LAK 2018 in Sydney

This post is on the exciting week of the Learning Analytics and Knowledge Conference LAK 2018, held in Sydney. LAK is a prestigious conference dedicated for sharing work in Learning Analytics across the globe. LAK coming down under was something we were looking forward to for quite some time. LAK is in fact the very first international conference I’ve ever attended (back in 2015), so it is always extra special 🙂

I started off with a Writing Analytics workshop, which we organized in Day 1 of LAK. We used a Jupyter notebook which runs Python code to demonstrate the application of text analysis for writing feedback and the pedagogic constructs behind designing such applications for learning analytics. Our aim was to bridge the gap between pedagogic contexts and the technical infrastructure (analytics) by crafting meaningful feedback for students on their writing, and to do so by developing writing analytics literacy. The participants were quite engaged in this hands on approach and we had good discussion on the implications of such Writing Analytics techniques.

The next day, I participated in the Doctoral Consortium, which is a whole day workshop where doctoral students present their work, discuss and receive feedback on their work from experts and other students. To know more about a Doctoral Consortium, read this. My doctoral consortium paper published in the companion proceedings is available here:

The new workshop for school practitioners was of interest to many educators working in K-12 learning analytics applications, and the Hackathon continues to be of wide interest. After the pre-conference events, the main conference officially started with the first keynote by Prof. David Williamson Shaffer on ‘The Importance of Meaning: Going Beyond Mixed Methods to Turn Big Data into Real Understanding’. David talked about how data is not scarce anymore, and to analyze such a sheer volume of data for learning, how we have to go beyond traditional quantitative and qualitative approaches. He gave examples of logical fallacies where statistics is likely to be misused while interpreting the concepts in learning, and introduced the notion of quantitative ethnography which can close the interpretive gap between the model and the data.

If you want to hear the full talk, all the keynotes are available along with the slides here: https://latte-analytics.sydney.edu.au/keynotes/ 

In general, there was great interest in the development of theories around designing dashboards, discussing how to and how not to develop dashboards for students.

Aligning learning analytics with learning design was increasingly emphasized. The demo paper which I presented that day exemplifying this in a Writing Analytics context is here (bonus pic with the supervisors):

The second day of the main conference (aptly on International women’s day) started with Prof. Christina Conati’s keynote on user adaptive visualizations, where she talked about adaptive interactions.

She showed how visualizations can be personalized for users by building user models based on eye tracking features.

Visualization in general was another key topic which gathered growing interest in the LAK community, along with other topics like Discourse analysis and Writing Analytics, many of them moving towards more near real-time applications.

I attended the SOLAR executive meeting for the first time to see what’s happening around SOLAR. It felt great to be part of a very welcoming community of researchers and practitioners. That’s where they announced this:

We also celebrated Women’s day:

It was quite an eventful day ending with the conference banquet in a Sydney harbour cruise.

The final keynote on the last day touched upon a number of criticisms around learning analytics and how we can progress the field further taking into account the key aims of learning analytics.

Multi modal learning analytics, MOOCS, Ethics and Policies, Theories, Self-regulated learning and Co-designing with stakeholders are other areas which continued to be discussed throughout the conference.

And then to wrap it up, happy hour!

To read all the interesting papers from LAK, follow this link.

For more tweets from the awesome LAK community, check #LAK18, #LAK2018, @lak2018syd

Note: Initially created as a private post for my own reference notes, this post was later made publicly available from 23 May 2018.

 

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