Author: CIC Editor

This is a monthly event Wednesday, 2 September 2020 3:30 pm - 4:30 pm Wednesday, 7 October 2020 3:30 pm - 4:30 pm Wednesday, 4 November 2020 3:30 pm - 4:30 pm Wednesday, 2 December 2020 3:30 pm - 4:30 pm    Zoom – further details provided upon registration What difference could instant feedback on draft writing make to your students? Over the last 5 years the Connected Intelligence Centre has been developing and piloting an automated feedback tool for academic writing (AcaWriter), working ...
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We are delighted to announce that Ben Hicks has joined CIC as a PhD candidate…Welcome! Ben has always loved patterns. This grew from a childhood growing up around the natural beauty of Norfolk Island, the south coast of NSW and Darwin, to obsessively creating music and a steadily expanding appreciation of the abstract world of mathematics. He spent a decade as a high school teacher across three continents, puzzling over the multitude of ways that minds can learn and how educational systems try t...
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We are delighted to announce that Joseph Jung has joined CIC as a User Experience (UX)  specialist and User Interface (UI) Front End Developer…Welcome! Joseph grew up in Korea. He is interested in UX/UI. He worked at Samsung Electronics as a UX Designer and Researcher for over 7 years, developing many fast prototypes. His interests in UX/UI led him to pursue his PhD at the University of Sydney. His research was conducted on new interface designs for food journaling mobile apps to help people lo...
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Learning Analytics and AI: Politics, Pedagogy and Practices This was the editorial by CIC's Director Simon Buckingham Shum and UCL Knowledge Lab Professor Rose Luckin, to the final issue of the 50th Anniversary of the British Journal of Educational Technology. We've just heard that of all papers 2018-19, this is one of the top 10% downloaded articles in the year following online publication. Buckingham Shum, S. & Luckin, R. (2019), Learning Analytics and AI: Politics, Pedagogy and Practice...
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CIC data-scientist Dr Michael Pracy was invited to give one of the five workshops at the recent X-sensing conference held in Coffs Harbor. His workshop, titled: Dynamic Dashboards and Visualization Using Python, was cantered around the open-source infrastructure he developed at CIC for building and deploying demonstrator data-visualization dashboards for internal analytics projects at UTS. The conference was multi-disciplinary and aimed at data-focused scientists and educators. It was attended b...
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Human-centred software design gives all stakeholders an active voice in the design of the systems that they are expected to use. However, this is not yet commonplace in Learning Analytics. Co-design techniques from other domains have much to offer in principle, but in fact there are few detailed accounts of exactly how well such techniques work for learning analytics. CIC Doctoral Researcher Carlos Prieto-Alvarez has developed a deck of cards for Learning Analytics design, called LA-DECK. Like ...
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The Australian Council of Social Service (ACOSS) is a national advocate for action to reduce poverty and inequality, and the peak body for the community services sector in Australia. Verity Firth, Director of the UTS Centre for Social Justice & Inclusion, convenes an Annual Policy Dialogue to support ACOSS and explore potential collaborations. CIC's Kirsty Kitto and Simon Buckingham Shum joined this year’s forum, briefing ACOSS on AI and its ethical dimensions, as they grapple with the impli...
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CIC is collaborating with the Academic Language and Literacy Team from IML and UTS International to support the development of academic literacy for UTS students. All commencing UTS students are required to undertake the OPELA (Online Post-Enrolment Language Assessment), or an in-class written diagnostic task. This test provides students with a rating of their academic language skills. Academic language skills are an essential foundation for learning and ongoing language development at universit...
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Post Ed Snowden, Cambridge Analytica, and myriad other widely covered data privacy breaches and examples of biased machine learning, citizens are rightly concerned about whether this emerging infrastructure will be used for good or ill. While education is a social good, it cannot of course, remain remote from this debate. CIC builds data-powered infrastructure, so this is core business for us. We're engaged locally, nationally and internationally, engaging audiences ranging from curious citizens...
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At the ALASI conference held at University of Wollongong on 29th November, Leonie Payne, Kirsty Kitto and Mike Pracy hosted a panel debate on the provocation “Student evaluations of teaching are the worst form of evaluation except for all of the others”. A lively debate ensued with the affirmative winning the contest convincingly. The post-debate discussions provided some thoughtful reflections on how the Learning Analytics community can make a valid contribution to policy discussions on the use...
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