Author: s1690803

The end of the beginning

s1690803/ / Ideas and thoughts, Who I am and what I think

Here I am, after 12 weeks and 35 posts later, here I am, writing the last post of this blog. It is Sunday night, and like the last 3 months, my plan for today is a date with my laptop, some snacks and a post to write. However, it feels different this time, I feel calmer than usual, more confident and even I would be bold and say I feel proud of myself.

When IDEL started I felt insecure, ashamed because the last time I was not able to continue, and even though I was ready for the challenge I was scared of not being able to finish. I had doubts about my ability to follow the course, doubts about my tenacity and my capacity to persevere and not get lost in excuses and thoughts to allow me to drop it out again… I basically didn’t trust myself, or my skills to follow the demanding pace of the course. But, here I am,  many things have changed since my first post, and I am writing this last one from another (better) position. I am writing it from the serenity and peace that you have after conquering the top of a mountain. Looking back to the last 12 weeks, I can say that I feel more comfortable in many labels.

First of all, I can identify how I have improved organising the workflow of the week. The first weeks I felt overwhelmed and stressed about the number of articles to read and the pressure to write. The fact that each week or each fortnight was focused on a different topic, it has been interesting and difficult at the same time. Sometimes, I felt that I was not able to go deeper to the topic, having the feeling that when I was immersed I needed to stop and starting another thing from scratch. After some weeks, I felt more comfortable with the dynamic and I enjoyed the transition and learned how to connect one theme with the other.

Week after week I have been learning how to organise myself, managing my IDEL time in a more efficient way and learning how to prioritise tasks in order to deliver on time and with the expected standards. I have to say that not all weeks I was happy with my posts. But, this has been a learning experience as well because I have had to accept the reality where I don’t have the time to dedicate and dig deeper. I have learned how to condense ideas and thoughts, and above all, how to show and express my thoughts in an efficient way. During the course, I needed to show the most relevant reflections and proof of my progress. In that way, I needed to be careful with the content I was generating, being aware of choosing my battles,  and accepting that probably some of the reflections I had during the week were not very visible or as well represented as I would have liked.

Despite this, I feel I have been able to show my reflections, I have shown that I was following the course connecting the post with the content of each week and I have linked my personal and professional experience with the syllabus.

Furthermore, and thanks to my tutor guidance and support, I have felt confident to try and experiment with different technologies. Analysing my old posts I can see my progress using different tools and betting on multimodality formats like video, sound, image or creative presentations. At the beginning of the course my tutor wrote to me: “What I really hope is that this blog becomes a place where you feel comfortable exploring ideas, challenging your preconceptions, reflecting on your experiences and scrutinising the different theories and concepts we encounter across and beyond the readings“.

I am happy to say that yes, I think the blog has become a personal playground where I have felt safe to investigate and comfortable to challenge my skills, knowledge and pre-thoughts. Thanks to the constant and good feedback and support from my tutor I can say I have developed my confidence. As well as noticing the pressure to deliver. James feedback it has served as the perfect accountability I needed in order to keep motivated with the course. I knew each Monday he would read what I wrote and I felt the responsibility to fulfill the task and the expectations.

Moreover, recovering more ideas from my first post, highlight this sentence where I said: “I am willing to read, research, and learn. I want to be a new version of me that is actually a good student.” I am very aware that I could have done much more. Some weeks I only have time to read the mandatory readings, and as I said I was not always happy with the final post, I do autocritique. Even though I am aware that I can improve and be more ambitious in the next courses, overall I am satisfied and happy with my work in the blog. I feel I can have some redemption from my previous enrollment in the course and I feel that I am a better student version of me. 

In summary, I can say that IDEL has been a great challenge to face. I have seen IDEL as an introduction to the masters as a whole and it has been the perfect presentation to Digital Education. IDEL has not only allowed me to learn new concepts and question myself. The design of the course also has offered me the space to be critical, disagree and take a personal position when discussing the content. And of course, discussions with classmates (on formal and informal spaces) have been the perfect combination to enrich my personal learning path. IDEL course it has been a nice journey to challenge previous ideas and build the fundamentals to keep growing and specialise in future modules.

