Private intuition: public expertise

Twitching the net curtainsAs well as debunking numerous teaching myths, Tom Bennett’s book Teacher Proof reasserts the common view that teaching is a sort of private craft. I disagree.

I was not able to attend ResearchEd2013 back in September 2013; but ever since then I have been meaning (and not finding the time) to comment on the outcomes of the conference, which were conscientiously videoed and posted to the web by Leon Cych. The conference was organised by Tom Bennett to highlight the importance of (and problems with) current research in education. This was a few months after he had himself published Teacher Proof, mentioned in my earlier post, Why teachers don’t know best

It struck me that while the attack on quack theories was sound, the conclusions reached in Teacher Proof about the nature of the expertise of teachers were not well justified. Indeed, they seemed to me to be bizarrely at odds with the advertised prospectus of the Research Ed conference.

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Learning analytics for better learning content

A resume of a break-out discussion at the JISC/CETIS annual conference

For me, the highlight of the 2012 JISC/CETIS annual conference[1] was Adam Cooper’s session on “Mapping Cause and Effect”. Adam asked participants to create diagrams which traced chains of causality (both negative and positive) through to a final, desirable, pre-defined outcome.

I joined a break-out group with Colin Smythe (Chief Architect at IMS ), Tore Hoel (Oslo and Akershus University, Sweden), Malcolm Batchelor (JISC/CETIS), and Seyoung Kim (Carnegie Mellon University, USA). We chose to analyse what preconditions would favour or disfavour the use of analytics to improve the quality of course materials, taking course materials to be synonymous with learning content. We envisaged a scenario in which the author of a digital course might be able to track the performance of students taking the course. Having discovered from this data which parts of the course worked well and which worked less well, the author could improve the quality of the course materials.

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