ELI Webinar - Analytics and Metaphors

Analytics and Metaphors: Grounding Our Understanding in a Conceptual Framework

Date: June 3, 2013

Time: 1:00 p.m. ET (UTC-4) runs one hour; convert to your time zone

Special Guest

Chuck Dziuban

Chuck Dziuban is director of the Research of Initiative for Teaching Effectiveness (RITE) at the University of Central Florida, where he has been a faculty member since 1970. Since 1996, he has been evaluating the impact of distributed learning in higher education, concentrating on how interventions such as online teaching and learning affect complex systems. Currently, he works on developing data models that can help with designing effective educational environments.

Patsy Moskal

Patsy Moskal is the associate director of RITE at UCF, where she has been a faculty member since 1989. Since 1996, she has served as the liaison for faculty research of distributed learning and teaching effectiveness at UCF. Moskal specializes in statistics, graphics, program evaluation, and applied data analysis, most often using those skills to help faculty and organizations improve education.

Summary

Join Malcolm Brown, EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative director, and Veronica Diaz, ELI associate director, as they moderate this webinar with Chuck Dziuban and Patsy Moskal. The popularity of the analytics movement in education has given rise to a large number of platforms, all of which intend to increase the probability of student success. In this webinar, Dziuban and Moskal will suggest that making instructional and policy decisions by casting various approaches to analytics in terms of representable metaphors can be helpful for understanding their potential and possible limitations. This presentation derives from the work of Lakoff and Johnson, who argue that since our conceptual system is largely metaphorical, what we experience every day also is largely metaphorical. Further, Katrina Meyer suggests that metaphors create a framework for understanding our emerging technological world. Based on these assumptions, the presenters create metaphors for analytics approaches that range from Boolean classification to transforming higher education. By using metaphors, they describe something we may not fully understand in terms of something that is more familiar.