Critical data literacy #3: learning / teaching resources

In the last post, I mentioned a lesson plan from an article by Pegrum, M., Dudeney, G. & Hockly, N. (2018. Digital literacies revisited. The European Journal of Applied Linguistics and TEFL, 7 (2), pp. 3-24) in which students discuss the data that is collected by fitness apps and the possibility of using this data to calculate health insurance premiums, before carrying out and sharing online research about companies that track personal data. It’s a nice plan, unfortunately pay-walled, but you could try requesting a copy through Research Gate.

The only other off-the-shelf lesson plan I have been able to find is entitled ‘You and Your Data’ from the British Council. Suitable for level B2, this plan, along with a photocopiable pdf, contains with a vocabulary task (matching), a reading text (you and your data, who uses our data and why, can you protect your data) with true / false and sentence completion tasks) and a discussion (what do you do to protect our data). The material was written to coincide with Safer Internet Day (an EU project), which takes place in early February (next data 9 February 2021). The related website, Better Internet for Kids, contains links to a wide range of educational resources for younger learners.

For other resources, a good first stop is Ina Sander’s ‘A Critically Commented Guide to Data Literacy Tools’ in which she describes and evaluates a wide range of educational online resources for developing critical data literacy. Some of the resources that I discuss below are also evaluated in this guide. Here are some suggestion for learning / teaching resources.

A glossary

This is simply a glossary of terms that are useful in discussing data issues. It could easily be converted into a matching exercise or flashcards.

critical-data-literacy-glossaryDownload

A series of interactive videos

‘Do not Track’ is an award-winning series of interactive videos, produced by a consortium of broadcasters. In seven parts, the videos consider such issues as who profits from the personal data that we generate online, the role of cookies in the internet economy, how online profiling is done, the data generated by mobile phones and how algorithms interpret the data.

Each episode is between 5 and 10 minutes long, and is therefore ideal for asynchronous viewing. In a survey of critical data literacy tools (Sander, 2020), ‘Do not Track’ proved popular with the students who used it. I highly recommend it, but students will probably need a B2 level or higher.

More informational videos

If you do not have time to watch the ‘Do Not Track’ video series, you may want to use something shorter. There are a huge number of freely available videos about online privacy. I have selected just two which I think would be useful. You may be able to find something better!

1 Students watch a video about how cookies work. This video, from Vox, is well-produced and is just under 7 minutes long. The speaker speaks fairly rapidly, so captions may be helpful.

Students watch a video as an introduction to the topic of surveillance and privacy. This video, ‘Reclaim our Privacy’, was produced by ‘La Quadrature du Net’, a French advocacy group that promotes digital rights and freedoms of citizens. It is short (3 mins) and can be watched with or without captions (English or 6 other languages). Its message is simple: political leaders should ensure that our online privacy is respected.

A simple matching task ‘ten principles for online privacy’

1 Share the image below with all the students and ask them to take a few minutes matching the illustrations to the principles on the right. There is no need for anyone to write or say anything, but it doesn’t matter if some students write the answers in the chat box.

(Note: This image and the other ideas for this activity are adapted from https://teachingprivacy.org/ , a project developed by the International Computer Science Institute and the University of California-Berkeley for secondary school students and undergraduates. Each of the images corresponds to a course module, which contains a wide-range of materials (videos, readings, discussions, etc.) which you may wish to explore more fully.)

2 Share the image below (which shows the answers in abbreviated form). Ask if anyone needs anything clarified.

You’re Leaving Footprints Principle: Your information footprint is larger than you think.

There’s No Anonymity Principle: There is no anonymity on the Internet.

Information Is Valuable Principle: Information about you on the Internet will be used by somebody in their interest — including against you.

Someone Could Listen Principle: Communication over a network, unless strongly encrypted, is never just between two parties.

Sharing Releases Control Principle: Sharing information over a network means you give up control over that information — forever.

Search Is Improving Principle: Just because something can’t be found today, doesn’t mean it can’t be found tomorrow.

Online Is Real Principle: The online world is inseparable from the “real” world.

Identity Isn’t Guaranteed Principle: Identity is not guaranteed on the Internet.

You Can’t Escape Principle: You can’t avoid having an information footprint by not going online.

Privacy Requires Work Principle: Only you have an interest in maintaining your privacy.

3 Wrap up with a discussion of these principles.

Hands-on exploration of privacy tools

Click on the link below to download the procedure for the activity, as well as supporting material.

hands-on-exploration-of-privacy-toolsDownload

A graphic novel

Written by Michael Keller and Josh Neufeld, and produced by Al Jazeera, this graphic novel ‘Terms of Service. Understanding our role in the world of Big Data’ provides a good overview of critical data literacy issues, offering lots of interesting, concrete examples of real cases. The language is, however, challenging (C1+). It may be especially useful for trainee teachers.

A website

The Privacy International website is an extraordinary goldmine of information and resources. Rather than recommending anything specific, my suggestion is that you, or your students, use the ‘Search’ function on the homepage and see where you end up.

Critical data literacy #2: why and what?

In the first post in this 3-part series, I focussed on data collection practices in a number of ELT websites, as a way of introducing ‘critical data literacy’. Here, I explore the term in more detail.

Although the term ‘big data’ has been around for a while (see this article and infographic) it’s less than ten years ago that it began to enter everyday language, and found its way into the OED (2013). In the same year, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Kenneth Cukier published their best-selling ‘Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think’ (2013) and it was hard to avoid enthusiastic references in the media to the transformative potential of big data in every sector of society.

Since then, the use of big data and analytics has become ubiquitous. Massive data collection (and data surveillance) has now become routine and companies like Palantir, which specialise in big data analytics, have become part of everyday life. Palantir’s customers include the LAPD, the CIA, the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the British Government. Its recent history includes links with Cambridge Analytica, assistance in an operation to arrest the parents of illegal migrant children, and a racial discrimination lawsuit where the company was accused of having ‘routinely eliminated’ Asian job applicants (settled out of court for $1.7 million).

Unsurprisingly, the datafication of society has not gone entirely uncontested. Whilst the vast majority of people seem happy to trade their personal data for convenience and connectivity, a growing number are concerned about who benefits most from this trade-off. On an institutional level, the EU introduced the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which led to Google being fined Ꞓ50 million for insufficient transparency in their privacy policy and their practices of processing personal data for the purposes of behavioural advertising. In the intellectual sphere, there has been a recent spate of books that challenge the practices of ubiquitous data collection, coining new terms like ‘surveillance capitalism’, ‘digital capitalism’ and ‘data colonialism’. Here are four recent books that I have found particularly interesting.

