Six degrees of separation

6 degrees of separation

As usual, according to Wiki, 6 degrees of separation is:

"The theory that everyone and everything is six or fewer steps away, by way of introduction, from any other person in the world, so that a chain of 'a friend of a friend' statements can be made to connect any two people in a maximum of six steps"

We might also have stumble across this situation, where the person who we just met actually know someone who we knows. In my case, few that I remember are; my sister who found out that her lecturer during degree is actually my uncle's good friend. Another is my friend actually know my friend (not close enough) from degree studies, and the expert I interviewed last week is someone whom my friend has worked together during conference. See, others might have same experience and even funny story behind it.

The theory make us think and we can say that we are all actually related or connected to each other. The 6 steps show how close we are from each other. Besides that, this remind us that we must be humble and not belittle others as there are no big difference between us. Professor Albert-Laslo Barabasi from Northeastern University said that there is no isolate person in a network. Each person on the network depend on each other. We must question on how the person contact others. I have analyse a online forum network before, so, that is means, even there are so many isolate members in the forum, that doesn't means they are isolate. Behind that virtual activities, they might somehow communicate with each other, maybe through calling or meet at the cafe.

There is a video which prove the '6 degrees of separation' theory. A document which pass to a foreign country are able to arrive Boston through 6 peoples. 

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2rzxAyY7D7k

The great things is this theory might also help in various field such as finding the solution/understanding the genetic disease, virus spread or military tactic in targeting influence people.

Learning analytics

Good day!

Today, let's talk a bit about learning analytics. Actually, this topic has been brought up during our interview with the Director of Centre of Teaching & Learning, few weeks before. It is interesting topic be discussed as e-learning has become more common as a medium in learning process. Now, what is learning analytics?

Let's take a look at wiki definition:

"Learning analytics is the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of data about learners and their contexts, for purposes of understanding and optimising learning and the environments in which it occurs."

There are 4 importance thing here, which are:

-What you need to see

-Which data to be used

-What method/analysis/analytic tools you use

-What you need to do after see the result

The last part is where the process of "understanding and optimising learning and the environment".

An article (http://www.theguardian.com/education/2014/mar/26/learning-analytics-student-progress) share on how an institution, Purdue University even has tools which will give their students warning about their learning performance through colour. The instructors, after told by tool will tell the student to improve when the student got 'red colour' if in high risk such as isolated or not participate at all in online activities. This show the advantage of learning analytics as it tell you what happened (the result) and what you can do. Other benefits, it is true that not only learning analytics help students improve learning performance but also other skills such as team networking or leadership skills, as there are many activities online are in group.

Nowadays there is a lot of tools provided for this purpose. Whether embedded in the e-learning (learning management system) or stand-alone tools. The instructor has wide choice in other to analyse student's performance and then do what is necessary to improve them. However, in other to give useful result, the provider of the analytics tools itself need to consider several things:

-Provide accurate result (involve correct measurement, algorithm and etc)   

-Not all user are tech geek, so the tools must user friendly

-The result patterns or visual graph need to be easily understand (as those result are usually for decision making)

To get the concept clearer, I want to share one example through this video (which I learned from: http://glassclassroom.blogspot.com/2012/12/the-glass-classroom-big-data.html). 

The glass is just the medium and technology which still far beyond achieve, but what need to be focused is how the information needed (result after data being analysed) can appear just in few seconds (yeah, that easy!) and the user can use for their own needs-mobile control, class attendance, energy control, patients status, etc.

If doing analytic by own is uneasy or not enough time, why not establish a department in institution which specialize in providing analyses results required by instructors through phone call or email or one click? (Anyway, this is just bizarre idea)

So, let's use learning analytic tools to learn more effectively and efficiently!