Widgets for Awareness and Reflection

Using widgets to supportawareness and reflectionin a PLE setting

Rebecca Ferguson & Simon Buckingham Shum

The Open University

Ruth Deakin Crick

University of Bristol

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What is a research blog?

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Changing and learningLearning relationshipsStrategic awarenessResilienceCreativityMeaning makingCritical curiosity

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Research challenges

• Privacy issues – exposing reflection to classmates and to the world at large

• Clarity – Can teachers and learners set this up and run it without support?

• Scalability –One school = 1000 pupils +200 each yearTen schools = 10,000 pupils +2000 each

year

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What should we focus on?

• Providing structures for reflection

• Providing language to support reflection

• Providing visualisations that help learners to navigate and extend their reflection.

• Learning analytics and recommendations

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What are learning analytics?

The use of data and models to predict student progress and performance, and the ability to act on that information

EDUCAUSE (2010)nextgenlearning.org

dougclow.wordpress.com

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Five-year research agenda

• Develop ethical frameworks and learning analytics that will enable us to change our assessment practices to support learning in these new educational environments.

• Develop recommendation engines that use these analytics to provide personalised recommendations that support learning and that are valued by learners, teachers and society.

EnquiryBloggerkmi.open.ac.uk/eb