1. Discussant
Gráinne Conole, The Open University, UK
CAL conference, Manchester, 14th April 2011

2. Contribution
• Learning analytics:
• as a tool to understand learning
behaviour
• to provide evidence to support design of
more effective learning environments
• to make effective use of social and
participatory media

3. Pedagogies
• Learning analytics against:
• Assessment and feedback
• Discourse
• Enquiry and sensemaking

4. Assessment & feedback
• Importance of assessment and feedback as
part of the learning process
• Issues around marking and workload
• Open Mentor and Open Comment:
feedback through reflection and social
networking
• Coding of feedback comments and power
of Bale’s categories of group interaction

5. Discourse
• Cohere: structured discourse and
knowledge construction
• Discourse as an indicator of learning
• Language as social action
• Visualisation both as an analytic tool and a
means of supporting sensemaking

6. Enquiry and sensemaking
• New social networking spaces like
Cloudworks to support dialogue and
knowledge construction
• Cloudworks: object- rather than ego
centric, collective aggregation and
improvement, supporting collective
intelligence and distribution cognition
(Salomon, 1983)
• Disputational, cumulative and exploratory

7. Putting it all together
• Combining different forms of data analytics
• VLE stats
• Library analytics
• Sitewide tracking
• Course analytics

8. Final thoughts
• New social media are complex spaces
• Offer potential for new forms of dialogue
and collaboration
• Need for new tools and methodologies and
theoretical perspectives to structure and
analyse these spaces
• Meta-analysis - learning about learning
• Potential to foster good pedagogies -
reflection, feedback, dialogue & collaboration
• Care with interpretation