EDUCAUSE is big. Really big. With so much to take in, conference-goers (myself included) are easily faced with the paradox of choice: a sense of paralysis in the face of too many options. To help myself and others, I have scanned this year’s conference agenda and selected five presentations that I think will be individually…
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Learning analytics and interoperability—a new standard
Learning analytics can be like shining a flashlight into a deep cave. In an instant, access to data about teaching and learning practices illuminates facts about actual behavior that would otherwise be left to speculation and anecdote. But just as we need multiple light sources to shed light into the many caverns that connect to…
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Student Success and Liberal Democracy
The political environment in the United States has increasingly highlighted huge problems in our education system. These problems, I would argue, are not unrelated to how we as a country conceptualize student success. From the perspective of the student, success is about finding a high-paying job that provides a strong sense of personal fulfillment. From…
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Data Dread: An Intractable Problem of Personal Identity in the Digital Age?
Public concern about ‘big data’ frequently comes down to a vague and ill-defined sense of ‘ickiness.’ I’d like to briefly suggest a way to provides structure to this vague sentiment — let’s call it data dread. Provisionally, I would argue that public distrust of ‘big data’ comes down to major tension between two promises of…
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The Trouble with ‘Student Success’
I’m increasingly troubled by ‘student success,’ and am even somewhat inclined to stop using the term entirely. The trouble with ‘student success,’ it seems to me, is that it actually has very little to do with people. It’s not about humans, but rather about a set of conditions required for humans to successfully fill a…
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Three Ways Higher Ed can Avoid IT ‘Lock-In’
In a recent Future Trends Forum discussion with Bryan Alexander, George Siemens expressed concern about lock-in: a situation in which technology investments become so integrated with the business practices of an institution that disentanglement becomes all but impossible. Where hyper-rationalized approaches to data-driven decision-making come together with inflexible technological ecosystems characterized by a lack of…
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