Learning and Knowledge Analytics

Posts made in Learning and Knowledge Analytics

[SCoPE] LAK11 -> Week 1: Introduction to Learning and Knowledge Analytics Use cases for learning analytics in the corporate world -> "Train me now!"

by Hans de Zwart -
You are in the lobby of the head office waiting for your appointment to arrive. She has just texted you that she will be 10 minutes late as she has been delayed by the traffic. You open the "Train me now!" app and tell it you have 8 minutes to spare. The app looks at the required training that is coming up for you, at the expiration dates of your certificates and at your current projects and interests. It also looks at the most popular pieces of learning content in the company and checks to see if any of your peers have recommended something to you (actually it also sees if they have recommended it to somebody else, because the algorithm has learned that this is a useful signal too), it eliminates anything that is longer than 8 minutes, anything that you have looked at before (and haven't marked as something that could be shown again to you) and anything from a content provider that is on your blacklist. This all happens in a fraction of a second after which it presents you with a shortlist of videos for you to watch. The fact that you chose the second pick instead of the first is of course something that will get fed back into the system to make an even better recommendation next time.

[SCoPE] LAK11 -> Week 1: Introduction to Learning and Knowledge Analytics Use cases for learning analytics in the corporate world -> Automatic "getting-to-know-yous"

by Hans de Zwart -
About once a week you get an invite created by "The Connector". It invites you to get to know a person that you haven't met before and always picks a convenient time to do it. Each time you and the other invitee accept one of these invites you are both surprised that you have never met before as you operate with similar stakeholders, work in similar topics or have similar challenges. In your settings you have given your preference for face to face meetings, so "The Connector" does not bother you with those video-conferencing sessions that other people seem to like so much.

[SCoPE] LAK11 -> Week 1: Introduction to Learning and Knowledge Analytics Use cases for learning analytics in the corporate world -> Data enabled meetings

by Hans de Zwart -
Just before you go into a meeting you open the invite. Below the title of the meeting and the location you see the list of participants of the meeting. Next to each participant you see which other people in your network they have met with before and which people in your network they have emailed with and how recent those engagements have been. This gives you more context for the meeting. You don't have to ask the vendor anymore whether your company is already using their product in some other part of the business. The list also jogs your memory: often you vaguely remember speaking to somebody but cannot seem to remember when you spoke and what you spoke about. This tools also gives you easy access to notes on and recordings of past conversations.

[SCoPE] LAK11 -> Week 1: Introduction to Learning and Knowledge Analytics Use cases for learning analytics in the corporate world -> Social Contextualization of Content

by Hans de Zwart -
Whenever you look at any piece of content in your company (e.g. a video on the internal YouTube, an office document from a SharePoint site or news article on the intranet), you will not only see the content itself, but you will also see which other people in the company have seen that content, what tags they gave it, which passages they highlighted or annotated and what rating they gave the piece of content. There are easy ways for you to manage which "social context" you want to see. You can limit it to the people in your direct team, in your personal network or to the experts (either as defined by you or by an algorithm). You love the "aggregated highlights view" where you can see a heat map overlay of the important passages of a document. Another great feature is how you can play back chronologically who looked at each URL (seeing how it spread through the organization).

[SCoPE] LAK11 -> Week 1: Introduction to Learning and Knowledge Analytics Use cases for learning analytics in the corporate world -> Portfolio management through monitoring search terms

by Hans de Zwart -
You are responsible for the project management portfolio learning portfolio. In the past you mostly worried about "closing skill gaps" through making sure there were enough courses on the topic. In recent years you have switched to making sure the community is healthy and you have switched from developing "just in case" learning intervention towards "just in time" learning interventions. One thing that really helps you in doing your work is the weekly trending questions/topics/problems list you get in your mailbox. It is an ever-changing list of things that have been discussed and searched for recently in the project management space. It wasn't until you saw this dashboard that you noticed a sharp increase in demand for information about privacy laws in China. Because of it you were able to create a document with some relevant links that you now show as a recommended result when people search for privacy and China.