This is the structure of the Abaceria market, in the Gracia neighbourhood, where I live. They are cleaning the old asbestos and rebuilt it. I thought it is a great image to represent the IDEL journey. Reviewing and rebuilding to have a good base to follow the Digital Education programme.
This is the structure of the Abaceria market, in the Gracia neighbourhood, where I live. They are cleaning the old asbestos and rebuilding it. I thought it is a great image to represent the IDEL journey. Reviewing and rebuilding to have a good base to follow the Digital Education programme.

Learning Analytics yes or not?

s1690803/ / Is that the future?, Trying tools

During this week I have tried to collect main ideas to support the use of Learning Analytics as well as noting the arguments against.

There is a clear agenda to push for using more and more learning analytics, it is becoming more present in institutions and education. That forces us to be careful and explore the privacy issues and pedagogical problems that its practise carries.

LA promises to transform the way educational institutions will collect and analyse data. How it will be treated by administrators, teachers and learners. It seems to offer a benefit for all the characters involved.

First, teachers will use this data to detect and predict if a student is having problems to follow the programme, LA data will help to give support and personalized treatment. It can also benefit disadvantaged groups of students and help them to achieve their learning goals. Second, students will have more agency about their learning progress, allowing them to value and understanding the whole process, and also focusing on their goal and course completion. Finally, an educational institution can use all this to claim its ability to increase productivity and effectiveness. (Enron, 2013: 237).

All of this not only brings questions about privacy, accurately gathering of data, manage and storing issues, potential risks about getting predictions and profiling students. LA can also increase the dominate power relationship of institutions/teachers over students.

Considering all of this, I can see the benefits of LA when we are talking about personalising the learning process. However, I feel discouraged when this personalization is understood as a mear recommendation, copying the e-commere. Also, interesting that the Wilson et al article gives the example of Amazon to explain this, when Amazon is one of the worst machine learning examples, showing products that you already bought or not giving really good suggestion. It seems a long way to walk yet… and it shows that translating that to education can not really be much useful (yet!).

Anyway, what I was saying, is that this hypothetical picture offered by Learning analytics si quite grey and sad from my perspective. I feel that this idea of predictions, recommendations, standards, generalisations, etc. are robbing the opportunity to be spontaneous, creative and live the “here and now”.

Taking the Twitter activity we had last week as an example, we saw how the weigh of the learning process and leading the dynamic of the activity was on Jeramy and Ben. This is is good, as well as, the fact that many conversations were happening without their knowledge. In my opinion that is also an interesting undertaken, teachers can provoke a situation that maybe they lose a little bit of control.
With automation, we probably will lose this magic moment, were something that the teacher was not anticipating, it happens and the class becomes something better than what was planned.

Multidisciplinary teams are the solution for everything?

s1690803/ / Ideas and thoughts, Is that the future?

The Society for Learning Analytics Research defined learning analytics as “the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of data about learners and their contexts, for purposes of understanding and optimizing learning and the environments in which it occurs” (Long et al., 2011). 

Using this definition as a framework, my first question is: who is responsible for measuring, collecting, analysing and reporting the data? As we can see in this week articles the answer is not easy, and there is a discussion about the role and responsibility of the educational institution, as well as the role of teachers and the external tech experts. Gašević et al article (2019) contextualise this idea that higher education is not adopting learning analytics as systematic as they should.

Adoption of learning analytics cannot be deemed as a simple fix to address the challenges of contemporary education. Rather, learning analytics must be considered in a broader context of interconnected organizational, social and political structures that form modern educational institutions. Effective adoption and impact of learning analytics can only be achieved if multidisciplinary teams responsible for and representative of all relevant stakeholder groups are formed and charged with implementation.