Beer, D. (2019). The Data Gaze. London: Sage

Couldry, N. & Mejias, U. A. (2019). The Costs of Connection. Stanford: Stanford University Press

Sadowski, J. (2020). Too Smart. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press

Zuboff, S. (2019). The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. New York: Public Affairs

The use of big data and analytics in education is also now a thriving industry, with its supporters claiming that these technologies can lead to greater personalization, greater efficiency of instruction and greater accountability. Opponents (myself included) argue that none of these supposed gains have been empirically demonstrated, and that the costs to privacy, equity and democracy outweigh any potential gains. There is a growing critical literature and useful, recent books include:

Bradbury, A. & Roberts-Holmes, G. (2018). The Datafication of Primary and Early Years Education. Abingdon: Routledge

Jarke, J. & Breiter, A. (Eds.) (2020). The Datafication of Education. Abingdon: Routledge

Williamson, B. (2017). Big Data in Education: The digital future of learning, policy and practice. London: Sage

Concomitant with the rapid growth in the use of digital tools for language learning and teaching, and therefore the rapid growth in the amount of data that learners were (mostly unwittingly) giving away, came a growing interest in the need for learners to develop a set of digital competencies, or literacies, which would enable them to use these tools effectively. In the same year that Mayer-Schönberger and Cukier brought out their ‘Big Data’ book, the first book devoted to digital literacies in English language teaching came out (Dudeney et al., 2013). They defined digital literacies as the individual and social skills needed to effectively interpret, manage, share and create meaning in the growing range of digital communication channels (Dudeney et al., 2013: 2). The book contained a couple of activities designed to raise students’ awareness of online identity issues, along with others intended to promote critical thinking about digitally-mediated information (what the authors call ‘information literacy’), but ‘critical literacy’ was missing from the authors’ framework.

Critical thinking and critical literacy are not the same thing. Although there is no generally agreed definition of the former (with a small ‘c’), it is focussed primarily on logic and comprehension (Lee, 2011). Paul Dummett and John Hughes (2019: 4) describe it as ‘a mindset that involves thinking reflectively, rationally and reasonably’. The prototypical critical thinking activity involves the analysis of a piece of fake news (e.g. the task where students look at a website about tree octopuses in Dudeney et al. 2013: 198 – 203). Critical literacy, on the other hand, involves standing back from texts and technologies and viewing them as ‘circulating within a larger social and textual context’ (Warnick, 2002). Consideration of the larger social context necessarily entails consideration of unequal power relationships (Leee, 2011; Darvin, 2017), such as that between Google and the average user of Google. And it follows from this that critical literacy has a socio-political emancipatory function.

Critical digital literacy is now a growing field of enquiry (e.g. Pötzsch, 2019) and there is an awareness that digital competence frameworks, such as the Digital Competence Framework of the European Commission, are incomplete and out of date without the inclusion of critical digital literacy. Dudeney et al (2013) clearly recognise the importance of including critical literacy in frameworks of digital literacies. In Pegrum et al. (2018, unfortunately paywalled), they update the framework from their 2013 book, and the biggest change is the inclusion of critical literacy. They divide this into the following:

• critical digital literacy – closely related to information literacy
• critical mobile literacy – focussing on issues brought to the fore by mobile devices, ranging from protecting privacy through to safeguarding mental and physical health
• critical material literacy – concerned with the material conditions underpinning the use of digital technologies, ranging from the socioeconomic influences on technological access to the environmental impacts of technological manufacturing and disposal
• critical philosophical literacy – concerned with the big questions posed to and about humanity as our lives become conjoined with the existence of our smart devices, robots and AI
• critical academic literacy, which refers to the pressing need to conduct meaningful studies of digital technologies in place of what is at times ‘cookie-cutter’ research

I’m not entirely convinced by the subdivisions, but labelling in this area is still in its infancy. My particular interest here, in critical data literacy, seems to span across a number of their sub-divisions. And the term that I am using, ‘critical data literacy’, which I’ve taken from Tygel & Kirsch (2016), is sometimes referred to as ‘critical big data literacy’ (Sander, 2020a) or ‘personal data literacy’ (Pangrazio & Selwyn, 2019). Whatever it is called, it is the development of ‘informed and critical stances toward how and why [our] data are being used’ (Pangrazio & Selwyn, 2018). One of the two practical activities in the Pegrum at al article (2018) looks at precisely this area (the task requires students to consider the data that is collected by fitness apps). It will be interesting to see, when the new edition of the ‘Digital Literacies’ book comes out (perhaps some time next year), how many other activities take a more overtly critical stance.

In the next post, I’ll be looking at a range of practical activities for developing critical data literacy in the classroom. This involves both bridging the gaps in knowledge (about data, algorithms and online privacy) and learning, practically, how to implement ‘this knowledge for a more empowered internet usage’ (Sander, 2020b).

Without wanting to invalidate the suggestions in the next post, a word of caution is needed. Just as critical thinking activities in the ELT classroom cannot be assumed to lead to any demonstrable increase in critical thinking (although there may be other benefits to the activities), activities to promote critical literacy cannot be assumed to lead to any actual increase in critical literacy. The reaction of many people may well be ‘It’s not like it’s life or death or whatever’ (Pangrazio & Selwyn, 2018). And, perhaps, education is rarely, if ever, a solution to political and social problems, anyway. And perhaps, too, we shouldn’t worry too much about educational interventions not leading to their intended outcomes. Isn’t that almost always the case? But, with those provisos in mind, I’ll come back next time with some practical ideas.

