Worrying about analytics...

I'm back in Canada, and also making my first post since I was last here. Maybe I have to move to Canada if I'm going to get blogging regularly! I'm at the Big Data and the Cloud 2012 conference in Edmonton. It's at the Fantasyland Hotel, West Edmonton Mall (once the biggest in the world). On ringing to make my reservation I was told "Hi, this is Britney, how can I make your stay with us more fun?" I was very discrete in my response. Just a few steps down the corridor from the hotel is this:

It's been a very worthwhile few days with lots of interesting presentations and conversations, and also some worries, especially for the educational application of analytics. I'll be going into that in future. For now I'll just mention that Dwayne Harapniuk, VP Academic Concordia University Alberta, made a very gung ho presentation about analytics, including references to Davenport, a Harvard analytics guru. According to Davenport it seems you have to use analytics across the organisation because you only get the benefits when you get data from the whole entity. Dwayne says this means everything must be based on analytics, and we all have to accept that we are evidence based in everything we do. This sounds a recipe for ratcheting up managerialism (and deliverology?) still further, and is in conflict with the start small and experiment advice which was given in other sessions. It's all very bottom line inspired: “We are student centred, so we go by student grades”. Student centredness has gone on a long journey since I started teaching!


Jurji Paraszak, of IBM, (who I was largely in sympathy with) talked about the importance of models. But he only talked about them after the data was collected. There was no mention from him or other presenters about the models which lead to the choice or creation of data sources. It seems to me that there is always a theory lurking in the background, informing the data gathering (and the areas where no data is gathered), and it was the lack of an explicit theory was what worried me most about what Harapniuk's talk.

How I learned to stop worrying and love the conifer

As I grew up in Wales I learned a potted (and no doubt unreliable) history of the woods:

• the countryside was covered in deciduous woodland, and populated by poets extemporising in ancient metres to the acompanyment of their harps
• the English came and cut down all the trees to build their navy, and burnt the lot in the cause of Empire
• the Welsh reinvented themselves as upland sheep farmers
• the evil Forestry Commission bought up the hill farms and covered them with monoculture of sitka spruce

Consequently I tend not to be well disposed to conifers, and especially not sitka spruce.

In the hope that I might do some mind broadening during my stay in Canada I have set myself the task of learning to love conifers. I've had to spend time with them, and learn to make new distinctions as I walk through what initially appeared to be endless ranks of undifferentiated trees. I had to stop seeing them as scaly green aliens, and start making new categories for their variety of needles, barks, cones and so forth. And yes, I can report that I am now taking as much pleasure from coming across a sitka spruce half way up a mountain in British Columbia as I do from encountering an oak in a valley in Wales (though now that the sessile oak has been co-opted by the Welsh Tories as some eliptical symbol of their identity I'll no doubt find myself alienated from that blameless species).

Something similar has been happening to me in my work. There is an unreliable history of e-Learning which sees the human touch of face to face education being undermined by a monoculture of inflexible learning activities supported by technologies derived from distance education. The finger of blame is pointed at instructional design as providing the rationale for this. As someone who has worked with IMS LD for many years, I haven't entirely bought into this critique, and I'm not sure on which side of this fence I would be unceremoniously dumped by an enthusiastic (and muscular) constructivist. But something of this attitude persists in the background assumptions of the educational technology world that I move in.
I am currently being generously hosted by the Open Learning group of Thompson Rivers University, and the group I am working most closely with are the Instructional Designers. You will be unsurprised to hear that they do not share this prejudice, and are justifiably enthusiastic about the opportunities for growth which they offer their students. Talking to them all has been the opportunity to develop and appreciate another (and perhaps more useful) set of distinctions.

I read this from Durkheim's 'Suicide' the other day:

On the pretext of giving the science a more solid foundation by establishing it upon the psychological constitution of the individual, it is thus robbed of the only object proper to it

He was writing about sociology, but it resonates for me in thinking about education, and especially the technologically mediated organisation of education.

Pooter, Prophet of the Blogosphere?

Firing up this blog, I can identify with Charles Pooter, 1888, whom I found so deeply unfunny as a child, but who has somehow stayed with me:
"Why should I not publish my diary? I have often seen reminiscences of people I have never even heard of, and I fail to see - because I do not happen to be a ’Somebody’ - why my diary should not be interesting. My only regret is that I did not commence it when I was a youth."