Our first brown-bag seminar of the semester will take place next Wednesday (28 January 2015) from 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM in Woodruff Library Rm 208E. Please RSVP by email to Timothy Harfield (tharfie [at] emory [dot] edu by Friday, 23 September 2015 so that we can ensure that our space can comfortably accommodate all who plan to attend.
Our meeting will be facilitated by Dr. Ben Sayeski (Managing Partner, Education Strategy Consulting), who will lead a discussion about the ways in which he has leveraged big data in K-12, and opportunities for similar work in Higher Education. The full abstract for this seminar is as follows:
This presentation and discussion will focus on the evolution of big data analyses in K-12 education and the opportunities for higher education. The discussion will be grounded in research from the Los Angeles Unified School District, publicly available K-12 data from the state of Georgia, and publicly available data from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System. All data will be presented within a visualization tool in order to address specific questions from attendees and create questions for future consumption. Particular attention will be paid to the visualizations from a variety of stakeholder perspectives including policy, professional, students, and parents.
This semester, the general goal of our brown bag series is to stimulate our data-imaginations in order to gain a richer idea of how various types of educational data can be put to use. In addition to Ben Sayeski, our series will also include seminars led by Nancy Bliwise (Emory University), Kimberly Arnold (University of Wisconsin-Madison), and Mike Sharkey (Blue Canary). Our season will conclude with a session led by Timothy Harfield, which will provide an overview of the learning analytics work being done at Emory, a description of how far we’ve come, and an opportunity to reflect upon the future of learning analytics at Emory University. For complete details, our full seminar schedule is available to view HERE.
All this amounts to what is certain to be an engaging and fruitful set of events.