LAK11 : Where do we find good critiques of learning analytics?

George Siemens started the discussion in LAK-11 with both a post and a forum.  This post is in response to his question.

I’ve come to the preliminary conclusion that because the field is so new-especially referenced by the exact phrase “learning analytics”– that there probably aren’t a lot of good critiques.  However, if you consider one (ugly step?) sister from standardized testing – or  google “critiques of standardized testing”  there is a plethora of critiques and opinions.  Let’s try to ensure that learning analytics does NOT follow the mis-steps of standardized (mandated) testing.

I found one recent federal government publication(abstract) or (pdf) that attempts to report about the use of Educational data at the Local Level.  It focuses a lot on “data-driven decisions” and claims to address local uses of educational data from accountability to instructional improvement. The closest the article comes to critiquing the analytics is by addressing the "barriers to use" of the data.  These

LAK11 Week 1: Playing with Hunch

I’m probably just as paranoid about privacy issues as anyone else in my generation, but I found that if you do a little exploring/digging  you can actually create an account in hunch that is NOT linked to your twitter or facebook accounts.  In fact , all you really need is a valid email address, and you can skip divulging  the rest of the information they ask of you to create an account.

LAK11 Week 1: Presentation - John Fritz

(Links to the elluminate session, and the mp3 and slides of that session)

John’s presentation and emphasis is (admittedly by him) biased toward the LMS/CMS, and much of the talk centered on students’ use of Blackboard.  First let me say that my interest and focus is NOT at the CMS/LMS level, but is more at the level of the individual courses—that is, using analytics to inform and improve instructional design, assessment, and evaluation.  It is interesting to note that one of the published articles to which John referred: Mining LMS data to develop an “early warning system” for educators: A proof of concept* ( Macfadyen and Dawson in the February 2010 Issue of Computers & Education) had the following to say in the conclusion-(end of section 4.1):