Affordances of Learning Analytics for Mediating Learning

Learning analytics acceptance and adoption is a socio-technological endeavour. Understanding how learning analytics impact practice is an important part of demonstrating their value. In the study presented in this thesis, "Mediated Learning" provides a framework through which to describe how learning analytics can impact psychological, social and material aspects of learning, from the perspective of educators and learners. It also offers a structure through which to make recommendations for improving the mediatory effects of learning analytics. A qualitative research design, based on "Grounded Theory" was implemented and 10 educators from 3 European universities were recruited through convenience and purposive sampling for exploratory interviews. A subsequent case study of the Open University provided critical perspectives from both educators (n=18) and learners (n=22) about the institutional, departmental, domain-related and epistemological factors that broadly influence perceptions of learning analytics. The study applied "Affordance Theory" to identify what participants were most easily able to recognise as beneficial to their own practice. Participant contributions were open-coded to uncover emerging themes and then organised into thematic categories and subcategories. Respondent validation, as well as triangulation of data between the exploratory interviews and focus groups support the validity of the study. Findings suggested that domain-related epistemological assumptions and previous experience influence how and why an individual could make use of learning analytics insights. Gaining stakeholder acceptance involves targeting the right training and opportunities at the appropriate disciplines. Findings also indicate that learning analytics has the strongest mediatory effect for learners when the technology is capable of exposing them to other learners' strategies, or when it assists them personally, and continually in goal orientation adoption. The implications of the study are important for higher education institutions looking to implement large-scale learning analytics initiatives, in particular, those with a diverse student body

Scaffolding Reflection: Prompting Social Constructive Metacognitive Activity in Non-Formal Learning

The study explores the effects of three different types of non-adaptive, metacognitive scaffolding on social, constructive metacognitive activity and reflection in groups of non-formal learners. Six triads of non-formal learners were assigned randomly to one of the three scaffolding conditions: structuring, problematising or epistemological. The triads were then asked to collaboratively resolve an ill-structured problem and record their deliberations. Evidence from think-aloud protocols was analysed using conversational and discourse analysis. Findings indicate that epistemological scaffolds produced more social, constructive metacognitive activity than either of the two other scaffolding conditions in all metacognitive activities except for task orientation, as well as higher quality interactions during evaluation and reflection phases. However, participants appeared to be less aware of their activities as forming a strategic, self-regulatory response to the problem. This may indicate that for learning transfer, it may be necessary to employ an adaptive, facilitated reflection on learners' activities

Transferring a Question-Based Dialog Framework to a Distributed Architecture

Inquiry skills are an essential tool for assessing and integrating knowledge. In facilitated face-to-face settings, inquiry skills were improved successfully by using a “question-based dialog” and its resulting visual representation. However, groups that work without a facilitator, or in which members collaborate asynchronously or in different geographical regions, such as Communities of Practice (CoP), cannot schedule face-to-face inquiry meetings. This paper summarises the unmet requirements of CoPs for a collaborative inquiry tool found by previous research on the Noracle model and proposes a distributed Web architecture as a solution. It mitigates the need for a common infrastructure, central coordination or facilitation, addresses the evolutionary nature of communities of practice and reduces the cognitive load for the individual by filtering and organising the representational artefacts with respect to the social network of the community. The implementation we envision in this paper aims at applying the concept to a much broader audience, ultimately replacing the need for local meetings

Are you thinking what I'm thinking? Representing Metacognition with Question­-based Dialogue

In the following paper, we present Noracle, a tool for creating representational artefacts of metacognitive thinking in a collaborative, social environment. The tool uses only question asking, rather than the typical question/answer paradigm found in threaded discussions, as a mechanism for supporting awareness and reflection on metacognitive activity, and for supporting self- regulated learning. The weblike artefact produced by learner contributions is intended to support learners in mapping a given domain, identifying points of convergence and recognizing gaps in the knowledge representation. In this paper, the authors present the model of the tool, a use case scenario and a discussion of the opportunities and limitations related to this approach