REFERENCES

Darvin R. (2017). Language, Ideology, and Critical Digital Literacy. In: Thorne S., May S. (eds) Language, Education and Technology. Encyclopedia of Language and Education (3rd ed.). Springer, Cham. pp. 17 – 30 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02237-6_35

Dudeney, G., Hockly, N. & Pegrum, M. (2013). Digital Literacies. Harlow: Pearson Education

Dummett, P. & Hughes, J. (2019). Critical Thinking in ELT. Boston: National Geographic Learning

Lee, C. J. (2011). Myths about critical literacy: What teachers need to unlearn. Journal of Language and Literacy Education [Online], 7 (1), 95-102. Available at http://www.coa.uga.edu/jolle/2011_1/lee.pdf

Mayer-Schönberger, V. & Cukier, K. (2013). Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think. London: John Murray

Pangrazio, L. & Selwyn, N. (2018). ‘It’s not like it’s life or death or whatever’: young people’s understandings of social media data. Social Media + Society, 4 (3): pp. 1–9. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/2056305118787808

Pangrazio, L. & Selwyn, N. (2019). ‘Personal data literacies’: A critical literacies approach to enhancing understandings of personal digital data. New Media and Society, 21 (2): pp. 419 – 437

Pegrum, M., Dudeney, G. & Hockly, N. (2018). Digital literacies revisited. The European Journal of Applied Linguistics and TEFL, 7 (2), pp. 3-24

Pötzsch, H. (2019). Critical Digital Literacy: Technology in Education Beyond Issues of User Competence and Labour-Market Qualifications. tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique, 17: pp. 221 – 240 Available at https://www.triple-c.at/index.php/tripleC/article/view/1093

Sander, I. (2020a). What is critical big data literacy and how can it be implemented? Internet Policy Review, 9 (2). DOI: 10.14763/2020.2.1479 https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/218936/1/2020-2-1479.pdf

Sander, I. (2020b). Critical big data literacy tools – Engaging citizens and promoting empowered internet usage. Data & Policy, 2: DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/dap.2020.5

Tygel, A. & Kirsch, R. (2016). Contributions of Paulo Freire for a Critical Data Literacy: a Popular Education Approach. The Journal of Community Informatics, 12 (3). Available at http://www.ci-journal.net/index.php/ciej/article/view/1296

Warnick, B. (2002). Critical Literacy in a Digital Era. Mahwah, NJ, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates

Platforms and big data in ELT – a look back at the last decade

At the start of the last decade, ELT publishers were worried, Macmillan among them. The financial crash of 2008 led to serious difficulties, not least in their key Spanish market. In 2011, Macmillan’s parent company was fined ₤11.3 million for corruption. Under new ownership, restructuring was a constant. At the same time, Macmillan ELT was getting ready to move from its Oxford headquarters to new premises in London, a move which would inevitably lead to the loss of a sizable proportion of its staff. On top of that, Macmillan, like the other ELT publishers, was aware that changes in the digital landscape (the first 3G iPhone had appeared in June 2008 and wifi access was spreading rapidly around the world) meant that they needed to shift away from the old print-based model. With her finger on the pulse, Caroline Moore, wrote an article in October 2010 entitled ‘No Future? The English Language Teaching Coursebook in the Digital Age’ . The publication (at the start of the decade) and runaway success of the online ‘Touchstone’ course, from arch-rivals, Cambridge University Press, meant that Macmillan needed to change fast if they were to avoid being left behind.

Macmillan already had a platform, Campus, but it was generally recognised as being clunky and outdated, and something new was needed. In the summer of 2012, Macmillan brought in two new executives – people who could talk the ‘creative-disruption’ talk and who believed in the power of big data to shake up English language teaching and publishing. At the time, the idea of big data was beginning to reach public consciousness and ‘Big Data: A Revolution that Will Transform how We Live, Work, and Think’ by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Kenneth Cukier, was a major bestseller in 2013 and 2014. ‘Big data’ was the ‘hottest trend’ in technology and peaked in Google Trends in October 2014. See the graph below.

Not long after taking up their positions, the two executives began negotiations with Knewton, an American adaptive learning company. Knewton’s technology promised to gather colossal amounts of data on students using Knewton-enabled platforms. Its founder, Jose Ferreira, bragged that Knewton had ‘more data about our students than any company has about anybody else about anything […] We literally know everything about what you know and how you learn best, everything’. This data would, it was claimed, enable publishers to multiply, by orders of magnitude, the efficacy of learning materials, allowing publishers, like Macmillan, to provide a truly personalized and optimal offering to learners using their platform.

The contract between Macmillan and Knewton was agreed in May 2013 ‘to build next-generation English Language Learning and Teaching materials’. Perhaps fearful of being left behind in what was seen to be a winner-takes-all market (Pearson already had a financial stake in Knewton), Cambridge University Press duly followed suit, signing a contract with Knewton in September of the same year, in order ‘to create personalized learning experiences in [their] industry-leading ELT digital products’. Things moved fast because, by the start of 2014 when Macmillan’s new catalogue appeared, customers were told to ‘watch out for the ‘Big Tree’’, Macmillans’ new platform, which would be powered by Knewton. ‘The power that will come from this world of adaptive learning takes my breath away’, wrote the international marketing director.

Not a lot happened next, at least outwardly. In the following year, 2015, the Macmillan catalogue again told customers to ‘look out for the Big Tree’ which would offer ‘flexible blended learning models’ which could ‘give teachers much more freedom to choose what they want to do in the class and what they want the students to do online outside of the classroom’.

But behind the scenes, everything was going wrong. It had become clear that a linear model of language learning, which was a necessary prerequisite of the Knewton system, simply did not lend itself to anything which would be vaguely marketable in established markets. Skills development, not least the development of so-called 21^st century skills, which Macmillan was pushing at the time, would not be facilitated by collecting huge amounts of data and algorithms offering personalized pathways. Even if it could, teachers weren’t ready for it, and the projections for platform adoptions were beginning to seem very over-optimistic. Costs were spiralling. Pushed to meet unrealistic deadlines for a product that was totally ill-conceived in the first place, in-house staff were suffering, and this was made worse by what many staffers thought was a toxic work environment. By the end of 2014 (so, before the copy for the 2015 catalogue had been written), the two executives had gone.

For some time previously, skeptics had been joking that Macmillan had been barking up the wrong tree, and by the time that the 2016 catalogue came out, the ‘Big Tree’ had disappeared without trace. The problem was that so much time and money had been thrown at this particular tree that not enough had been left to develop new course materials (for adults). The whole thing had been a huge cock-up of an extraordinary kind.

Cambridge, too, lost interest in their Knewton connection, but were fortunate (or wise) not to have invested so much energy in it. Language learning was only ever a small part of Knewton’s portfolio, and the company had raised over $180 million in venture capital. Its founder, Jose Ferreira, had been a master of marketing hype, but the business model was not delivering any better than the educational side of things. Pearson pulled out. In December 2016, Ferreira stepped down and was replaced as CEO. The company shifted to ‘selling digital courseware directly to higher-ed institutions and students’ but this could not stop the decline. In September of 2019, Knewton was sold for something under $17 million dollars, with investors taking a hit of over $160 million. My heart bleeds.