Gasevic et al. article (2019)

From the teacher perception, I have the feeling that there is no much control of capacity when we are talking about technology use to collect and analyze data. If we add this task to the list of teacher responsibility it seems that we are asking teachers to know about everything and do everything. In the other hand, if teachers are left behind in the decisions, they lose control of the situation, and learning analytics is presented as the solution to solve a variety of problems. Gasevic, et al. (2019) suggest stakeholders get involved from the start, I wonder where the ‘start’.

On the other hand, it can be argued that teachers or institutions are not responsible for this process, and developers are the ones taking control of their products. They are the ones how should adapt the product and make it appropriated for each content. Making sure, design and implementations are adjusting to the reality where research will be performed.

At the beginning of the course, I recall having some conversations in the formal forum where these elements were discussed. We talked about the responsibility and knowledge of the teacher and discussions about the real value of being in co-creation between developers and educators. Actually, I wrote that to one of my early posts: I wonder if this is because of lack of knowledge? Maybe because all the LMS are predetermined programmes that not allow enough customisation, companies don’t want educators to have this power? lack of resources? we should assume that teachers need to work closely with UX, designers and even developers in order to offer a good interface that can guarantee the needs of their students. Or do we prefer to pay software that is already designed and we scramble to use it in an efficient way?

In this post, I was referring to the design of the platform, thinking about the front end of the interface. But I think same questions apply when we are talking about the back end and data collection and analysis.

Talking about data, I would add, is Learning analytics simply enhancing something you would do in person? Is just making the process faster and more efficient? Or on the other hand, are offering a real opportunity to perceive and detect information that is beyond human interaction and observation? If that the case, are educators ready? Collaboration and having multidisciplinary teams where tech perspective is included seems quite obvious. 

As I have done it before, I am going to use my background as a QA engineer working very closely with developers and basically being part of the tech team. Nowadays, Agile is the most used methodology in the tech business, sometimes it feels that Agile will solve all the problems that a team or business can have. Similar to the claims and benefits that Learning Analytics seems to bring…

An interesting element of Agile, that came to my mind having these conversations about the role of the institution, teachers and techy people, is the Three amigos agile perspective.

The implementation process needs to be seen as a task that requires multidisciplinary teams with active involvement from all relevant stakeholders, as also suggested in the literature (Tsai et al., 2018).

What is interesting about the Three amigos perspective is that the roles are well defined, they all work together in the whole project, but they have an important role during the process. I can relate the three characters with Institutions (Business – what is the problem we want to solve), development (building a possible solution) and teachers (testers – testing solutions and finding new possible cases that can happen). AS I said, even that each amigo has their specific role in the project, all three are involved in the whole process, end to end. That facilitates the description of the problem, the design and development of the solution and the implementation and testing. “It’s also good practice to review increments of the product that have been implemented to make sure it’s correct from those different perspectives.”

For me, this is a good example of how a diverse team can generate something better, and it is an example of that tech teams can be configurated with people that maybe doesn’t have what we understand a traditional tech background. People who bring knowledge about the context, reality and specifications, elements that are essential when we are talking about education. As Wilson et al. reading pointed out trying to predict academic failure, for example, through learning analytics alone seems rather useless and ignores the social and political lives of students.
As a conclusion, we can say that having a multidisciplinary team can guarantee a better definition of the process, where technological expertise and educators work together to produce a product. Such a product, not only offers a better framework, scheme, design, development and application. The product also is presented with a more obvious identity and pedagogical values behind.

Is big data the past? Privacy is the future for education?

s1690803/ / Is that the future?, Weekly task

This was one of my first tweets with the #mscidel hashtag of the week. Are big data and data-driven concepts that are we have overcome? I mean, I am very conscious about the importance and the relevance of data collection these days. However, I think that big data is something that has been proof it generates so many ethical issues with privacy and biased results, that offers generalizations and trends, but actually is not giving us real “useful” information. Or at least information that doesn’t generate ethical issues.

