Monday, February 27, 2012

A few thoughts on privacy and ethics for LAK12

One of the points was what happens to the data if we allow students to opt-out. As a person who has collected data from human subjects, I found that when people feel you are giving then full disclosure they are excited to help and be about of your study. Also, I have been in a situation were my boss insisted on nondisclosure. Students had no opt-out. We collected more nonsense responses that than we data was collected freely. As a TA, I decided to collect sets of data from students and I told them it was for the design of an ITS and they not only were glad to help, but they even got involved with the project. My point, opt-out will have so risks attached in terms of collecting a large enough data sets. However, the quality of data may be better by avoiding nonsense data. Second, we need to study if the opt-out option really hurts data collection. We may have to be creative in how we get our data point. The sample may have to include multiple sections of a course or more courses in the same topic area to insure opt-out is no longer an issues. Finally, if opt-out turns out to exclude a group based on social-economic standings, gender, age, or ethnic group; them we have an issue to resolve. If opt-out cross all a wide range with no pattern do we have an issue?

Tuesday, January 24, 2012

Import citations into your digital library LAK12 using the Mendeley Web Importer | Mendeley

Import citations into your digital library using the Mendeley Web Importer | Mendeley

An effort to archive all related works now that we figured out how it works:

http://www.mendeley.com/groups/1813551/learning-analytics-lak12/