Uncategorized

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...
Read More

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 ...
Read More

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...
Read More

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...
Read More

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...
Read More

CIC is now initiating a series of pilots in close collaboration with UTS academics across the faculties, and other units (HELPS; Jumbunna; IML) to test the potential of language technologies to provide rapid, formative feedback on draft writing. This builds on the work at The Open University's Knowledge Media Institute (KMi), initiated by Simon Buckingham Shum, in collaboration with Ágnes Sándor, a linguist in the Parsing & Semantics Group at Xerox Research Centre Europe, Grenoble. ...
Read More

As part of CIC's mission to prototype analytics and learning futures, we are working with the High Schools — who are of course the providers of the next generation of UTS students. In close partnership with Ruth Deakin Crick (CIC Visiting Professor in 2014), we are developing a systemic form of action research building on Ruth's experience in educational research, Simon's work in analytics, and educational improvement science concepts developed by Tony Bryk at the Carnegie Foundation for the Ad...
Read More