In higher education, and in general, an increasing amount of attention is being paid to questions about the ethical use of data. People are working to produce principles, guidelines and ethical frameworks. This is a good thing. Despite being well-intentioned, however, most of these projects are doomed to failure. The reason is that, amidst talk…
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Liquid modernity & learning analytics: On educational data in the 21st century
I was recently interviewed for a (forthcoming) piece in eLearn Magazine. Below are my responses to a couple of key questions, reproduced here in their entirety. eLearn: You have a Ph.D. in Philosophy. Could you share with us a little about your history and your work with learning analytics? TH: What drives me in my…
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The difference between IT and Ed Tech
In a recent interview with John Jantsch for the Duct Tape Marketing podcast, Danny Iny argued that the difference between information and education essentially comes down to responsibility. Information is simply about presentation. Here are some things you might want to know. Whether and the extent to which you come to know them is entirely…
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Why the National Student Clearinghouse matters, and why it should matter more
In analytics circles, it is common to quote Peter Drucker: “What gets measured get managed.” By quantifying our activities, it becomes possible to measure the impact of decisions on important outcomes, and optimize processes with a view to continual improvement. With analytics, there comes a tremendous opportunity to make evidence-based decisions where before there was…
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Is Facebook making us more adventurous?
When was the last time you heard someone say “get off of Facebook (or Instagram? or twitter, or …) and DO something!”? I have a favorite passage from Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea: This is what I thought: for the most banal even to become an adventure, you must (and this is enough) begin to recount it. This…
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‘Good marketing’ isn’t good marketing: Why marketers should get out of the language game
Marketers like to make up new terminology and distinctions. This is easy to do because, in the absence of particular domain expertise, they don’t know the ‘right’ language. Reading is hard. Knowledge acquisition takes time. And marketers need to produce. So they create novel constellations of terms. Instead of exploring the world as it is,…
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Should Ed Tech Vendors Stop Selling ‘Predictive Analytics’?
Pedantic rants about the use and misuse of language are a lot of fun. We all have our soap boxes, and I strongly encourage everyone to hop on theirs from time to time. But when we enter into conversations around the use and misuse of jargon, we must always keep two things in mind: (1)…
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