Exploring Misogyny across the Manosphere in Reddit

The ‘manosphere’ has been a recent subject of feminist scholar- ship on the web. Serious accusations have been levied against it for its role in encouraging misogyny and violent threats towards women online, as well as for potentially radicalising lonely or dis-enfranchised men. Feminist scholars evidence this through a shift in the language and interests of some men’s rights activists on the manosphere, away from traditional subjects of family law or mental health and towards more sexually explicit, violent, racist and homophobic language. In this paper, we study this phenomenon by investigating the flow of extreme language across seven online communities on Reddit, with openly misogynistic members (e.g., Men Going Their Own Way, Involuntarily Celibates), and investigate if and how misogynistic ideas spread within and across these communities. Grounded on feminist critiques of language, we created nine lexicons capturing specific misogynistic rhetoric (Physical Violence, Sexual Violence, Hostility, Patriarchy, Stoicism, Racism, Homophobia, Belittling, and Flipped Narrative) and used these lexicons to explore how language evolves within and across misogynistic groups. This analysis was conducted on 6 million posts, from 300K conversations created between 2011 and December 2018. Our results shows increasing patterns on misogynistic content and users as well as violent attitudes, corroborating existing theories of feminist studies that the amount of misogyny, hostility and violence is steadily increasing in the manosphere

Co-Spread of Misinformation and Fact-Checking Content during the Covid-19 Pandemic

In the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, the consequences of misinformation are a matter of life and death. Correcting misconceptions and false beliefs are important for injecting reliable information about the outbreak. Fact-checking organisations produce content with the aim of reducing misinformation spread, but our knowledge of its impact on misinformation is limited. In this paper, we explore the relation between misinformation and fact-checking spread during the Covid-19 pandemic. We specifically follow misinformation and fact-checks emerging from December 2019 to early May 2020. Through a combination of spread variance analysis, impulse response modelling and causal analysis, we show similarities in how misinformation and fact-checking information spread and that fact-checking information has a positive impact in reducing misinformation. However, we observe that its efficacy can be reduced, due to the general amount of online misinformation and the short-term spread of fact-checking information compared to misinformation

False Hopes in Automated Abuse Detection (Short Paper)

The idea of a protected characteristic is supposedly based on the evidence of discrimination against a group of people associated with that characteristic or a combination of those characteristics. However, this determination is political and evolves over time as existing forms of discrimination are recognised and new forms emerge. All the while, these notions are also rooted in colonial practices and legacies of colonialism that create and re-create injustice and discrimination against those same “protected” groups. Automated hate-speech detection software is based typically on those political definitions of hate, which are then codified in law. Moreover, the law tends to focus on classes of characteristics (e.g. gender, ethnicity), rather than specific characteristics that are particularly targeted by discrimination and hate (being a woman, being Indigenous, Black, Asian, etc.). In this paper, we explore some of the implications of this for hate speech detection, particularly that supported with Artificial Intelligence (AI), and for groups that experience a significant amount of prejudicial hate online

Mediating learning with learning analytics technology: guidelines for practice

How can we better mediate processes of learning at large institutions? Learning analytics are used primarily in online and blended learning environments to expose patterns in learning behaviour or interaction. They make use of digital traces from virtual learning environments and combine this with other learner data. The goal is to assist both educators and learners in improving their practice. In this work, we apply the concepts of ‘psychological tools’ and more ‘knowledgeable others’ from Lev Vygotsky, and Reuven Feuerstein's model of Mediated Learning Experiences to define prerequisites that learning analytics at scale must reach, in order to be a meaningful tool for mediating learning. We present findings from an in-depth qualitative study with educators and learners at a large, online institution of higher education. We then map insights gained from this study to our model of mediated learning. The resulting analysis and recommendations indicate that we need more inclusive and dedicated practices in learning analytics development, as well as institutional will to create more complex and meaningful tools