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…
Continue ReadingTag: EdTech
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)…
Continue Reading
How ed tech marketers are bad for higher education
A lot of ed tech marketers are really bad. They are probably not bad at their ‘jobs’ — they may or may not be bad at generating leads, creating well-designed sales material, creating brand visibility. But they are bad for higher education and student success. Bad ed tech marketers are noisy. They use the same…
Continue Reading
Has Analytics Fallen Into the Trough of Disillusionment?
Co-Authoered with Mike Sharkey In direct contradiction to Betteridge’s Law, we believe the answer is yes. Analytics in higher education is in the trough of disillusionment. The trough of disillusionment refers to a specific stage of Gartner’s Hype Cycle. It is that moment when, after a rapid build up leading to a peak of inflated…
Continue Reading
Climbing out of the Trough of Disillusionment: Making Sense of the Educational Data Hype Cycle
In 2014, I wrote a blog post in which I claimed (along with others) that analytics had reached a ‘peak of inflated expectations.’ Is the use of analytics in higher education now entering what Gartner would call the ‘trough of disillusionment’? In 2011, Long and Siemens famously argued that big data and analytics represented “the…
Continue Reading
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…
Continue ReadingEducational Technology is not a Rotisserie Oven
An important and fruitful area of discussion in learning analytics involves the use of embedded student dashboards, which are most commonly sold and promoted as tools for leveraging peer pressure to increase student success (like UMBC’s Check My Activity Tool). In my experience with a similar tool over the last year however, it has become…
Continue Reading