The cheer-leading for big data in education continues unabated. Almost everything you read online on the subject is an advertisement, usually disguised as a piece of news or a blog post, but which can invariably be traced back to an organisation with a vested interest in digital disruption. A typical example is this advergraphic which comes under a banner that reads ‘Big Data Improves Education’. The site, Datafloq, is selling itself as ‘the one-stop-shop around Big Data.’ Their ‘vision’ is ‘Connecting Data and People and [they] aim to achieve that by spurring the understanding, acceptance and application of Big Data in order to drive innovation and economic growth.’
Critical voices are rare, but growing. There’s a very useful bibliography of recent critiques here. And in the world of English language teaching, I was pleased to see that there’s a version of Gavin Dudeney’s talk, ‘Of Big Data & Little Data’, now up on YouTube. The slides which accompany his talk can be accessed here.
His main interest is in reclaiming the discourse of edtech in ELT, in moving away from the current obsession with numbers, and in returning the focus to what he calls ‘old edtech’ – the everyday technological practices of the vast majority of ELT practitioners.
It’s a stimulating and deadpan-entertaining talk and well worth 40 minutes of your time. Just fast-forward the bit when he talks about me.
If you’re interested in hearing more critical voices, you may also like to listen to a series of podcasts, put together by the IATEFL Learning Technologies and Global Issues Special Interest Groups. In the first of these, I interview Neil Selwyn and, in the second, Lindsay Clandfield interviews Audrey Watters of Hack Education.
Adaptive Learning in ELT 
Reblogged this on The Echo Chamber.