Micro-blog post World War 2 is arguably the most important moment in history for the UK. The heroism, community spirit and sacrifice that arose during the 1939-45 conflict have done more to shape modern Britain than any amount of Tudor divorce nonsense or flukey Norman archery. Whether the Keep Calm and Carry on bobbins, or …
Category: Big data
Who traces the tracers? Algorithm Watch Report 2021
The book I’ve found most challenging and rewarding recently is ‘Irrationality’. First written in 1992, the book both identifies significant flaws in the human thinking process and advocates for a more standardised scientific approach. It’s a good case. However, nearly 30 years later, we are living through the lived realities of that way of thinking: …
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AI in Tertiary Education report
<Blogging as a filing cabinet> AI is clearly part of the future of education, but I suspect a lot of what's claimed now is utter bobbins. So do we chase every opportunity to use it now, or let other HEIs blow millions on bad tech then swoop in learn from their mistakes? AI in tertiary …
Shifting Baseline Syndrome
Feral (2013), George Monbiot I'm writing the morning after the UEFA cup final. One manager, Chelsea's Thomas Tuchel, is being praised for tactical intelligence, one, Manchester City's Pep Guardiola, has been criticised for an apparently erratic squad choice. I didn't watch the game, so I'm not sure whether City played in a more interesting or …
“Wait for it!” – Problems using predictions to instigate COVID 19 lockdowns
The reaction time of a typical human being is apparently 250 miliseconds. In other words, it takes us about quarter of a second to get out of the way of a speeding snowball, or catch the dropped vase. That stuff's easy - 1. Danger - 2. React - 3. Try not to look embarrassed when our response …
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Black Box Thinking – a review and a challenge to universities
This post is a piece of procrastination. And I'm partly writing it because Matthew Syed brilliantly describes a form of procrastination in his excellent book Black Box Thinking, but truthfully I'm just procrastinating because I'm putting off a task that I'm finding difficult. 🙂 The book deserves a better review than this, because I think it's …
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Future Shocks – big data from 1980
As a child in the 1980s I read a lot of comics. Well I read a lot of 2000AD. Spiderman, Batman etc., didn't really appeal. Homegrown, punky, weird sci fi suited me far better. Alongside Judge Dredd and other hardbitten heros was a quirky series known as Future Shocks (imagine Black Mirror but in a …
Chaos theory from the perspective of the butterfly: learning analytics and change
In a recent discussion about how we help academics to use learning analytics, a very wise colleague made the point that we need to constantly remind them of the relationship between average engagement and success. This arose during a conversation about the accuracy of each individual alert raised. They can never be 100% accurate and …
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Diagnosing student ‘risk’: categorising learning analytics to prevent early withdrawal
Universities are awash with data about students that could function as early warning signs that a student may need help. These data sources range from the highly personal, for example tutors observing that a student appears to be having a bad day, to the highly systematised, for example automatic early warnings based on a metric …
Big data/AI: examples of concerning practice unintended consequences
I'm not apocalyptic about the role of big data in society generally and education specifically, but I do feel strongly that we all have a responsibility to stand back and think about how we accept and use technology. The brilliant writer Yuval Noah Harari has written a great piece on the philosophical challenges of what …
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