The Selfie and How We
Go From Students as
Consumers to Students
as Creators
http://polls.bb/2376
Dan Peters
@danspeters
dan.peters@blackboard.com
19 March 2014
A photograph that one has
taken of oneself, typically
one taken with a smartphone
or webcam and uploaded to
a social media website
Oxford Dictionaries 2013
word of the year
2013 Word of the year in
Sweden, Belgium, Holland
Självporträtt publicerat i sociala medier. 2013
Den bild som skapas när vi fotograferar oss
själva med våra mobiltelefoner kallas just så –
selfie. Det är en lek med engelskans ord för den
egna identiteten.
Dagens Nyheter 18 maj 2013
[även egobild och självis förekommer i samma
betydelse]
Two Hats? (revisited)
4
5
• Video of DVP typing
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8
9
10
13
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Some Meanings of the Selfie
• A symptom of media driven narcissism
• A new way not only of representing ourselves to
others, but of communicating with one another
through images
• Traditional portraits are meant to portray some
sense of permanence but selfies are
representative of the moment and fleeting in
nature
• An empowering form of self-creation that puts
everyone in a position of celebrity
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How Does This Relate to
Education?
The selfie is the coming
together of trends in mobile,
Internet, social networks,
and individualism that
already affect us greatly…
Trends in education are a
reflection (often delayed) of
overall trends in society
Technology Makes People
Antisocial
MMORPGs vs. MOOCs
•
•
•
•
Quests vs. Projects
Guilds vs. Groups
Powers vs. Skills
Quality?
World of Warcraft took 5 years to develop. We are less
than 3 years from Sebastian Thrun’s MOOC that
popularized the xMOOC format
3D Printing
Consumer Driven Computing Models
• 89% of colleges and universities in the US and UK
support Bring Your Own Device (BYOD)
• 79% deploy mobile apps
Bradford Networks 2013. Campus Computing 2013
We can predict future
educational trends by
observing current societal
trends
Prediction – Bayes Theorem
Prior Probability
Initial Estimate of likelihood of plane
hitting Manhattan skyscraper in terrorist
attack
x
0.005%
Probability of plane hitting if terrorists are
attacking Manhattan skyscrapers
y
100%
Probability of plane hitting by accident
z
0.008%
New Event
Posterior Probability
Revised estimate of probability of terror
attack given first plane hitting
xy
xy + z(1- x)
38%
Nate Silver’s World Trade Center Example
Silver, Nate (2012-09-27). The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't
Prediction
Prior Probability
Revised Prior Estimate of likelihood of
terror attack given first plane hitting
x
38%
Probability of plane hitting if terrorists are
attacking Manhattan skyscrapers
y
100%
Probability of plane hitting by accident
z
0.008%
xy
xy + z(1- x)
99.99%
New Event
Posterior Probability
Revised estimate of probability of terror
attack given second plane hitting
Nate Silver’s World Trade Center Example
Silver, Nate (2012-09-27). The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't
3-5 Year Trend
Rise of DataDriven
Learning and
Assessment
NMC Horizon Report 2014
The Swedish Tabellverket in
1749 is thought to be the
first data collection exercise
using demographic and
economic data to inform
policy decisions
The Key Questions of Analytics
Past
Present
Future
Information
Reports &
Descriptions
Alerting
Extrapolation
Insight
Key Questions Positioning
Models &
Explanations
Recommendations
Prediction
T.
29H. Davenport, J. G. Harris, and R. Morison, Analytics at Work: Smarter Decisions, Better Results. Harvard Business Press, 2010.
Data Mining and Artificial Intelligence
Past
Present
Future
Information
Reports &
Descriptions
Alerting
Extrapolation
Insight
Key Questions Positioning
Models &
Explanations
Recommendations
Prediction
• Generally concerned with patterns
• Examples: shopping basket analysis, insurance fraud
T.
30H. Davenport, J. G. Harris, and R. Morison, Analytics at Work: Smarter Decisions, Better Results. Harvard Business Press, 2010.
Business Intelligence
Past
Present
Future
Information
Reports &
Descriptions
Alerting
Extrapolation
Insight
Key Questions Positioning
Models &
Explanations
Recommendations
Prediction
• Allows users to combine and visualize data from a range of sources.
• Often dashboards and reports focus on key performance indicators
in a form suited to continuous monitoring.