It was clear, from very early on (see, for example, my posts from 2014 here and here) that Knewton’s product was little more than what Michael Feldstein called ‘snake oil’. Why and how could so many people fall for it for so long? Why and how will so many people fall for it again in the coming decade, although this time it won’t be ‘big data’ that does the seduction, but AI (which kind of boils down to the same thing)? The former Macmillan executives are still at the game, albeit in new companies and talking a slightly modified talk, and Jose Ferreira (whose new venture has already raised $3.7 million) is promising to revolutionize education with a new start-up which ‘will harness the power of technology to improve both access and quality of education’ (thanks to Audrey Watters for the tip). Investors may be desperate to find places to spread their portfolio, but why do the rest of us lap up the hype? It’s a question to which I will return.

 

 

 

 

Big data, learning analytics and language learning / teaching

The use of big data and analytics in education continues to grow.

A vast apparatus of measurement is being developed to underpin national education systems, institutions and the actions of the individuals who occupy them. […] The presence of digital data and software in education is being amplified through massive financial and political investment in educational technologies, as well as huge growth in data collection and analysis in policymaking practices, extension of performance measurement technologies in the management of educational institutions, and rapid expansion of digital methodologies in educational research. To a significant extent, many of the ways in which classrooms function, educational policy departments and leaders make decisions, and researchers make sense of data, simply would not happen as currently intended without the presence of software code and the digital data processing programs it enacts. (Williamson, 2017: 4)

The most common and successful use of this technology so far has been in the identification of students at risk of dropping out of their courses (Jørno & Gynther, 2018: 204). The kind of analytics used in this context may be called ‘academic analytics’ and focuses on educational processes at the institutional level or higher (Gelan et al, 2018: 3). However, ‘learning analytics’, the capture and analysis of learner and learning data in order to personalize learning ‘(1) through real-time feedback on online courses and e-textbooks that can ‘learn’ from how they are used and ‘talk back’ to the teacher, and (2) individualization and personalization of the educational experience through adaptive learning systems that enable materials to be tailored to each student’s individual needs through automated real-time analysis’ (Mayer-Schönberger & Cukier, 2014) has become ‘the main keyword of data-driven education’ (Williamson, 2017: 10). See my earlier posts on this topic here and here and here.

Near the start of Mayer-Schönberger and Cukier’s enthusiastic sales pitch (Learning with Big Data: The Future of Education) for the use of big data in education, there is a discussion of Duolingo. They quote Luis von Ahn, the founder of Duolingo, as saying ‘there has been little empirical work on what is the best way to teach a foreign language’. This is so far from the truth as to be laughable. Von Ahn’s comment, along with the Duolingo product itself, is merely indicative of a lack of awareness of the enormous amount of research that has been carried out. But what could the data gleaned from the interactions of millions of users with Duolingo tell us of value? The example that is given is the following. Apparently, ‘in the case of Spanish speakers learning English, it’s common to teach pronouns early on: words like “he,” “she,” and “it”.’ But, Duolingo discovered, ‘the term “it” tends to confuse and create anxiety for Spanish speakers, since the word doesn’t easily translate into their language […] Delaying the introduction of “it” until a few weeks later dramatically improves the number of people who stick with learning English rather than drop out.’ Was von Ahn unaware of the decades of research into language transfer effects? Did von Ahn (who grew up speaking Spanish in Guatemala) need all this data to tell him that English personal pronouns can cause problems for Spanish learners of English? Was von Ahn unaware of the debates concerning the value of teaching isolated words (especially grammar words!)?

The area where little empirical research has been done is not in different ways of learning another language: it is in the use of big data and learning analytics to assist language learning. Claims about the value of these technologies in language learning are almost always speculative – they are based on comparison to other school subjects (especially, mathematics). Gelan et al (2018: 2), who note this lack of research, suggest that ‘understanding language learner behaviour could provide valuable insights into task design for instructors and materials designers, as well as help students with effective learning strategies and personalised learning pathways’ (my italics). Reinders (2018: 81) writes ‘that analysis of prior experiences with certain groups or certain courses may help to identify key moments at which students need to receive more or different support. Analysis of student engagement and performance throughout a course may help with early identification of learning problems and may prompt early intervention’ (italics added). But there is some research out there, and it’s worth having a look at. Most studies that have collected learner-tracking data concern glossary use for reading comprehension and vocabulary retention (Gelan et al, 2018: 5), but a few have attempted to go further in scope.

Volk et al (2015) looked at the behaviour of the 20,000 students per day using the platform which accompanies ‘More!’ (Gerngross et al. 2008) to do their English homework for Austrian lower secondary schools. They discovered that

• the exercises used least frequently were those that are located further back in the course book
• usage is highest from Monday to Wednesday, declining from Thursday, with a rise again on Sunday
• most interaction took place between 3:00 and 5:00 pm.
• repetition of exercises led to a strong improvement in success rate
• students performed better on multiple choice and matching exercises than they did where they had to produce some language

The authors of this paper conclude by saying that ‘the results of this study suggest a number of new avenues for research. In general, the authors plan to extend their analysis of exercise results and applied exercises to the population of all schools using the online learning platform more-online.at. This step enables a deeper insight into student’s learning behaviour and allows making more generalizing statements.’ When I shared these research findings with the Austrian lower secondary teachers that I work with, their reaction was one of utter disbelief. People get paid to do this research? Why not just ask us?

More useful, more actionable insights may yet come from other sources. For example, Gu Yueguo, Pro-Vice-Chancellor of the Beijing Foreign Studies University has announced the intention to set up a national Big Data research center, specializing in big data-related research topics in foreign language education (Yu, 2015). Meanwhile, I’m aware of only one big research project that has published its results. The EC Erasmus+ VITAL project (Visualisation Tools and Analytics to monitor Online Language Learning & Teaching) was carried out between 2015 and 2017 and looked at the learning trails of students from universities in Belgium, Britain and the Netherlands. It was discovered (Gelan et al, 2015) that:

• students who did online exercises when they were supposed to do them were slightly more successful than those who were late carrying out the tasks
• successful students logged on more often, spent more time online, attempted and completed more tasks, revisited both exercises and theory pages more frequently, did the work in the order in which it was supposed to be done and did more work in the holidays
• most students preferred to go straight into the assessed exercises and only used the theory pages when they felt they needed to; successful students referred back to the theory pages more often than unsuccessful students
• students made little use of the voice recording functionality
• most online activity took place the day before a class and the day of the class itself

EU funding for this VITAL project amounted to 274,840 Euros[1]. The technology for capturing the data has been around for a long time. In my opinion, nothing of value, or at least nothing new, has been learnt. Publishers like Pearson and Cambridge University Press who have large numbers of learners using their platforms have been capturing learning data for many years. They do not publish their findings and, intriguingly, do not even claim that they have learnt anything useful / actionable from the data they have collected. Sure, an exercise here or there may need to be amended. Both teachers and students may need more support in using the more open-ended functionalities of the platforms (e.g. discussion forums). But are they getting ‘unprecedented insights into what works and what doesn’t’ (Mayer-Schönberger & Cukier, 2014)? Are they any closer to building better pedagogies? On the basis of what we know so far, you wouldn’t want to bet on it.

