LAK'12 conclusions

After some days, I've had time to think about LAK'12 conference.

BTW, really important note: Next year, we are going to organize LAK'13 in Leuven! So prepare your submissions... we are waiting for your contribution!

But how do we see Learning Analytics? You can check some slides from my Prof. Erik Duval or some of his thoughts about Educational Data Mining vs Learning Analytics.

But, what are my conclusions after LAK'12?

I would summarize it with a really nice photo that I took during my days off in Vancouver.

What does this photo mean to me?

The conference is finished, but now we have a nice picture of what our community in learning analytics is working on. The mountains (our goals) are still far away, but we only have to swim (to work) to get there. One day is over, but we are sure that tomorrow is going to start another great day. I think that it's really nice when you finish a conference with this kind of feeling.

It was a really nice experience that give me a lot of food for thought. I would highlight a really nice talk with Jon Dron who during the demo session gave me some interesting pointers (i.e. The Design of Everyday Things and Dr. Vive Kumar (still I have to take a look to his work)) and I had the opportunity to discuss with him issues regarding privacy and my PhD topic.

Another positive aspect is to read a bit the conclusions from others (i.e Abelardo's blog, Doug Clow's Blog, Audrey Watters' blog, ... ). People who share their thoughts about the topic... the common conclusion after every conference is that sharing knowledge is the key to progress in a research field and there is people doing a great job in that! So I only can say thanks guys to share your thought with all of us!

After my presentation, I had also a really nice talk about how to engage people in the reflection process. One easy argument is to include this process in the learning itinerary. However, we are often tracking sensible data and we can not force students to give it (i.e. tracking data beyond of the LMS common problem with Abelardo's group work). In our case, we track data from different systems and they have to give us their API keys to have access to their own data. If we include the reflection process in the learning itinerary, the tracking becomes mandatory... and somehow the final feeling is that everything is corrupted (in addition it can be against the law). We are trying to engage students in the process of open learning, show and share your thoughts with the world and somehow it will come back with some additional food for thought. Sharing your information and reflection should be a voluntary and participatory process. It is our premise.

Also, I had a really nice talk with David García-Solórzano from the Open University of Catalonia regarding his paper: "Educational Monitoring Tool Based on Faceted Browsing and Data Portraits". Damn! They are really doing nice work. I really encouraged him to evaluate their prototype because I think that it has a lot of possibilities. They are concentrating a lot of information and I think that they need to get some feedback now. Also, it was really nice to hear that he got a lot of inspiration from the paper "Attention please! Learning analytics for visualization and recommendation" by Erik Duval. You feel somehow lucky and think: "Yeah! And I am doing the PhD with him". Afterwards, you wonder why he hasn't still fired you after questioning all his ideas in the PhD meetings... I guess that it's the PhD student syndrome, we think that we know more than we actually know... or maybe it's my personal syndrome but I feel better thinking that others share the same problem... as the saying goes:

"It is a fool's consolation the think everyone is in the same boat"

Cheers! ;)