{"id":15,"date":"2022-10-18T12:11:49","date_gmt":"2022-10-18T11:11:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cde22.education.ed.ac.uk\/rparker\/?p=15"},"modified":"2022-10-18T12:25:46","modified_gmt":"2022-10-18T11:25:46","slug":"ideas-for-learning-with-data-visualisation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/cde22.education.ed.ac.uk\/rparker\/2022\/10\/18\/ideas-for-learning-with-data-visualisation\/","title":{"rendered":"Ideas for Learning with Data Visualisation"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Reflecting on my initial ideas<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Throughout this block so far, the reading has encouraged me to reflect upon my own learning and ponder how learning analytics solutions may have interpreted me so far based upon my trace data (as in the data that can be traced through clicks and time-spent on site pages). What sort of profile would I have according to a digital platform and what kind of content would be recommended to me based on this profile?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In connecting this to the activity of creating a hand-drawn data visualisation, I want to explore whether I can visualise the ways in which I learn, through my actions. By recording this data in analogue form from my<\/em> personal viewpoint, I can build a more holistic view of my actions and activities than any digital learning platform could ever claim to.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The seen vs the unseen (in learning)<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

If one thing is clear to me, it’s that learning is a very complex and messy subject that doesn’t fit neatly into data tables. Learning doesn’t sit within the confines of a school, college, or university; nor does sit exclusively within a VLE. It happens in lots of different places that are unique to each individual learner.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Photo by Ricardo Viana<\/a> on Unsplash<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n

If I think about how I<\/em> learn, I spend an awful lot of time thinking, reading, and noting ideas down. Most of this will be go unseen by a learn analytics platform. So how would such systems deal with this? Would I be sent push notifications to tell me I’m falling behind? Would a flag appear beside my name as needing some form of intervention?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Any interactions I make ‘online’ will no doubt be recorded, but where those interactions take place determines who sees this data. A lot of that won’t be the university. For instance the university could<\/em> see that I saw a notification, I authored a blog post, I contributed to a discussion, or clicked on an item in the reading list. But what about when I’m searching the web for ideas, trying to connect concepts, reading ‘offline’, having discussions with friends, family and even peers outside of the VLE. This will go unseen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ideas for a visualisation<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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I attempted to list the activities I engage in that all contribute to my learning. Note some activities happen ‘offline’ and some exist as idea formulation that are not documented anywhere.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

I want to explore whether I can document each learning interaction I make throughout a given week. This will include the seen (let’s assume that’s anything digital) and the unseen which is not only learning that happens in analogue form (perhaps ‘offline’) also those activities that are<\/em> online but happen within websites and apps that are personal to me and not seen by the university and its licensed technologies. I want to emphasise the divide between the seen and the unseen in this landscape as a vehicle to highlight the limitations of any proposed learning analytics or personal tutor type system and I’m exploring ways in which I can illustrate this for my visualisation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I started thinking about the data I produce and how where that’s authored depends on who sees it.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Learning fields<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
<\/span>\"Aerial
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Photo by Peter Ford<\/a> on Unsplash<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n

I have an idea that will be a visual play on the metaphor of data harvesting. This will take the form of hand-drawn data lines that happen within silos (like farmer’s fields). Here, I’m wanting to emphasise the division between the data by using each field as a different data provider. One shape may be university servers, another licensed vendors like Microsoft, then there’s the companies that I (students) interact with outside of the university’s provision e.g. Google, Amazon Web Services, app providers, and so on. There’s ‘fields’ that more than one actor can see, for instance activity that happens within a licensed service like Microsoft could be seen by both the University staff as well as Microsoft themselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then going a step further there’s the interactions that happen offline, like conversations with family and friends, reading a paper that’s been downloaded, or making notes on a locally installed text editor. You could argue this aspect of learning isn’t recorded at all. You could perhaps only record the output through an assessment for example.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Abstract representation<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

The concept of the seen and unseen of learning through the metaphor of fields seemed quite logical in my head, but I have struggled to actually illustrate this. Therefore, I’m exploring whether a more abstract Lupi & Posavec-esque representation may prove simpler.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Starting to experiment with a more abstract visualisation of ‘learning’ data, highlighting the distinction between data that is born digital versus data that is created in an analogue form.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

As I start to develop my ‘learning’ data visualisation, I was able to show both the type of learning activity I was engaging in, along with whether that activity exists online or not. However, this is only scraping the surface in terms of the complexity of recording learning data. Signifying that data is produced\/exists online means it’s trackable, but who sees that data deters whether this is useful for learning. For example, I often use OneNote to make notes and draft ideas – and Edinburgh University provide me with access to this application. However, as I use Microsoft 365 as part of my job, that activity and note taking typically happens on my work’s tenancy, whether that is the right thing to do or not. If a learning analytics platform wanted to “capture” my learning activity, that would prevent that information being recorded and analysed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This can be even further removed when that idea formulation happens on completely unsupported platforms that are solely the choice of me (the learner) for example using WhatsApp for informal discussions with peers outside of the VLE.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is the challenge I’m wrestling with of how best to visualise the complexity of the seen and unseen in learning.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reflecting on my initial ideas Throughout this block so far, the reading has encouraged me to reflect upon my own learning and ponder how learning analytics solutions may have interpreted me so far based upon my trace data (as in the data that can be traced through clicks and time-spent on site pages). What sort […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":27,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,6],"tags":[12,7,11,10,8,9],"class_list":["post-15","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-learning-with-data","category-week-4","tag-data","tag-learning-with-data","tag-seen","tag-unseen","tag-visualisation","tag-week-4"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/cde22.education.ed.ac.uk\/rparker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/cde22.education.ed.ac.uk\/rparker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/cde22.education.ed.ac.uk\/rparker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/cde22.education.ed.ac.uk\/rparker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/cde22.education.ed.ac.uk\/rparker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"http:\/\/cde22.education.ed.ac.uk\/rparker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35,"href":"http:\/\/cde22.education.ed.ac.uk\/rparker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15\/revisions\/35"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/cde22.education.ed.ac.uk\/rparker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/27"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/cde22.education.ed.ac.uk\/rparker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/cde22.education.ed.ac.uk\/rparker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/cde22.education.ed.ac.uk\/rparker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}