It may be the case that all the learning / learner data that is captured could be used in some way that has nothing to do with language learning. Show me a language-learning app developer who does not dream of monetizing the ‘behavioural surplus’ (Zuboff, 2018) that they collect! But, for the data and analytics to be of any value in guiding language learning, it must lead to actionable insights. Unfortunately, as Jørno & Gynther (2018: 198) point out, there is very little clarity about what is meant by ‘actionable insights’. There is a danger that data and analytics ‘simply gravitates towards insights that confirm longstanding good practice and insights, such as “students tend to ignore optional learning activities … [and] focus on activities that are assessed” (Jørno & Gynther, 2018: 211). While this is happening, the focus on data inevitably shapes the way we look at the object of study (i.e. language learning), ‘thereby systematically excluding other perspectives’ (Mau, 2019: 15; see also Beer, 2019). The belief that tech is always the solution, that all we need is more data and better analytics, remains very powerful: it’s called techno-chauvinism (Broussard, 2018: 7-8).

References

Beer, D. 2019. The Data Gaze. London: Sage

Broussard, M. 2018. Artificial Unintelligence. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press

Gelan, A., Fastre, G., Verjans, M., Martin, N., Jansenswillen, G., Creemers, M., Lieben, J., Depaire, B. & Thomas, M. 2018. ‘Affordances and limitations of learning analytics for computer­assisted language learning: a case study of the VITAL project’. Computer Assisted Language Learning. pp. 1­26. http://clok.uclan.ac.uk/21289/

Gerngross, G., Puchta, H., Holzmann, C., Stranks, J., Lewis-Jones, P. & Finnie, R. 2008. More! 1 Cyber Homework. Innsbruck, Austria: Helbling

Jørno, R. L. & Gynther, K. 2018. ‘What Constitutes an “Actionable Insight” in Learning Analytics?’ Journal of Learning Analytics 5 (3): 198 – 221

Mau, S. 2019. The Metric Society. Cambridge: Polity Press

Mayer-Schönberger, V. & Cukier, K. 2014. Learning with Big Data: The Future of Education. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Reinders, H. 2018. ‘Learning analytics for language learning and teaching’. JALT CALL Journal 14 / 1: 77 – 86 https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1177327.pdf

Volk, H., Kellner, K. & Wohlhart, D. 2015. ‘Learning Analytics for English Language Teaching.’ Journal of Universal Computer Science, Vol. 21 / 1: 156-174 http://www.jucs.org/jucs_21_1/learning_analytics_for_english/jucs_21_01_0156_0174_volk.pdf

Williamson, B. 2017. Big Data in Education. London: Sage

Yu, Q. 2015. ‘Learning Analytics: The next frontier for computer assisted language learning in big data age’ SHS Web of Conferences, 17 https://www.shs-conferences.org/articles/shsconf/pdf/2015/04/shsconf_icmetm2015_02013.pdf

Zuboff, S. 2019. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. London: Profile Books

 

[1] See https://ec.europa.eu/programmes/erasmus-plus/sites/erasmusplus2/files/ka2-2015-he_en.pdf

Vocabulary apps: a wish list (revisited)

In December last year, I posted a wish list for vocabulary (flashcard) apps. At the time, I hadn’t read a couple of key research texts on the subject. It’s time for an update.

First off, there’s an article called ‘Intentional Vocabulary Learning Using Digital Flashcards’ by Hsiu-Ting Hung. It’s available online here. Given the lack of empirical research into the use of digital flashcards, it’s an important article and well worth a read. Its basic conclusion is that digital flashcards are more effective as a learning tool than printed word lists. No great surprises there, but of more interest, perhaps, are the recommendations that (1) ‘students should be educated about the effective use of flashcards (e.g. the amount and timing of practice), and this can be implemented through explicit strategy instruction in regular language courses or additional study skills workshops ‘ (Hung, 2015: 111), and (2) that digital flashcards can be usefully ‘repurposed for collaborative learning tasks’ (Hung, ibid.).

However, what really grabbed my attention was an article by Tatsuya Nakata. Nakata’s research is of particular interest to anyone interested in vocabulary learning, but especially so to those with an interest in digital possibilities. A number of his research articles can be freely accessed via his page at ResearchGate, but the one I am interested in is called ‘Computer-assisted second language vocabulary learning in a paired-associate paradigm: a critical investigation of flashcard software’. Don’t let the title put you off. It’s a review of a pile of web-based flashcard programs: since the article is already five years old, many of the programs have either changed or disappeared, but the critical approach he takes is more or less as valid now as it was then (whether we’re talking about web-based stuff or apps).

Nakata divides his evaluation for criteria into two broad groups.

Flashcard creation and editing

(1) Flashcard creation: Can learners create their own flashcards?

(2) Multilingual support: Can the target words and their translations be created in any language?

(3) Multi-word units: Can flashcards be created for multi-word units as well as single words?

(4) Types of information: Can various kinds of information be added to flashcards besides the word meanings (e.g. parts of speech, contexts, or audios)?

(5) Support for data entry: Does the software support data entry by automatically supplying information about lexical items such as meaning, parts of speech, contexts, or frequency information from an internal database or external resources?

(6) Flashcard set: Does the software allow learners to create their own sets of flashcards?

Learning

(1) Presentation mode: Does the software have a presentation mode, where new items are introduced and learners familiarise themselves with them?

(2) Retrieval mode: Does the software have a retrieval mode, which asks learners to recall or choose the L2 word form or its meaning?

(3) Receptive recall: Does the software ask learners to produce the meanings of target words?

(4) Receptive recognition: Does the software ask learners to choose the meanings of target words?

(5) Productive recall: Does the software ask learners to produce the target word forms corresponding to the meanings provided?

(6) Productive recognition: Does the software ask learners to choose the target word forms corresponding to the meanings provided?

(7) Increasing retrieval effort: For a given item, does the software arrange exercises in the order of increasing difficulty?

(8) Generative use: Does the software encourage generative use of words, where learners encounter or use previously met words in novel contexts?