Big Data represents a number of ethical considerations, particularly around privacy, informed consent, and protection of harm, and raises wider questions of what kinds of data should be combined and analysed, and the purposes to which this should be put.

Eynon, R. (2013).

For years, (and still happening) data has been collected indiscriminately with the idea of having a lot, collecting as much data as possible with the idea that it will help us to solve education system issues. Collecting different data points without and see what it can offer, and what conclusions we can get from there. It seems that over these years teachers, educational institutions, and families have become a data production, responsible to collect and record data, as Williamson, B. (2017), points out in his book: Introduction: Learning machines, digital data and the future of education.

Considering all of these, I wonder why would we like to use big data in education? Are we not moving forward to a more inclusive system, where minority and diversity should be taken into consideration?

I started the week asking this, and after this week readings, discussions on Twitter and cheating a little with the knowledge of my husband. I can say that big data collection will pass to a better life. I am being optimistic, and I think we are moving to a reality where yes, we accept that our data is being collected, and assuming that is used beyond our complete understanding and capacity.

 

But at the same time, though, we are aware of the importance of being conscious and careful about the data we share and to whom. People are not that open to share personal data as it was years ago, and I would say that the trend now is to talk about models of data collection that guarantee a high level of privacy. If we put the focus on education, we can see how students are more careful with their data, as well as other activists in society. People are aware and are taking a more active role with the collection use of their own personal data.

As I said, I cheated a little here, and I used my husband expertise to know more about privacy and what is the current flow. He works as a Google researcher in machine learning and privacy, so I thought it would be really useful to know what big tech companies care about. Using his knowledge, I have learned that the tendency now, and what companies are working with, is based on building trust on users. How? collecting data as much anonymous as possible. Also storage it’s an issue and collecting everything it has a cost. Privacy is a delicate topic, and considering what has happened in the past, tech companies know that they need to guarantee a maxim level of privacy. In that way, different methods and protocols are implemented to guarantee encrypted data collection. You can read here what I shared on Twitter about the topic. He explained what is Differential privacy and some protocols that are used to minimise the identification of people and treat data as much private as possible.

What he pointed out, and I think it is very important when we talk about education is the tendency to move to a focus data collection, instead of big data. It is a way of having only information that is relevant to the purpose, nothing else, that way it is more difficult to identify the person. As I mentioned while reviewing the MOOC, for example, much demographic data is asked. This should be considered a bad practise because demographic data make us unique easily. If we have several data points from people is difficult to have anonymity, many data means that is difficult to hide using aggregation data. You will never have more random that that real data. For that reason, moving forward to models based on focus data collection is a necessity. And education can and should be playing an active role in this battle.

As a conclusion, and answering my own question, I would say that education should not care about big data, but it should care a lot about focus data collection. I think education has an important role in making people aware of this and pushing for regulation and policies. As my dear classmate Paul, suggested in this tweet, education should be working together with data scientists in order to find consensus and work together to achieve good practices in all different contexts.

 

Eynon, R. (2013). The rise of Big Data: what does it mean for education, technology, and media research? Learning, Media and Technology, 38(3), pp. 237-240.

Williamson, B. 2017. Introduction: Learning machines, digital data and the future of education (chapter 1). In Big Data and Education: the digital future of learning, policy, and practice.