T.
31H. Davenport, J. G. Harris, and R. Morison, Analytics at Work: Smarter Decisions, Better Results. Harvard Business Press, 2010.
Data Mining in Education
How MOOC video production affects student engagement
• Analysis of 862 videos viewed 6,900,000 times by 128,000 students
Conclusions
• Shorter videos are much more engaging. Engagement drops sharply after 6
minutes.
• Videos that intersperse an instructor’s talking head with PowerPoint slides
are more engaging than showing only slides.
• Videos produced with a more personal feel could be more engaging than
high-fidelity studio recordings.
• Khan-style tablet drawing tutorials are more engaging than PowerPoint
slides or code screencasts.
• Even high-quality prerecorded classroom lectures are not as engaging when
chopped up into short segments for a MOOC.
• Videos where instructors speak fairly fast and with high enthusiasm are
more engaging.
• Students engage differently with lecture and tutorial videos.
Philip J. Guo, Juho Kim, Rob Rubin How Video Production Affects Student Engagement: An Empirical Study of MOOC Videos. 2014
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Data Mining Selfies
“The idea was to confront the generalizations about selfies, which are not based
on data, with actual data. We wanted to look at what the actual patterns are.”
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•
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Analysis of selfies from New York City, Berlin, Bangkok, Moscow, and Sao
Paolo between 4 December and 12 December 2013
Women take more selfies than men, particularly in Moscow where 80
percent of the selfies are from women. The trend reverses after
approximately age 40 when men are more likely to take and post selfies on
Instagram than women.
Women are more likely to tilt their heads in photos, with the average amount
of head tilt in women being 150 percent higher than in men. And in Sao
Paulo, on average women tilt their heads to 16.9 degrees whereas in NYC,
women only tilt their head to 11 degrees.
According to Selfiecity’s mood analysis, people in Bangkok and Sao Paulo
appear to be happier than people in Moscow. Or at least they smile more in
their selfies.
http://selfiecity.net
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3-5 Year Trend
“The relative immaturity of the
education sector…and the
absence of data at the scale
typical of much-publicised
commercial-sector applications of
data mining (e.g. ebay, Amazon)
suggests that a period of
experimentation within the sector
would be more appropriate than
adoption as a core business tool”
3-5 Year Trend
Shift from
Students as
Consumers to
Students as
Creators
CHANGE
IS BEING
DRIVEN
BY THE
CONSUMER
?
Some Drivers for Change (UK HE)
• Institutional reputation – National Student Survey
• Learners as consumers – value for money
• Increased competition among course providers –
flexible provision
• Generational changes in educational and social
expectations / experiences
• And a lot more……..
Curriculum Documentation
Focus on outputs:
• Learning outcomes
• Assessment criteria
• Reading lists
• Timetable
• Plus supporting narrative
Provides an overall framework but doesn’t capture
the “essence” of a course for a learner.
Essence (for the learner) – can be
OR
Focusing On That Essence
“My job now is to get kids excited and give them the
tools to be able to access the knowledge to be able
create, to be able to analyze, to be able to compare
and contrast, to be able to synthesize and to be able
to design new things out of the learning that they’re
able to access via a touch of a button”
Students as Change Agents
• Students change agents act as the “innovators” in
the Diffusion of Innovations model
• Student developers are used at many institutions
to create apps in agile approaches to change – if
it’s becoming easier to make bad predictions it
needs to be easier to correct them
“There is a subtle, but extremely important, difference
between an institution that ‘listens’ to students and responds
accordingly, and an institution that gives students the
opportunity to explore areas that they believe to be
significant, to recommend solutions and to bring about the
required changes.”
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Dunne in Foreword to Dunne and Zandstra, 2011, 4
Makerspaces
Tell me, I’ll forget
Show me, I’ll remember
Involve me, I’ll understand
• Makers work with a variety of media on projects of their own creation
• All students can learn by doing and making
• Stanford Transformative Learning Technologies Lab initiative to
create open source makerspace curriculum
http://fablearn.stanford.edu/2013/uncategorized/fablearn-fellows/
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FabLab Example
Back to Selfies…
• “Making” should always have been the goal of our
education systems
• Selfies are a symptom of the desire to produce
rather than consume
• What do we do to help our students be producers?
Thank You
Dan Peters
@danspeters
dan.peters@blackboard.com
19 March 2014