Congratulations to our Finnish colleagues, Professor Kai Hakkarainen and his team, who have been awarded a strategic grant for the project “Growing mind: Educational transformations for facilitating sustainable personal, social, and institutional renewal at the digital age”.

Abelardo Pardo, co-coordinator of the learning analytics SIG, has just published a new paper in The Journal for Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education. This paper explores feedback in education and how this can play out and be extended in data rich learning environments. 

Here is a short offering on my endeavours in the recent past...PhD wise that is.

Under the supervision of Prof. Peter Reimann, my research is investigating current practices and sense making of student data presented as Learning Analytics Visualisations (LAV) in the teaching of English as a Second Language (ESL). Existing knowledge of data use in this context will be advanced by examining and tracking teacher learning. This will be achieved by observing teachers’ ability to interpret, engage with and make sense of student data via the concept of expansive learning trajectories (Barab, Hay & Yamagata-Lynch, 1999; Cobb, 1996) in correlation with descriptive frameworks measuring the interplay of ESL pedagogy, technology, and the sense making process.