Alexandra Wood, Micah Altman, Aaron Bembenek, Mark Bun, Marco Gaboardi, James Honaker, Kobbi Nissim, David R. O’Brien, Thomas Steinke & Salil Vadhan*. Differential Privacy:A Primer for a Non-Technical Audience

Kobbi Nissim, Aaron Bembenek, Alexandra Wood, Mark Bun, Marco Gaboardi, Urs Gasser, David R. O’Brien, Thomas Steinke, & Salil Vadhan* Harvard Journal of Law & Technology Volume 31, Number 2 Spring 2018 BRIDGING THE GAP BETWEEN COMPUTER SCIENCE AND LEGAL APPROACHES TO PRIVACY

 

Open vs. digital?

s1690803/ / Ideas and thoughts, Trying tools, Weekly task

Considering the fact that the link that was facilitated to do this week’s task is not working. Actually, it has not worked for the whole week, plus all the conversation that had happened on the formal forum and the other informal chats, I think it is safe to say, that Open badges are not in their best shape.

Also, reading this week articles didn’t help me make a real picture of what an Open badge, I felt jumping from one site to another without really figuring out what was related to the Ahn et al table. I have the feeling of finding better and clearer information on Wikipedia’s site (the open project par excellence) Reading information there helped me to understand and consider what is a real open initiative or, just mere use of digital badges.

I have to thank my classmates for this week because it is thanks to them that I am able to produce something. Thanks to the conversations and uncomfortable questions I had challenged my opinions and thoughts and I have been motivated to find information.

I think I have been very optimistic about the use of badges. Once again, I think my personal experience and my background in tech have created a biased view when considering the current use/success of open badges. I have to say, that part of my optimistic view has been demolished. I still believe that the use of badging is a tendency and it will increase. However, I wonder if it will be the use of OPEN digital badges or only DIGITAL ones.  Like Henry Jenkins (2012), I am a sceptic of open badges, especially for educational purposes, because many people in the field consider they don’t carry the same weight as other qualifications. As I mention, the culture and history of badges and the idiosyncrasy of the educational system is a barrier for the open badges to success. However, I think digital badges will be used as an extra validation, motivation and gamification component. 

Open Badges – Week task

s1690803/ / Weekly task

After investigating and thanks to the collaboration with classmates we found some Open Badge projects, and I am going to focus on the Open Badge Passport.

I made this choice because I think one of the most important element to judge if a badge initiative can be considered open or not, and differentiated from a simple digital badge, is based on its transferable capacity. In that way, the Open Badge Passport is a good example to see a platform where users can find badges to earn, as well as having a virtual place to store and show them.

The main feature of this project is the Passport function, so the users can receive Open badges and share them when needed. In that sense, Open Badge Passport gives a clear and easy way to see the badge information.  On the Explore section, we find filters like by name, country or advanced search which facilitates the badge hunting. It is clear that they care about having a good search engine that shows you a new badge to earn and badges that can interest you.

Overall, I think the site gives a feeling of transparency and I appreciate it because I think it tackles some of the questions raised by Ahn et al. It helps learners to chose best options for them to get and gives credibility for futures employers, in theory.

However, I think all these good aspects only can become a real game-changer if the initiative is well known, has a good number of badges (relevant for the sectors and variety) and the platform is used by many learners/users. I don’t see this is the reality in this case. I see a platform that is full of good intentions, but it lacks the main important element that is having interesting badges and credential to get. I haven’t found any interesting badge for me to earn (I know that I am only one data point, but it’s the one I have). I actually found that the majority of the badges available were for specific events that have already happened or the badge is only for a specific community, like “students of the University of Southampton”.

An interesting pedagogical value of badges is the options for learns to create their own learning path and I believe that badges offer the opportunity to illustrate personal specifications. I think badges could help to show a more individualised CV for example, where someone who studied “Education science” can show in detail their particular knowledge and skills from another with the same degree. If I think in all my friends from university, our CV says that we own a bachelor in Pedagogy, but it is clear that after 10 years post finishing classes we all have a different set of skills. I miss more emphasis on this aspect.

I share all the motivation and optimism that the people behind the initiative mention here, but sadly I have to admit that I don’t find a tangible sense to have an account on Open Badge Passport. I think their design and infrastructure solve part of the questions raised on the Ahn et al article. I would say that they give an answer to the hypotheticals about Open production (if anyone can create a badge) and Open access (if badges are widely accessible and visible). However, I think the project doesn’t have enough recognition or community behind in order to solve what I consider the most important tension derived from the Open appropriation (if badges are open to divers interpretations by different stakeholders).

