known to NIDL staff as both have given invited talks at DCU and the latter serves as a Visiting Professor and member of our NIDL International Advisory Board.

Sligo

A video of Grainne’s keynote presentation and many of the other sessions is available from the conference website. Once again this year NIDL staff was visible throughout the conference programme with over 20 presentations, Gasta sessions and/or workshops over the two-days. This figure reflects a sizeable proportion of the overall conference programme. A full list of the contributions made by NIDL staff will be available in due course from the research outputs section of our website. In the meantime, below is a link to a joint paper from several NIDL staff on why technology fails to transform pedagogy which reports some of the plans and recent activities underway to more fully engage academic staff and harness the potential of new educational technologies in the service of better teaching and learning.

Why Technology Fails to Transform Pedagogy: Lessons for Professional Learning from Mark Brown

Lastly, conference was once again well organised and reflects well on the level of innovation and range of scholarly activity in the Irish learning technology community. Congratulations to members of the conference organising committee and we look forward to EdTech 2018.

By Professor Mark Brown

This brief opinion paper raises a number of conceptual and methodological issues associated with attempts to evaluate institutional initiatives in the area of learning analytics. It frames the discussion around three recent works that invite a more critical reading of learning analytics research and the potential of interventions and data-driven decisions for successful, sustainable and scalable impact on an institution-wide basis.

Firstly, the emerging field of Learning Analytics would benefit from more critical engagement with some of the points raised by Paul Kirschner (2016) in his keynote at the 6th International Conference on Learning Analytics and Knowledge (LAK16). More specifically, Kirschner warns that naïve understandings of learning and narrow conceptions of learning analytics may potentially do a lot of harm.

digital-388075_960_720 More recently Kirschner and Neelen (2017) argue that many so-called learning analytics initiatives: (i) view education as a simple process that is easily modelled; (ii) base decisions and interventions on data rich but weak theory; (iii) inform decisions and interventions based on wrong or even invalid variables; (iv) make interpretations and arrive at conclusions that confuse correlations with causality; and (v) result in unintended and unwanted effects that pigeonhole and stereotype learners which may be counterproductive to enhancing student engagement and learner success. Arguably, to date there has not been a serious or comprehensive response to these justifiable concerns.

You can read more of this opinion piece on the ICDE website where the full version of this paper was first published as part of the two-day ICDE Leadership Summit in May 2017 in Nancy, France.