Correlating Formal Assessment with Social Network Activity within a Personal Learning Environment

From Learning Analytics To Social Network Analysis

Analytics is a term used in business and science to refer to computational support for capturing digital data to help assist in decision-making, while learning analytics (LA) is a relatively recent term (coined during the 1^st International Conference on Learning Analytics and Knowledge, 2011) and refers to the collection and analysis of digital traces that every learner leaves. According to (Buckingham, 2012) LA appropriates the concept of analytics for education: “what should a digital nervous system look like when the focus is on learning outcomes, and to extend the metaphor, what kind of ‘brain’ or collective intelligence is needed to interpret the signals and adapt the system’s behavior accordingly?”