The folks at Wesleyan University have a blog up that is a stellar example of how to evangelize for an LMS platform to faculty when you’re facing the front end of a migration.1 For starters, their FAQ is rich with information, including analysis by peer schools.
Here’s a sample:
Just a couple of hours after I posted on social network analysis and the LMS, Scott Wilson tweeted about an article from Wired Magazine that he correctly identified as having serious implications for social learning. An economic sociologist from MIT used social network analysis to show that behaviors spread more quickly in social networks of clustered close connections.
From Wired Magazine
Many thanks to George Siemens for pointing out SNAPP: Social Networks Adapting Pedagogical Practice. This is something I’ve been urging various LMS communities to build for seven or eight years (since I was involved with dotLRN). SNAPP extracts information from the discussion boards in your LMS course and provides social graphs that help you to visualize interactivity.
Example layout of discussion forum posts and replies in a learning management system, and the same discussion as a network diagram using SNAPP
It works with Blackboard, ANGEL, Desire2Learn, and Moodle (but not Sakai). The mechanism by which it works isn’t entirely clear from the project site, but it looks like you use a bookmarklet to call a web service hosted elsewhere while browsing the discussion forum you want to analyze.
There’s quite a bit that you can do with a tool like this. Here are some applications that the SNAPP site suggests:
CC License: tanakawho
e-Literate had an outage of several days due to…irreconcilable differences with my now former web host. I have moved to Fused Network. Even in these early days, the difference in quality of service is night and day. I think I’m going to be happy here.
You may have noticed that the site looks different. Again. I have had a hard time finding a theme that I’m happy with. My criteria aren’t actually that complicated:
I’m happy to say that the new default WordPress theme finally meets all of those characteristics, so that’s what I’m using and intend to keep using for the foreseeable future. I may change the banner at the top of the page, but that’s about it.
This is a guest post by Jim Farmer.
As you know, the Statewide Longitudinal Data Systems program is funding states’ work to improve their data systems. Over the past four years, 41 states and the District of Columbia have received more than half a billion dollars from this program. It has supported states as they link data from preschool, K-12, and postsecondary education. In some states, it supports their work to track students into the workforce. We’re committed to helping all states.
Keynote presentation – Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan
For 40 years institutional and policy researchers and information technologist have met with staff from the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics to learn and advise on NCES data collection efforts. NCES is a source of useful statistics on K-12 and higher education. As described by Secretary Duncan, this year NCES staff and consultants provided detail data on the anticipated changes in higher education being implemented through the state agencies and conditions for any federal funding.
At last year’s STAS-DC conference the primary focus of the 600 participants was qualifying to receive federal grants to develop statewide longitudinal data systems (SLDS). The $500 million was for in grants to state education agencies. Higher education did not receive any of those funds directly or via the state higher education executive officers.
Now NCES has become the leader of perhaps the largest information technology (IT) implementation ever attempted in the U.S. It spans 4.339 colleges and universities and 98,916 public schools with annual revenue of $1.1 trillion. The Stats-DC 2010 conference, held 26-30 July in Bethesda, Maryland, focused on this implementation.
This year’s conference provided evidence of the Department’s perspective of higher education and the requirements that would be placed on public colleges and universities and incentives for private non-profit and for-profit colleges to participate as well. Statewide Longitudinal Data Systems (SLDS) have become an unfunded mandate for higher education through new state-required data reporting requirements and data exchanges among colleges, universities, and schools. States that received funding agreed to build state-level data warehouses of these data; the model was centralization within each of the states or the use of servicers.
In the long term higher education will be restructured by the metrics used to represent the success of college and university management and teaching faculty. The Stats-DC Conference offered an opportunity to learn the underlying assumptions about education and perception of the value and use of data. A caution: The U.S. Department of Education has a number of knowledgeable, dedicated, and hard-working educators. This is also true of the state education agencies. But the design and beginning implementation of a national education data system within the available time does not permit the thoughtful planning that would have reduced the risks of unintended consequences.
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