(9) Block size: Can the number of words studied in one learning session be controlled and altered?

(10) Adaptive sequencing: Does the software change the sequencing of items based on learners’ previous performance on individual items?

(11) Expanded rehearsal: Does the software help implement expanded rehearsal, where the intervals between study trials are gradually increased as learning proceeds? (Nakata, T. (2011): ‘Computer-assisted second language vocabulary learning in a paired-associate paradigm: a critical investigation of flashcard software’ Computer Assisted Language Learning, 24:1, 17-38)

It’s a rather different list from my own (there’s nothing I would disagree with here), because mine is more general and his is exclusively oriented towards learning principles. Nakata makes the point towards the end of the article that it would ‘be useful to investigate learners’ reactions to computer-based flashcards to examine whether they accept flashcard programs developed according to learning principles’ (p. 34). It’s far from clear, he points out, that conformity to learning principles are at the top of learners’ agendas. More than just users’ feelings about computer-based flashcards in general, a key concern will be the fact that there are ‘large individual differences in learners’ perceptions of [any flashcard] program’ (Nakata, N. 2008. ‘English vocabulary learning with word lists, word cards and computers: implications from cognitive psychology research for optimal spaced learning’ ReCALL 20(1), p. 18).

I was trying to make a similar point in another post about motivation and vocabulary apps. In the end, as with any language learning material, research-driven language learning principles can only take us so far. User experience is a far more difficult creature to pin down or to make generalisations about. A user’s reaction to graphics, gamification, uploading time and so on are so powerful and so subjective that learning principles will inevitably play second fiddle. That’s not to say, of course, that Nakata’s questions are not important: it’s merely to wonder whether the bigger question is truly answerable.

Nakata’s research identifies plenty of room for improvement in digital flashcards, and although the article is now quite old, not a lot had changed. Key areas to work on are (1) the provision of generative use of target words, (2) the need to increase retrieval effort, (3) the automatic provision of information about meaning, parts of speech, or contexts (in order to facilitate flashcard creation), and (4) the automatic generation of multiple-choice distractors.

In the conclusion of his study, he identifies one flashcard program which is better than all the others. Unsurprisingly, five years down the line, the software he identifies is no longer free, others have changed more rapidly in the intervening period, and who knows will be out in front next week?

 

Vocabulary apps: a wish list

Having spent a lot of time recently looking at vocabulary apps, I decided to put together a Christmas wish list of the features of my ideal vocabulary app. The list is not exhaustive and I’ve given more attention to some features than others. What (apart from testing) have I missed out?

1             Spaced repetition

Since the point of a vocabulary app is to help learners memorise vocabulary items, it is hard to imagine a decent system that does not incorporate spaced repetition. Spaced repetition algorithms offer one well-researched way of improving the brain’s ‘forgetting curve’. These algorithms come in different shapes and sizes, and I am not technically competent to judge which is the most efficient. However, as Peter Ellis Jones, the developer of a flashcard system called CardFlash, points out, efficiency is only one half of the rote memorisation problem. If you are not motivated to learn, the cleverness of the algorithm is moot. Fundamentally, learning software needs to be fun, rewarding, and give a solid sense of progression.

2             Quantity, balance and timing of new and ‘old’ items

A spaced repetition algorithm determines the optimum interval between repetitions, but further algorithms will be needed to determine when and with what frequency new items will be added to the deck. Once a system knows how many items a learner needs to learn and the time in which they have to do it, it is possible to determine the timing and frequency of the presentation of new items. But the system cannot know in advance how well an individual learner will learn the items (for any individual, some items will be more readily learnable than others) nor the extent to which learners will live up to their own positive expectations of time spent on-app. As most users of flashcard systems know, it is easy to fall behind, feel swamped and, ultimately, give up. An intelligent system needs to be able to respond to individual variables in order to ensure that the learning load is realistic.

3             Task variety

A standard flashcard system which simply asks learners to indicate whether they ‘know’ a target item before they flip over the card rapidly becomes extremely boring. A system which tests this knowledge soon becomes equally dull. There needs to be a variety of ways in which learners interact with an app, both for reasons of motivation and learning efficiency. It may be the case that, for an individual user, certain task types lead to more rapid gains in learning. An intelligent, adaptive system should be able to capture this information and modify the selection of task types.

Most younger learners and some adult learners will respond well to the inclusion of games within the range of task types. Examples of such games include the puzzles developed by Oliver Rose in his Phrase Maze app to accompany Quizlet practice.

4             Generative use

Memory researchers have long known about the ‘Generation Effect’ (see for example this piece of research from the Journal of Verbal Learning and Learning Behavior, 1978). Items are better learnt when the learner has to generate, in some (even small) way, the target item, rather than simply reading it. In vocabulary learning, this could be, for example, typing in the target word or, more simply, inserting some missing letters. Systems which incorporate task types that require generative use are likely to result in greater learning gains than simple, static flashcards with target items on one side and definitions or translations on the other.

5             Receptive and productive practice

The most basic digital flashcard systems require learners to understand a target item, or to generate it from a definition or translation prompt. Valuable as this may be, it won’t help learners much to use these items productively, since these systems focus exclusively on meaning. In order to do this, information must be provided about collocation, colligation, register, etc and these aspects of word knowledge will need to be focused on within the range of task types. At the same time, most vocabulary apps that I have seen focus primarily on the written word. Although any good system will offer an audio recording of the target item, and many will offer the learner the option of recording themselves, learners are invariably asked to type in their answers, rather than say them. For the latter, speech recognition technology will be needed. Ideally, too, an intelligent system will compare learner recordings with the audio models and provide feedback in such a way that the learner is guided towards a closer reproduction of the model.

6             Scaffolding and feedback

Most flashcard systems are basically low-stakes, practice self-testing. Research (see, for example, Dunlosky et al’s metastudy ‘Improving Students’ Learning With Effective Learning Techniques: Promising Directions From Cognitive and Educational Psychology’) suggests that, as a learning strategy, practice testing has high utility – indeed, of higher utility than other strategies like keyword mnemonics or highlighting. However, an element of tutoring is likely to enhance practice testing, and, for this, scaffolding and feedback will be needed. If, for example, a learner is unable to produce a correct answer, they will probably benefit from being guided towards it through hints, in the same way as a teacher would elicit in a classroom. Likewise, feedback on why an answer is wrong (as opposed to simply being told that you are wrong), followed by encouragement to try again, is likely to enhance learning. Such feedback might, for example, point out that there is perhaps a spelling problem in the learner’s attempted answer, that the attempted answer is in the wrong part of speech, or that it is semantically close to the correct answer but does not collocate with other words in the text. The incorporation of intelligent feedback of this kind will require a number of NLP tools, since it will never be possible for a human item-writer to anticipate all the possible incorrect answers. A current example of intelligent feedback of this kind can be found in the Oxford English Vocabulary Trainer app.