Probably these are the most difficult tensions to solve because I of the nature of the education system. Education is a very structured and hierarchy system, with their own inequalities associated, as well as the history and cultural component of badges. I think these factors make difficult the implementation of a real open badge system of co-creating.

Pre- thoughts about badges

s1690803/ / Ideas and thoughts, Who I am and what I think

I would say that I like badges, I actually use several apps that use badges in order to show improvement or just the fact that you have earnt what kind of achievement. However, when it comes to the use of badges in education I have some questions and doubts.

I am quite familiar with the use of badges for different contexts, I could say that I am a user/fan, and I don’t miss the chance to win one if I have the option. I see the effect they have on me and the satisfaction I have when I get one. I definitely see the engagement power they have.

One of my favourite ones, and probably the first one I started using is Swarm. I actually started using this app, a long time ago when all the company was under Foursquare. Now they are split into two different apps, Swarm kept the social and gamification aspect, earning badges, while Foursquare,  it become a rating app, similar to Yelp.

I confess that I have the secret routine of checking in places and earn coins and badges for my unlocked places, like you have been in 5 Thai restaurants, here you have the Thai restaurant badge!

Inspired in this app, in 2011 I worked designing and creating the education proposal Agora: Citizen participation activities. (Everything is in Catalan, sorry). I did the educational foundation and methodology for children aged 8 to 12 years old. I designed the methodology and some activities as an inspiration to the teachers who will use the guideline.  The main idea of the proposal was that students needed to create their own city using the elements and values they wanted. In order to do that they needed to pass some activities. For example, if they wanted to have a green area in their city, they needed to pass the “green area activity”, then they earned the proper badge, and they were allowed to build a green area. The idea was that they had the virtual and the physical city in their classroom. I didn’t have many resources and clearly, the badges handmade, you can check the website I did for this programme here.

All the proposal was website based, all the instructions and activities were placed in WordPress and basically, the kids just needed to read an do it, in real life. I think I created something blended without knowing… Also, my plan was that all the classes shared their results: how many badges they have earned, pictures of their cities and everyone would be able to see what others were doing, share ideas and get inspired by others. Everything with the Open spirit on.

It was quite sad because the proposal was not very successful. Many teachers found that kids were already spending too much time in front of the computer (at home!), and they didn’t want to encourage the use of the blog as a guideline of the activities… Surprising, right? Also, another complaint was the fact of earning badges. Many educators considered that this was not the best way to motivate students. They argued that they should learn and that is the real reward, learning! The majority of the professors considered that giving the badge or points was not a really good way to measure their motivation. I have to say that at that point I shared part of the arguments, and I knew the proposal was quite risky.

A year after that, I moved to San Francisco, and I started teaching Spanish to young children and teenagers. Teaching in a different country I had many shock cultural moments, but one that makes sense to mention is the fact that part of my kit tool class they gave me, was a lot of stickers and an ink buffer (star shaped). I was supposed to give stickers every day and at least use the ink buffer with a couple of kids… Many days I forgot, and when my manager noticed told me that I was not motivating enough the kids because I was not giving enough stickers. The stickers were the motivation? It is true that students were clearly into stickers, but I thought it was quite sad.

In my experience, badge culture is something Anglo-Saxon. It is clear than the UK and US have more tradition on badging and there is a clear influence on other countries. Is it for the better or for the worst? Are there any viable or credible alternatives at the moment? Gamification it’s a very interesting approach, however, doesn’t undervalue what is really important (the learning for the pleasure of learning)? Or is that really important?

At the end of the day, we all go to work because we know that we will have a salary at the end of the month, and if we do good, even better than expected, we will be able to ask for more rewards…