[SCoPE] LAK11 -> Week 2: Rise of “Big Data” and Data Scientists My thoughts and reflections on week 2 of Lak11

by Hans de Zwart -
Hello all, I just posted my thoughts and reflections on the second week of Lak11 on my blog.

I (try) to discuss Hadoop, how the technology is commoditised and we should start with asking interesting questions, skills for data scientists, connectivism and learning analytics, worries and concerns around analytics, SNAPP, and the spammability of open online courses.

Cheers, Hans

[SCoPE] LAK11 -> Week 2: Rise of “Big Data” and Data Scientists Are you ready for QR codes? -> Re: Are you ready for QR codes?

by Hans de Zwart -
Apostolos, I think Kelly is asking whether the QR reader software might be storing the information somewhere centrally and using it for some purpose.

This is one of the things I dislike about the iOS platform: it is completely unclear what kind of data these apps store about you somewhere.

Who knows...?

[SCoPE] LAK11 -> Week 2: Rise of “Big Data” and Data Scientists Are you ready for QR codes? -> Re: Are you ready for QR codes?

by Hans de Zwart -
An easy way to create QR codes is with Bit.ly. You can shorten any URL and will get a bit.ly link back. By adding .qr to the link you will get a QR code that you can use elsewhere.

Mine looks like this (I have it printed on my business card):

hansdezwartqr.qrcode

People who use a QR reader (any phone platform has multiple free apss) will be taken to the Bit.ly url: http://bit.ly.hansdezwartqr (people will not see this). This allows me to track how many people have used the QR code. The bit.ly link then takes them to http://www.hansdezwart.info/qr, which takes them to my blog (where I intend to do a write-up of this at some point as I realise this could be quite confusing).

In the future I will be able to make http://www.hansdezwart.info/qr show a nice landing page.

In general QR codes are an easy way to match a physical object to virtual information. I have used them quite succesfully in presentations on the beamer to link people to more information online.

I imagine they will soon be superseded by either RFID tags and near field communication or by the rapid advances in live visual processing and understanding by computers.

[SCoPE] LAK11 -> Week 2: Rise of “Big Data” and Data Scientists Where are you online? -> Re: Where are you online?

by Hans de Zwart -
Closest to who I am: http://blog.hansdezwart.info (if you are only interested in the Lak11 related entries go to http://blog.hansdezwart.info/tag/lak11 or subscribe to this RSS feed).

I am a pretty boring Twitter user: @hansdezwart (searchable archive at http://www.hansdezwart.info/tweets)

I love reading and do it in public: http://www.goodreads.com/hansdezwart

My professional network is on LinkedIn as much as possible: http://nl.linkedin.com/in/hansdezwart

My bookmarks now live at Diigo (and are all public, so beware): http://www.diigo.com/user/hansdezwart

Google Reader produces a feed with my favourite tweets (of others), my bookmarks and the articles I share from Google Reader. You can subscribe to it here.

On another note: who, who will be the first one to intelligently scrape this thread and turn it into something interesting and more machine readable? Will it be Tony Hirst?

[SCoPE] LAK11 -> Week 1: Introduction to Learning and Knowledge Analytics What about learning analytics in the corporate sector? -> Re: What about learning analytics in the corporate sector?

by Hans de Zwart -
You are right Dianne in that it is hard to predict the ROI of innovations, but after you have done a pilot it should be possible to use data to strengthen your intuitions about whether somethings should work.

[SCoPE] LAK11 -> Week 1: Introduction to Learning and Knowledge Analytics What about learning analytics in the corporate sector? -> Re: What about learning analytics in the corporate sector?

by Hans de Zwart -
There are a couple of questions in the corporate area that I hope to have better answers for at the end of this course:

1. I am very involved with innovation. It would be interesting to think about how learning analytics can help me in creating business cases voor learning innovation opportunities. Can it help in validating the business value of certain innovations? I am sure it can, but it requires the competences of asking the right questions and successfully navigating the maze of data ownership. This could allow us to use metric and data (instead of opinion) to prioritise investment.

