Audio Week 9 weekly thoughts
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The school inspection has taken place. Some data amassing was required, but most of it was conducted by humans interacting with each other in the real world. How long this will remain the case is up for question if our study and discussions about learning analytics this week hail the beginning of an inevitable phenomenon. Inspections in the future might be done remotely with officials tapping in to the school’s metrics, viewing dashboards and delving into detailed individual student action plans, predictions and prescriptions carefully compiled by the code. Even the psychological temperature of the pupils will be available remotely in real time.

I have swithered all week between a reactionary distrust of learning analytics – a concept of learning by numbers and an ambition to instantiate a quantified student measured against coherent mapped knowledge domains – and an acknowledgment of the importance of research and a creeping suspicion that some of it might actually be useful, with a confession, too, that my happiness and motivation indicators do actually nudge up a little each time an automated comment on my lifestream applauds me for a great post. 

I have bundled up all my LA thoughts into one post (not such a heavy call on the algorithmic burden), although I sprinkled a few little comments on infographics, LA reports and modelling the student elsewhere as well as starting to contribute to Dan’s Milanote. I started my tweetorial tweets a bit early with a question which, for me, still hangs in the air.

I feel moocs on behaviourism and neuroscience coming on 🙂