1,412 research outputs found

    Multidisciplinarity vs. Multivocality, the case of "Learning Analytics"

    Get PDF
    Session : Reflections on learning analyticsInternational audienceIn this paper, we consider an analysis of the TeLearn archive, of the Grand Challenges from the STELLAR Network of Excellence, of two Alpine Rendez-Vous 2011 workshops and research conducted in the Productive Multivocality initiative in order to discuss the notions of multidisciplinarity, multivocality and interidisciplinarity. We use this discussion as a springboard for addressing the term "Learning Analytics" and its relation to "Educational Data Mining". Our goal is to launch a debate pertaining to what extent the different disciplines involved in the TEL community can be integrated on methodological and theoretical levels

    Towards Visual Analytics for Teachers’ Dynamic Diagnostic Pedagogical Decision-Making

    Get PDF
    The focus of this paper is to delineate and discuss design considerations for supporting teachers\u27 dynamic diagnostic decision-making in classrooms of the 21st century. Based on the Next Generation Teaching Education and Learning for Life (NEXT-TELL) European Commission integrated project, we envision classrooms of the 21st century to (a) incorporate 1:1 computing, (b) provide computational as well as methodological support for teachers to design, deploy and assess learning activities and (c) immerse students in rich, personalized and varied learning activities in information ecologies resulting in high-performance, high-density, high-bandwidth, and data-rich classrooms. In contrast to existing research in educational data mining and learning analytics, our vision is to employ visual analytics techniques and tools to support teachers dynamic diagnostic pedagogical decision-making in real-time and in actual classrooms. The primary benefits of our vision is that learning analytics becomes an integral part of the teaching profession so that teachers can provide timely, meaningful, and actionable formative assessments to on-going learning activities in-situ. Integrating emerging developments in visual analytics and the established methodological approach of design-based research (DBR) in the learning sciences, we introduce a new method called Teaching Analytics and explore a triadic model of teaching analytics (TMTA). TMTA adapts and extends the Pair Analytics method in visual analytics which in turn was inspired by the pair programming model of the extreme programming paradigm. Our preliminary vision of TMTA consists of a collocated collaborative triad of a Teaching Expert (TE), a Visual Analytics Expert (VAE), and a Design-Based Research Expert (DBRE) analyzing, interpreting and acting upon real-time data being generated by students\u27 learning activities by using a range of visual analytics tools. We propose an implementation of TMTA using open learner models (OLM) and conclude with an outline of future work

    Communities of knowledge and knowledge of communities: An appreciative inquiry into rural wellbeing

    Get PDF
    This article offers a retrospective examination of the use of appreciative inquiry (AI) in a study on rural wellbeing. It provides a reflection on the rationale for choosing AI as a suitable methodology, critiques the application of AI in rural settings and considers its suitability for this inquiry into individual and community wellbeing. The article also considers the value of AI as a participatory research approach for community-university partnerships. A review of the literature on AI is distilled to examine the limitations as well as the utility of AI. Through an effective use of AI, communities of knowledge can be fostered and the knowledge of communities can be valued and harvested to enhance the wellbeing of rural communities.Keywords: appreciative inquiry, wellbeing, rural community, community-university partnership

    Multivocality as Practice of Critical Inquiry for Social Justice

    Get PDF
    Multivocality has been clearly and in detail present in social science reflection since the impact of the so-called linguistic turn and nowadays it has also presence in the qualitative inquiry current discussion. To explore how multivocality can be a practice of qualitative inquiry for social justice is the goal of this contribution. It is a global picture of epistemic violence that has subjugated knowledge and practices along with executing genocides and exterminations of otherness to build societies without social, epistemic, and cognitive justice that my goal is to unveil the horizon of modern social sciences to get a better understanding of the new ways of knowledge construction committed to the emancipation of those dominant hegemonic social practices that have made possible the existence of human misery and social, epistemic, and cognitive injustices. So, I will examine the concept of multivocality within social theory to bring it into play with the social justice, epistemic violence, and epistemicide contemporary discussions. Doing so will make its current position within qualitative inquiry practices more transparent. Putting rebellious, creative, poetic, performative, and subversive imaginations into play to discover another social order is what animates me now: building a world in which many worlds exist, building a world with multivoicedness and vari-voicedness inside; many voices without hierarchies or domination or extermination between them. In this paper I will try to delve into the background of our scientific and humanistic knowledge to understand our real political commitment to emancipation, freedom, and social and epistemic justice; however, I will only concentrate on what I assume are the consequences of applying Bakhtin’s concept of multivocality to qualitative research in its pursuit of social and epistemic justice