7             Content

At the very least, a decent vocabulary app will need good definitions and translations (how many different languages?), and these will need to be tagged to the senses of the target items. These will need to be supplemented with all the other information that you find in a good learner’s dictionary: syntactic patterns, collocations, cognates, an indication of frequency, etc. The only way of getting this kind of high-quality content is by paying to license it from a company with expertise in lexicography. It doesn’t come cheap.

There will also need to be example sentences, both to illustrate meaning / use and for deployment in tasks. Dictionary databases can provide some of these, but they cannot be relied on as a source. This is because the example sentences in dictionaries have been selected and edited to accompany the other information provided in the dictionary, and not as items in practice exercises, which have rather different requirements. Once more, the solution doesn’t come cheap: experienced item writers will be needed.

Dictionaries describe and illustrate how words are typically used. But examples of typical usage tend to be as dull as they are forgettable. Learning is likely to be enhanced if examples are cognitively salient: weird examples with odd collocations, for example. Another thing for the item writers to think about.

A further challenge for an app which is not level-specific is that both the definitions and example sentences need to be level-specific. An A1 / A2 learner will need the kind of content that is found in, say, the Oxford Essential dictionary; B2 learners and above will need content from, say, the OALD.

8             Artwork and design

It’s easy enough to find artwork or photos of concrete nouns, but try to find or commission a pair of pictures that differentiate, for example, the adjectives ‘wild’ and ‘dangerous’ … What kind of pictures might illustrate simple verbs like ‘learn’ or ‘remember’? Will such illustrations be clear enough when squeezed into a part of a phone screen? Animations or very short video clips might provide a solution in some cases, but these are more expensive to produce and video files are much heavier.

With a few notable exceptions, such as the British Councils’s MyWordBook 2, design in vocabulary apps has been largely forgotten.

9             Importable and personalisable lists

Many learners will want to use a vocabulary app in association with other course material (e.g. coursebooks). Teachers, however, will inevitably want to edit these lists, deleting some items, adding others. Learners will want to do the same. This is a huge headache for app designers. If new items are going to be added to word lists, how will the definitions, example sentences and illustrations be generated? Will the database contain audio recordings of these words? How will these items be added to the practice tasks (if these include task types that go beyond simple double-sided flashcards)? NLP tools are not yet good enough to trawl a large corpus in order to select (and possibly edit) sentences that illustrate the right meaning and which are appropriate for interactive practice exercises. We can personalise the speed of learning and even the types of learning tasks, so long as the target language is predetermined. But as soon as we allow for personalisation of content, we run into difficulties.

10          Gamification

Maintaining motivation to use a vocabulary app is not easy. Gamification may help. Measuring progress against objectives will be a start. Stars and badges and leaderboards may help some users. Rewards may help others. But gamification features need to be built into the heart of the system, into the design and selection of tasks, rather than simply tacked on as an afterthought. They need to be trialled and tweaked, so analytics will be needed.

11          Teacher support

Although the use of vocabulary flashcards is beginning to catch on with English language teachers, teachers need help with ways to incorporate them in the work they do with their students. What can teachers do in class to encourage use of the app? In what ways does app use require teachers to change their approach to vocabulary work in the classroom? Reporting functions can help teachers know about the progress their students are making and provide very detailed information about words that are causing problems. But, as anyone involved in platform-based course materials knows, teachers need a lot of help.

12          And, of course, …

Apps need to be usable with different operating systems. Ideally, they should be (partially) usable offline. Loading times need to be short. They need to be easy and intuitive to use.

It’s unlikely that I’ll be seeing a vocabulary app with all of these features any time soon. Or, possibly, ever. The cost of developing something that could do all this would be extremely high, and there is no indication that there is a market that would be ready to pay the sort of prices that would be needed to cover the costs of development and turn a profit. We need to bear in mind, too, the fact that vocabulary apps can only ever assist in the initial acquisition of vocabulary: apps alone can’t solve the vocabulary learning problem (despite the silly claims of some app developers). The need for meaningful communicative use, extensive reading and listening, will not go away because a learner has been using an app. So, how far can we go in developing better and better vocabulary apps before users decide that a cheap / free app, with all its shortcomings, is actually good enough?

I posted a follow up to this post in October 2016.

Research update

Decent research into adaptive learning remains very thin on the ground. Disappointingly, the Journal of Learning Analytics has only managed one issue so far in 2015, compared to three in 2014. But I recently came across an article in Vol. 18 (pp. 111 – 125) of  Informing Science: the International Journal of an Emerging Transdiscipline entitled Informing and performing: A study comparing adaptive learning to traditional learning by Murray, M. C., & Pérez, J. of Kennesaw State University.

The article is worth reading, not least because of the authors’ digestible review of  adaptive learning theory and their discussion of levels of adaptation, including a handy diagram (see below) which they have reproduced from a white paper by Tyton Partners ‘Learning to Adapt: Understanding the Adaptive Learning Supplier Landscape’. Murray and Pérez make clear that adaptive learning theory is closely connected to the belief that learning is improved when instruction is personalized — adapted to individual learning styles, but their approach is surprisingly uncritical. They write, for example, that the general acceptance of learning styles is evidenced in recommended teaching strategies in nearly every discipline, and learning styles continue to inform the evolution of adaptive learning systems, and quote from the much-quoted Pashler, H., McDaniel, M., Rohrer, D., & Bjork, R. (2008) Learning styles: concepts and evidence, Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 9, 105–119. But Pashler et al concluded that the current evidence supporting the use of learning style-matched approaches is virtually non-existent (see here for a review of Pashler et al). And, in the world of ELT, an article in the latest edition of ELTJ by Carol Lethaby and Patricia Harries disses learning styles and other neuromyths. Given the close connection between adaptive learning theory and learning styles, one might reasonably predict that a comparative study of adaptive learning and traditional learning would not come out with much evidence in support of the former.

Murray and Pérez set out, anyway, to explore the hypothesis that adapting instruction to an individual’s learning style results in better learning outcomes. Their study compared adaptive and traditional methods in a university-level digital literacy course. Their conclusion? This study and a few others like it indicate that today’s adaptive learning systems have negligible impact on learning outcomes.

