CCT Professor, Students and Alum Attend International Learning Analytics and Knowledge Conference in Belgium

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Georgetown’s Professor Yianna Vovides (CNDLS/CCT), Rob Pongsajapan (CNDLS/CCT ‘08), and graduate students Sarah Inman (CCT) and Deepa Rao (CNDLS/CCT) attended the third annual International Learning Analytics & Knowledge Conference (LAK) from April 8-12, 2013. Connecting with fellow researchers, they presented their poster: “A Model for Reflective-Sensemaking: Implementing Cohere in Courses.”

The conference—hosted by the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium—brought together interdisciplinary researchers in the emerging field of learning analytics for the twofold purpose of understanding technologies that support learning and how to best analyze learner-generated data. Institutions around the world are facing similar technological changes in education that are challenging traditional pedagogy. In the centuries-old university city of Leuven, attendees discussed how learning takes place in modern socio-technical settings.

Deepa and Rob attended the Computational Methods and Tools for Social Network Analysis of Networked Learning Communities workshop. The first half of the workshop was a solid introduction to the basic theory of social network analysis; the second half was dedicated to analyzing real data and creating visualizations to best represent the network.

Professor Vovides attended the International Workshop on Teaching Analytics, which focused on “methods and tools [that] aim to develop innovative solutions to assist and augment teachers’ dynamic diagnostic decision-making in the classrooms of the 21st century.”

The entire Georgetown team interacted with conference attendees during the poster session on Wednesday. The poster focused on integrating a reflective sensemaking model of learning into an undergraduate ethics course at Georgetown using Cohere, a learning discourse tool developed by The Open University (UK).

For more information on the LAK conference, please visit the conference website or email the any of the Georgetown attendees.