    Dialogism

    Get PDF

    Dialogue as Data in Learning Analytics for Productive Educational Dialogue

    Get PDF
    This paper provides a novel, conceptually driven stance on the state of the contemporary analytic challenges faced in the treatment of dialogue as a form of data across on- and offline sites of learning. In prior research, preliminary steps have been taken to detect occurrences of such dialogue using automated analysis techniques. Such advances have the potential to foster effective dialogue using learning analytic techniques that scaffold, give feedback on, and provide pedagogic contexts promoting such dialogue. However, the translation of much prior learning science research to online contexts is complex, requiring the operationalization of constructs theorized in different contexts (often face-to-face), and based on different datasets and structures (often spoken dialogue). In this paper, we explore what could constitute the effective analysis of productive online dialogues, arguing that it requires consideration of three key facets of the dialogue: features indicative of productive dialogue; the unit of segmentation; and the interplay of features and segmentation with the temporal underpinning of learning contexts. The paper thus foregrounds key considerations regarding the analysis of dialogue data in emerging learning analytics environments, both for learning-science and for computationally oriented researchers

    Innovative interventions in support of innovation networks. A complex system perspective to public innovation policy and private technology brokering

    Get PDF
    The linear model of innovation has been superseded by a variety of theoretical models that view the innovation process as systemic, complex, multi-level, multi-temporal, involving a plurality of heterogeneous economic agents. Accordingly, the emphasis of the policy discourse has shifted over time. It has gone from a focus on direct public funding of basic research as an engine of innovation, to the creation of markets for knowledge goods, to, eventually, the acknowledgement that knowledge transfer very often requires direct interactions among innovating actors. In most cases, these interventions attempt to facilitate the match between “demand” and “supply” of the knowledge needed to innovate. A complexity perspective calls for a different framing, one focused on the fostering of process characterized by multiple agency levels, multiple temporal scales, ontological uncertainty and emergent outcomes. The article explores what it means to design interventions in support of innovation processes inspired by a complex systems perspective. It does so by analyzing two different examples of coordinated interventions: an innovative public policy funding networks of innovating firms, and a private initiative supporting innovation in the mechanical engineering industry thanks to the set up of a technology broker. Relying on two unique datasets recording the interactions of the various organizations involved in these interventions, the article combines social network analysis and qualitative research in order to investigate the dynamics of the networks and the roles and actions of specific actors in fostering innovation processes. Building upon this comparative analysis, some general implications for the design of coordinated interventions supporting innovation in a complexity perspective are derived.Innovation policy; local development policies; regional development policies; evaluation management

    Critical indirectness as a design approach in participatory practice: Spatialities of multivocal estrangement in three engagements with public cultural institutions around participatory projects in Gothenburg

    Get PDF
    Contributing across the domains of open transdisciplinary inquiry and transdisciplinary- and practice-oriented architectural and urbanism research engaging critically with participation in urban contexts, this research proposes critical indirectness as a multivocal design approach in participatory practice, developed through conceptual-analytical inquiry into three cases involving engagements between external art and design practitioners and public cultural institutions around participatory projects in Gothenburg. It joins with calls for art and design practitioners\u27 greater engagement with public sector institutions as way of working towards a more durable and wider impact, with calls to model a more de-centered \u27urban-combinatory\u27 practice on the plurality, hybridity, discontinuities, and contingencies of the contemporary city, and with calls for more multiple, contradictory approaches. Its methodological approach, open transdisciplinary turn-taking, likewise pursued these aims via alternating engagements between institutional and external actors, my own and others\u27 practices, and theory from multiple fields. The primary aim is to explore how art and design practitioners (including researchers and institutional actors) can develop greater capacity to critically wayfind within the complexities of engagements with public cultural institutions in and around participatory processes. This is supported by two interrelated inquiries, the first reworks monovocal understandings of participation, critique, institutions, and actors as multivocal—simultaneously collective, complex, and involving actors\u27 critical and creative trajectories of agency. The second conceptualizes multivocal relations as having their own critical efficacy through potentially estranging effects, which can be both reflexively perceived by practitioners and furthered by design. These two inquiries combine in the use, in case analyses, of alternating voices, transversing voices, and wavering voices—conceptual-analytical lenses enabling focus on the critical and creative potentials of spatialities of multivocal estrangement generated by differential interrelations between \u27voices\u27

    An autoethnographic exploration of creative design practice: towards pedagogic implications.

