Below is excerpted from a keynote address that I delivered on November 8, 2016 at Texas A&M at Texarkana for its National Distance Education Week Mini-Conference Right now in the US, nearly a quarter of all undergraduate students — 4.5 million — are both first generation and low income. Of these students, only 11% earn…
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Does Student Success start with Diversity in Higher Ed Administration?
Twitter has finally begun to add tools to mitigate harassment. Harassment on Twitter has been a huge problem in recent years, and the amount of poor citizenship on the platform has only increased post-election. Why has it taken so long to respond? On the one hand, it is a very hard technical problem: how can…
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Product as Praxis: How Learning Analytics tools are ACTUALLY Differentiated
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about product as praxis. Without putting too much conceptual weight behind the term ‘praxis,’ what I mean is merely that educational technologies are not just developed in order to change behavior. Ed tech embodies values and beliefs (often latent) about what humans are and should be, about what teaching…
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Five Must-See Analytics Sessions at EDUCAUSE 2016
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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