2. I have a complete fascination for methods like social network analysis or semantic similarity checking and how they could be used to make individuals work smarter. I firmly believe we are at the cusp of many practical implementations of these kinds of methodologies and it is good to be at the forefront of that.

The concern that I have is very much regulatory. Most attempts at doing social network analysis for example seem to be blocked by legal departments with privacy concerns. This needs to change in some way before it can start becoming more useful.

[SCoPE] LAK11 -> Introductions Critiques of learning analytics? -> Re: Critiques of learning analytics?

by Hans de Zwart -
One area that might be worth exploring are the perverse effects of using measurement to change policy. By chance I encountered Goodhart's law (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law) this week. There are some related "laws" mentioned in the article that I think are interesting too.

[SCoPE] LAK11 -> Introductions Who is Hans de Zwart and what is he doing here? -> Re: Who is Hans de Zwart and what is he doing here?

by Hans de Zwart -
I really wouldn't know. Ever since I was eleven I have never lived closer to school or work than one hour of public transportation (one-way). There have been two years where I have a lease car and drove to work (and to clients). I never managed to attain my reading KPIs during those years.

In recent years it has been much better: I have made a deal with myself that I will only read books in the train and nothing else (no RSS feeds or magazines). For this course I am making an exception to the rule!

[SCoPE] LAK11 -> Introductions Who is Hans de Zwart and what is he doing here?

by Hans de Zwart -
Enough of the talking in third person!

I am a 34 year old guy from Amsterdam in the Netherlands. I work as the "Innovation Manager for Global Learning Technologies" at Shell International (at the headquarters in The Hague). Before this job I was heavily involved with the Moodle project as an e-learning consultant working for the Dutch Moodle Partner (Stoas Learning). Before that I was a teacher at a high school in Amsterdam (I thought PE and project based education).

I love technology and am deeply interested in how it affects society. One of my business cards uses my favourite quote (from Yochai Benkler): "Technology creates feasibility spaces for social practice" (see here for more context). To me, this open course is an example too of a practice enabled by technological possibilities.

My blog can be found at http://blog.hansdezwart.info and you should also find links to my other social networking presences there. I try to blog regularly and what I write on this course is here.

I intend to actively participate in this course. For me this means:
  • Spending time to read and annotate all the course materials during my commute (1.5 hours each way) on my iPad.
  • Writing reflections at least once a week on my blog
  • Doing all the suggested activities and participate actively in the Moodle forums.
  • Try to attend the weekly live Elluminate sessions (if the timezone agrees with my schedule) or at least watch the recordings.
If I manage to the above, then the course will be a success for me. The topic is inherently fascinating to me and I would love to be helped with how learning and knowledge analytics could help my professional practice.

Looking forward to meeting other participants and learning together!

[SCoPE] LAK11 -> Week 1: Introduction to Learning and Knowledge Analytics Playing around with Hunch -> Re: Playing around with Hunch

by Hans de Zwart -
One other difference between Hunch and Pandora is that Pandora actually looks at the content of what it recommends whereas hunch should looks at correlations between "likes" regardless of the content.

Pandora has a deep "expert-mediated" knowledge of the music in its database. See: http://www.pandora.com/corporate/mgp for more...

[SCoPE] LAK11 -> Week 1: Introduction to Learning and Knowledge Analytics Playing around with Hunch -> No need to use Facebook or Twitter

by Hans de Zwart -
One thing has surprised me a bit: people refusing to sign up for Hunch because it would require a Facebook or Twitter sign-in. Do you all realize it is also possible to create a hunch account without using those things? They did manage to hide it well, but it is there.

