This is a humorous video exploring how I found my research question, or rather, how it found me. The journey touches upon many aspects of computing including: ubiquitous computing, data mining, DIY culture, rapid prototyping, personal, learning, and visual analytics.
Standard activity trackers preprocess raw personal data from accelerometers and gyroscopes, to provide meaningful results in the form of step counts, calories burned, and progress over time. What happens though, when the built-in algorithms are not calibrated to an individual's physiological characteristics? Specifically, is 16 consecutive days of an activity rating at "-1" a meaningful diagnostic or a data disaster?
Visualizations are quickly becoming an integral part of learning analytics for knowledge discovery, sensemaking, and insight. Empowering educators and learners, visualizations make data graphically accessible through a range of perceptual modes. As the embodiment of learners' data, visualizations give them a thing to reflect upon, potentially arriving at insights they may otherwise not have. Visualizations aid educators in behavioral monitoring, formative feedback provision, and strategic intervention. They support learners' motivation and self-regulation, focusing attention on the behaviors associated with academic success. As a mechanism for joint knowledge work, visualizations are collaboratively used to produce, translate, and facilitate communication around shared learning artifacts. This visualization survey explores disposition, predictive, semantic, discourse, collaborative and social learning analytics tools within a variety of learning spaces. In their entirety, they represent both the historical and the novel, from conceptual designs to empirically validated tools.
Learning analytics tools help online educators visually extract meaningful performance and behavioral patterns from learners’ trace data. While many learning analytics solutions have addressed how educators monitor and provide summative feedback to learners, most are pedagogically neutral, and do not feature or support formative feedback. We explore the research principles underlying the design and implementation of a learning analytics tool rooted in theories of self-regulation, formative feedback and design-based research that address challenges unique to online educators and learners. The tool, itself a source of formative feedback, is intended to improve educator efficacy and the provision of timely feedback, leading to greater learner retention and overall satisfaction.
A mixed methods approach was undertaken in this exploratory study to better understand how learners perceive and utilize learning analytics visualizations during online discussions activities. Internal conditions such as goal orientation and numeracy were measured alongside the external conditions created by the discussion structure and learning analytics. Our results emphasize key factors that should be considered when designing learning analytics tools.
The noise emissions from a compressor station, part of a wastewater treatment plant, were investigated. The noise was a source of annoyance to a nearby residential subdivision. Initial measurements made on the site revealed salient tonal components. Further measurements suggested that the two main sources were leakage around the pipe intakes, and flow noise from the exhaust mufflers. Modifications were made to both sources in order to mitigate the problem. The leaks were sealed using dense caulking materials, and spoilers were inserted in the mufflers. The impact of these noise control solutions was measured, and the benefits to the surrounding community were assessed.
We propose the creation of a repository of inclusive mobile application design tools and techniques. The repository will be based on existing and future research in the realm of accessibility and initially only available to academic researchers developing user studies. These developers may browse tool features based on operating system, ease of implementation, modality and range of user ability within each particular modality. To educate developers, the toolkit will utilize user personas for each modality that exemplify how users might use the features in the repository.
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