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July 17: Gardner Campbell – From the Memex to the World Wide Mind

Posted on June 23, 2015 by CIC Editor

Gardner Campbell (Virginia Commonwealth University Vice-Provost for Learning Innovation & Student Success) will be spending the day at CIC on Fri 17th July, with a seminar 2.30-4pm, CB08.08.002. Gardner brings an uncommon depth and breadth of thinking about the future of the university and the role of technology — check out his often provocative blog for a flavour. Following a morning in CIC, Gardner will run a seminar which calls us back to some of the founding vision of computing pi...
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Academic Writing Analytics update

Posted on June 21, 2015 by CIC Editor

CIC has been developing AWA (Academic Writing Analytics), a rapid feedback tool for students at all levels (1st years to PhD) to help them reflect on how effectively they are using academic language in their writing. The Australian recently covered this development in a story about UTS (June 3rd). This tool currently makes use of a natural language parser in development at Xerox research labs, with whom we have a longstanding research collaboration. This will be combined with other open source ...
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Reflecting on reflective writing analytics

Posted on June 20, 2015 by simon

Tweet Computational “assessment” of writing elicits strong reactions from many educators. For sceptics, handing over to a machine the task of feeding back or even grading writing crosses a boundary line marking the limits of AI. It also raises the same fears that any disruptive technology brings, around redefining roles and identities in a profession. Effective writing is not only central to education and the workplace, but a lifelong citizenship competency for engaging in society. Many academ...
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Social Learning Analytics outside the LMS

Posted on May 28, 2015 by CIC Editor

Just kicking off, a project funded by Australian OLT, led by Kirsty Kitto and her team at QUT. This builds on earlier work conceiving Social Learning Analytics [1-2] and work by QUT's Mandy Lupton who is developing the concept of teaching+learning in the wild. This has led to the first release of the Connected Learning Analytics (CLA) Toolkit: “The CLA toolkit helps students and teachers to harvest data about their activities in standard social media environments, and then provide immediate fee...
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Launch of NIC@CIC

Posted on May 28, 2015 by CIC Editor

The UTS research mission is to have societal impact. CIC is committed to educational research that impacts practitioners in the trenches, in our schools and universities — here in Sydney's schools and at UTS, and globally through our interenational network.
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Meet our 2 new Research Fellows

Posted on May 28, 2015 by CIC Editor

CIC is building its team, and we’re delighted to announce the appointment of two new Research Fellows, selected for their human-centred analytics orientation, communication skills and transdisciplinary modes of designing and thinking. Working closely with UTS educators and leaders, Simon and Roberto will help design, deploy, evaluate and theorise next generation analytics tools. These will help both learners and educators see patterns in the data traces left by Learning.Futures student activity....
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Chris Goldspink (Incept Labs): Your worldview shapes your teaching

Posted on May 21, 2015 by CIC Editor

Whether higher education or K-12, one of the greatest challenges in shifting how we teach is shifting teachers’ mindsets. Ruth Crick and I have a long-standing collaboration with Chris Goldspink at Incept Labs, Sydney. Chris brings expertise in the use of analytical tools to make visible the worldviews that practitioners hold. His findings argue that what educators do is grounded in their fundamental conceptions of knowledge, learning and teaching: in short, their epistemologies. Moreover, shi...
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CfP: Learning Analytics for C21 Competencies

Posted on May 18, 2015 by simon

CfP: Learning Analytics for 21st Century Competencies Special Issue Editors: Simon Buckingham Shum & Ruth Crick (University of Technology Sydney) Full call for Special Issue submissions: http://bit.ly/jlac21 A strategic educational response to a world of constant change is to focus explicitly on nurturing the skills and dispositions which equip learners to cope with novel, complex situations, assessed under authentic conditions. Thus, even if we do not know what the future holds, we can be ...
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OLT Beyond the LMS project

Posted on May 12, 2015 by CIC Editor

It seems to be a truism that many of our most talented educators abandon the LMS and use external web applications to create engaged, authentic learning experiences. Unfortunately, this also means that students go ‘off the radar’. The Beyond the LMSproject, funded by the OLT, aims to support such educators (and students) with analytics showing learning-relevant activity on social media sites. The project is led by Kirsty Kitto at QUT. This builds on earlier work by myself conceiving Social Lea...
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Ruth Crick, Professor of Learning Analytics & Educational Leadership

Posted on April 8, 2015 by CIC Editor

Ruth Crick is now Professor of Learning Analytics & Educational Leadership at UTS. In an exciting appointment to the School of Education, in close collaboration with CIC, Ruth will now be spending half of her life here in Sydney, balanced with work based in the UK. The School of Education announcement sums it up very well: "Many of you will already be aware of Ruth’s international reputation in dispositional learning analytics - she is one of the creators of the self-assessment learni...
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