For the truly paranoid:
  • Make sure you sign out of Facebook and Twitter and delete all your cookies
  • Create a throw away email address
  • Sign up to Hunch and play around
For the truly truly paranoid:
  • Dress up as somebody from one of the other two genders than yours (thanks Ignatia)
  • Go to a public Internet computer and wear gloves

[SCoPE] LAK11 -> Week 1: Introduction to Learning and Knowledge Analytics Playing around with Hunch -> Re: Playing around with Hunch

by Hans de Zwart -
Indeed the complete US-centricness of the service was the first thing that I noticed. I believe it asked me at some point on what continent I am living. How come it still asks me questions to which I would never have an answer? Are these questions crowdsourced too? Do we get them randomly or do we get certain questions based on our answers? It feels like the former to me.

The recommendations that it gave me seemed to be pretty random too. The occasional hit and then a lot of missers. I had the ambition to try out the top 5 music albums it would recommend me, but couldn't bear the thought of listening to all that rock. This did sneak a little thought into my head: could it be that I am very special? Am I so ecclectic that I can defeat all data mining effort. Am I the Napoleon Dynamite of people? Of course I am not, but the question remains: does this work better for some people than for others.

One other thing that I noticed how the site seemed to use some of the tricks of an astrologer: who wouldn't like "Insalata Caprese", seems like a safe recommendation to me.

In the learning domain I could see an application as an Electronich Performance Support System. It would know what I need in my work and could recommend the right website to order business cards (when it sees I go to a conference) or an interesting resource relating to the work that I am doing. Kind of like a new version of Clippy, but one that works.

BTW, In an earlier blogpost I have written about how recommendation systems could turn us all into mussels (although I don't really believe that).

[SCoPE] LAK11 -> Week 6: What’s next for Learning & Knowledge Analytics? Just to kickstart the RSS feed...

by Hans de Zwart -
Moodle only creates sensible RSS feeds for forums with a post in it. This post will allow me (and anybody else) to add the RSS feed to my reader.

[SCoPE] LAK11 -> Week 5: Organizational Implementation Just to kickstart the RSS feed...

by Hans de Zwart -
Moodle only creates sensible RSS feeds for forums with a post in it. This post will allow me (and anybody else) to add the RSS feed to my reader.

[SCoPE] LAK11 -> Week 4: Visualization: Tools for, and examples of, Analytics Just to kickstart the RSS feed...

by Hans de Zwart -
Moodle only creates sensible RSS feeds for forums with a post in it. This post will allow me (and anybody else) to add the RSS feed to my reader.

[SCoPE] LAK11 -> Week 3: Semantic Web, Linked Data, & Intelligent Curriculum Just to kickstart the RSS feed...

by Hans de Zwart -
Moodle only creates sensible RSS feeds for forums with a post in it. This post will allow me (and anybody else) to add the RSS feed to my reader.

[SCoPE] LAK11 -> Week 2: Rise of “Big Data” and Data Scientists Just to kickstart the RSS feed...

by Hans de Zwart -
Moodle only creates sensible RSS feeds for forums with a post in it. This post will allow me (and anybody else) to add the RSS feed to my reader.

[SCoPE] LAK11 -> Week 1: Introduction to Learning and Knowledge Analytics Just to kickstart the RSS feed...

by Hans de Zwart -
Moodle only creates sensible RSS feeds for forums with a post in it. This post will allow me (and anybody else) to add the RSS feed to my reader.

[SCoPE] LAK11 -> HELP! Course Data Dump -> Re: Course Data Dump

by Hans de Zwart -

I really like Richard's idea (and Stack Overflow's stated ambitions and intentions).

So for me it would certainly be a plus if it were possible to have all the posts here in Moodle be CC-licensed. I guess because there is ownership of the course/site that should be possible. After that it is indeed important to offer the data of the posts in some format that makes sense for people to use.

Maybe it is a good idea to look at Wikimedia's Terms of use for the Wikipedia project?
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Terms_of_Use