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Last Saturday, I overheard a conversation during a Hockey Night in Canada game wherein a woman asked her husband "Why don't they televise women's hockey?" Whether it's hockey, baseball, or football, the prevailing (male) response typically goes something like this: Since women are physiologically different [read: weaker] from men, women's sports are less exciting to … Continue reading Throwing Out Stereotypes (Like A Girl) →

The above video represents the most recent iteration of my dissertation work; a design-based research project that investigates how learning analytics tools and approaches, applied within the context of a technology-enhanced, blended learning environment, can support a Knowledge Community and Inquiry (KCI) approach to secondary science.  In the video I present the design of CKBiology; a software … Continue reading CKBiology →

“Give a colony of garden ants a week and a pile of dirt, and they’ll transform it into an underground edifice about the height of a skyscraper in an ant-scaled city. Without a blueprint or a leader, thousands of insects moving specks of dirt create a complex, sponge-like structure with parallel levels connected by a … Continue reading Eusociality →

From the d3js.org website: D3.js is a JavaScript library for manipulating documents based on data. D3 helps you bring data to life using HTML, SVG, and CSS. D3’s emphasis on web standards gives you the full capabilities of modern browsers without tying yourself to a proprietary framework, combining powerful visualization components and a data-driven approach … Continue reading Exploring Learning Analytics Software: D3.js →

Gephi is an open-source software application used for visualizing and analysing (large) network graphs.  Figure 1 shows the types of data formats that can be imported into Gephi.  The GEXF format (Graph Exchange XML Format) was created by members of the Gephi project and offers the most functionality; it is one of the two formats … Continue reading Exploring Learning Analytics Software: Gephi →

I first heard about RapidMiner from the “Data Analytics & Learning” MOOC (Siemens, Gasevic, Baker, and Rosé, 2014). For this evaluation, I installed a trial version of RapidMiner Studio (desktop software version) and performed the introductory tutorials. Like Data Science Studio (DSS), RapidMiner is used for generating predictive models.  However, unlike DSS - which records … Continue reading Exploring Learning Analytics Software: RapidMiner →

For the purposes of this exploration, I am using a 14-day free trial version of the cloud version of DSS, which includes several tutorials for new users. DSS enables users to import data from a variety of sources (see Figure 1), however the dataset must be in tabular format - i.e. an SQL Database is … Continue reading Exploring Learning Analytics Software: Data Science Studio (DSS) →

My exploration of Tableau began with a series of on-demand video tutorials available to registered users on the Tableau website.  I started by downloading their sample data set and following along with the training videos. Right from the beginning, I was quite impressed with the fairly intuitive user interface of this piece of software, which … Continue reading Exploring Learning Analytics Software: Tableau →

The following series of posts reflects my experiences as a first-time explorer of various pieces of learning analytics and data mining software applications.  The purpose of these explorations is for me to gain a better understanding of the current palette of tools and visualizations that may possibly support my own research in learning analytics within the context of a … Continue reading Exploring Learning Analytics Software: LightSide →