Do we really need to measure everything? Week 10

It is seldom if ever that my professional life and my studies amalgamate so whole-heartedly. I don’t really know if this is a good or a bad thing because inevitably the short snippets in which my studies present surpass my professional life and leave it behind while I’m still grappling with the issues at hand.

Last week I posted about going on training on Moodle analytics. I thought this would really help me make sense of one of the courses I work on as well as contribute to my understanding of this course.

Unwieldy data, how do we manage it?

How does one make sense of a course that has over 2480 pages and 12 thousand students enrolled on it?

The Tweetorial was much easier to manage but it did make me wonder if there was any purpose to recording students’ activity in open educational spaces. How can we really know that they are engaged? What struck me in our hangout this week is that one of the participants had a different handle and gender than what I have come to recognise. Since he was not in the tutorial as himself, does that mean he didn’t participate?

I went to London and South East Learning Technologies Conference for Health Education. A lot of the discourse centred on ‘technology enhanced learning’. The first seminar I attended was on wearable technology. The speaker spoke of physiolytics, the study of the information retrieved from a device worn on one’s body such at a staff ID card and Fitbit. The doctor presenting spoke of a “smart condom” that measured one’s performance and then fed that information back to an app on a phone. I had to wonder at this point whether man’s obsession with measuring his performance has gone a step too far.