It’s not a straighforward journey, but the illusions are in honour of Jeremy Knox’s blog post on ‘Abstracting Learning Analytics’, which has infused a number of Lifestream posts and has informed a lot of my thinking behind them.
Learning analytics can be illusion-inducing…
… and not always clear. Is there a shape there, or not? That was a question within and behind the analysis of the Tweetorial.
What am I seeing, exactly, and is that correct – and the only way to see it? Are others seeing something I’m not – and what happens when politics and power (as well as the market) are embroiled in these interpretive steps? [Non-representational art is still bound into contexts of production and consumption.]
Or, alternatively, seeing something when there is nothing there. Or, put another way, seeing something in the nothing, but the ‘nothing’ is important – and is made into a ‘something’? [Even Guardian readers – particularly Guardian readers – have their own filter bubbles, even filter baubles.]
Learning analytics becomes creations (plural) out of something. [And we might not know what we’re creating – cross your fingers, and hope for the best?]
But throw enough data and metadata into the mix, and will anything become something, or something become anything? [Is the art gallery of learning analytics actually a hall of distoring mirrors?]
‘Archive’ is a strange term here. First, in light of Knox’s ‘Abstracting Learning Analytics’, perhaps this is a more a gallery, or even an installation. Second, archive implies some sort of fixed state, but this data is a moving, shifting event. Below are some screen shots taken after the Tweetorial (on the morning of 21 March, so a few days after the Tweetorial), with some commentary. Continue reading “Visiting the Tweetorial archive”
I’m reading this piece through an educator’s eyes. This report from PwC appears to suggest that the education sector survives relatively well within the tsunami of digital unemployment to come. Perhaps a sense of relief, perhaps not. But also the piece continues to emphasise the importance of education in helping people to cope, suggesting “an argument for government intervention in education, lifelong learning and job matching to ensure the potential gains from automation were not concentrated in too few hands.” Hum: I wonder it’s that’s a fair and sustainable expectation to put on education. Even allowing for possible media hyping of the report, the projection seems bigger than simply an education quick-fix. Something more societal is in possible view here. If a new industrial revolution is underway, then education will be part of the mix, not the totality of it.
I’m also reading this piece with Jeremy Knox’s ‘Abstracting Learning Analytics’ in mind, and his analogies to art. Visit any historical art gallery, and one will see works of art which are, to varying extents, separated from their circumstances of production. Likewise architecture (and digital cultures, analytics included, do and will create their own architectures): aesthetics take on an after-life of their own, when beautiful artefacts produced under less-than-beautiful conditions are preserved and curated for a later, often selective, audience.
Will analytics become – or some become – thus separated from their production? How will people, undergoing perhaps radical restructuring of their jobs and lives, react? It might be some time before such things settle down and become national treasures, preserved for posterity, and even tourist attractions. There will be much action and reaction ahead of then.
“I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.” – Hamlet, II.ii What does this mean? Not just the obvious, literal explanation,…
I don’t think we got very far with this exchange. I’m including it as a sample of the loose ends which Twitter allows, and which the learning analytics patiently gobble up, process and expound. In itself, that’s telling.
Dirk, should you travel this way, I’m wondering how this fits with your early Lifestream posts about singular and revealed identity, and living publicly on the web. Many meanings/truths sounds like it might cut against it – or at least problematise it.
The Fenwick, Edwards and Sawchuk volume looks very interesting. I’m looking forward to getting my head a little way round complexity theory, and also relishing the latter chapters on space and geography.
It’s a great spin-off from the Google Hangout, and the good conversation and exchange of ideas and experiences. Many thanks…