    Get PDF
    Doctoral degree, University of KwaZulu Natal, Durban.I have lectured Jewellery Design at a University of Technology in South Africa for nearly 30 years now. My teaching practice has gradually adjusted over the years to suit the changing needs of the industry, the university and the students. I have become aware of the need to make deliberate adjustments, because the changes happening around me are more complex than I realized, and I feel out of touch with my students. To gain a better understanding of my own creative practice and the intersection with my pedagogic practice, I have undertaken an autoethnographic exploration of my identity as creative artist and designer, and as university educator. I produce numerous objects during the creative design process and my office/studio is filled with these artefacts. It occurred to me that there might be meanings contained within these objects that could influence my creative and pedagogic practice. So I set out to analyse the things that line my office walls. The research questions that guided my research were: a) Which are my significant creative outputs/artefacts, and why do I consider them to be important? b) How does my self manifest in these significant creative outputs/artefacts? and c) What are the pedagogic implications of an enhanced awareness of self in creative practice? As an artist and creative designer, I often stage and participate in exhibitions. So I decided to analyse the objects that I produced for these exhibitions to see what I could find. I developed an autoethnographic self-interview method using denotative prompts and connotative responses, which enabled me to reveal an underlying network of connections that culminated and intersected within the objects. On analysing the significances, I was able to recognise aspects of my creative process and arrive at an understanding of creativity that allowed me to engage fruitfully with factors that could influence the development of creative ability. The elements I identified within my own creative practice, using the self-interview, related to the meandering nature of creativity, the role serendipity plays, and the extent to which I draw on personal experience as a source of inspiration. The primary original contribution of this thesis lies in the development, refinement and use of the autoethnographic self-interview. When I considered these insights in terms of my pedagogic practice I realised that I could pay more attention to the diversity of my students, to the heterogeneity that manifested in the classroom . I recognised that this approach could help me acknowledge the emergent nature of v creativity, particularly if I wanted to encourage my students to use their own personal experiences as a foundation for creative design. By inviting this personalised approach I would, of necessity, have to make them aware of the nature of serendipity, of the ‘happy accidents’ in daily life (and creative design), and the usefulness of this phenomenon when aiming for innovation, or in a better word, creativity.Only available in English

    Innovation, generative relationships and scaffolding structures: implications of a complexity perspective to innovation for public and private interventions

    Get PDF
    The linear model of innovation has been superseded by a variety of theoretical models that view the innovation process as systemic, complex, multi-level, multi-temporal, involving a plurality of heterogeneous economic agents. Accordingly, the emphasis of the policy discourse has changed over time. The focus has shifted from the direct public funding of basic research as an engine of innovation, to the creation of markets for knowledge goods, to, eventually, the acknowledgement that knowledge transfer very often requires direct interactions among innovating actors. In most cases, policy interventions attempt to facilitate the match between “demand” and “supply” of the knowledge needed to innovate. A complexity perspective calls for a different framing, one focused on the fostering of processes characterized by multiple agency levels, multiple temporal scales, ontological uncertainty and emergent outcomes. This contribution explores what it means to design interventions in support of innovation processes inspired by a complex systems perspective. It does so by analyzing two examples of coordinated interventions: a public policy funding innovating networks (with SMEs, research centers and university), and a private initiative, promoted by a network of medium-sized mechanical engineering firms, that supports innovation by means of technology brokerage. Relying on two unique datasets recording the interactions of the organizations involved in these interventions, social network analysis and qualitative research are combined in order to investigate network dynamics and the roles of specific actors in fostering innovation processes. Then, some general implications for the design of coordinated interventions supporting innovation in a complexity perspective are drawn
    • 

    corecore