I was, however, more interested in the comments which followed this general conclusion. They point out that learning outcomes are only one measure of quality. Others, such as student persistence and engagement, they claim, can be positively affected by the employment of adaptive systems. I am not convinced. I think it’s simply far too soon to be able to judge this, and we need to wait quite some time for novelty effects to wear off. Murray and Pérez provide two references in support of their claim. One is an article by Josh Jarrett, Bigfoot, Goldilocks, and Moonshots: A Report from the Frontiers of Personalized Learning in Educause. Jarrett is Deputy Director for Postsecondary Success at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Educause is significantly funded by the Gates Foundation. Not, therefore, an entirely unbiased and trustworthy source. The other is a journalistic piece in Forbes. It’s by Tim Zimmer, entitled Rethinking higher ed: A case for adaptive learning and it reads like an advert. Zimmer is a ‘CCAP contributor’. CCAP is the Centre for College Affordability and Productivity, a libertarian, conservative foundation with a strong privatization agenda. Not, therefore, a particularly reliable source, either.

Despite their own findings, Murray and Pérez follow up their claim about student persistence and engagement with what they describe as a more compelling still argument for adaptive learning. This, they say, is the intuitively appealing case for adaptive learning systems as engines with which institutions can increase access and reduce costs. Ah, now we’re getting to the point!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Behaviourism and adaptive learning

In ELT circles, ‘behaviourism’ is a boo word. In the standard history of approaches to language teaching (characterised as a ‘procession of methods’ by Hunter & Smith 2012: 432[1]), there were the bad old days of behaviourism until Chomsky came along, savaged the theory in his review of Skinner’s ‘Verbal Behavior’, and we were all able to see the light. In reality, of course, things weren’t quite like that. The debate between Chomsky and the behaviourists is far from over, behaviourism was not the driving force behind the development of audiolingual approaches to language teaching, and audiolingualism is far from dead. For an entertaining and eye-opening account of something much closer to reality, I would thoroughly recommend a post on Russ Mayne’s Evidence Based ELT blog, along with the discussion which follows it. For anyone who would like to understand what behaviourism is, was, and is not (before they throw the term around as an insult), I’d recommend John A. Mills’ ‘Control: A History of Behavioral Psychology’ (New York University Press, 1998) and John Staddon’s ‘The New Behaviorism 2^nd edition’ (Psychology Press, 2014).

There is a close connection between behaviourism and adaptive learning. Audrey Watters, no fan of adaptive technology, suggests that ‘any company touting adaptive learning software’ has been influenced by Skinner. In a more extended piece, ‘Education Technology and Skinner’s Box’, Watters explores further her problems with Skinner and the educational technology that has been inspired by behaviourism. But writers much more sympathetic to adaptive learning, also see close connections to behaviourism. ‘The development of adaptive learning systems can be considered as a transformation of teaching machines,’ write Kara & Sevim[2] (2013: 114 – 117), although they go on to point out the differences between the two. Vendors of adaptive learning products, like DreamBox Learning©, are not shy of associating themselves with behaviourism: ‘Adaptive learning has been with us for a while, with its history of adaptive learning rooted in cognitive psychology, beginning with the work of behaviorist B.F. Skinner in the 1950s, and continuing through the artificial intelligence movement of the 1970s.’

That there is a strong connection between adaptive learning and behaviourism is indisputable, but I am not interested in attempting to establish the strength of that connection. This would, in any case, be an impossible task without some reductionist definition of both terms. Instead, my interest here is to explore some of the parallels between the two, and, in the spirit of the topic, I’d like to do this by comparing the behaviours of behaviourists and adaptive learning scientists.

Data and theory

Both behaviourism and adaptive learning (in its big data form) are centrally concerned with behaviour – capturing and measuring it in an objective manner. In both, experimental observation and the collection of ‘facts’ (physical, measurable, behavioural occurrences) precede any formulation of theory. John Mills’ description of behaviourists could apply equally well to adaptive learning scientists: theory construction was a seesaw process whereby one began with crude outgrowths from observations and slowly created one’s theory in such a way that one could make more and more precise observations, building those observations into the theory at each stage. No behaviourist ever considered the possibility of taking existing comprehensive theories of mind and testing or refining them.[3]

Positivism and the panopticon

Both behaviourism and adaptive learning are pragmatically positivist, believing that truth can be established by the study of facts. J. B. Watson, the founding father of behaviourism whose article ‘Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It’ set the behaviourist ball rolling, believed that experimental observation could ‘reveal everything that can be known about human beings’[4]. Jose Ferreira of Knewton has made similar claims: We get five orders of magnitude more data per user than Google does. We get more data about people than any other data company gets about people, about anything — and it’s not even close. We’re looking at what you know, what you don’t know, how you learn best. […] We know everything about what you know and how you learn best because we get so much data. Digital data analytics offer something that Watson couldn’t have imagined in his wildest dreams, but he would have approved.

The revolutionary science

Big data (and the adaptive learning which is a part of it) is presented as a game-changer: The era of big data challenges the way we live and interact with the world. […] Society will need to shed some of its obsession for causality in exchange for simple correlations: not knowing why but only what. This overturns centuries of established practices and challenges our most basic understanding of how to make decisions and comprehend reality[5]. But the reverence for technology and the ability to reach understandings of human beings by capturing huge amounts of behavioural data was adumbrated by Watson a century before big data became a widely used term. Watson’s 1913 lecture at Columbia University was ‘a clear pitch’[6] for the supremacy of behaviourism, and its potential as a revolutionary science.

Prediction and control

The fundamental point of both behaviourism and adaptive learning is the same. The research practices and the theorizing of American behaviourists until the mid-1950s, writes Mills[7] were driven by the intellectual imperative to create theories that could be used to make socially useful predictions. Predictions are only useful to the extent that they can be used to manipulate behaviour. Watson states this very baldly: the theoretical goal of psychology is the prediction and control of behaviour[8]. Contemporary iterations of behaviourism, such as behavioural economics or nudge theory (see, for example, Thaler & Sunstein’s best-selling ‘Nudge’, Penguin Books, 2008), or the British government’s Behavioural Insights Unit, share the same desire to divert individual activity towards goals (selected by those with power), ‘without either naked coercion or democratic deliberation’[9]. Jose Ferreira of Knewton has an identical approach: We can predict failure in advance, which means we can pre-remediate it in advance. We can say, “Oh, she’ll struggle with this, let’s go find the concept from last year’s materials that will help her not struggle with it.” Like the behaviourists, Ferreira makes grand claims about the social usefulness of his predict-and-control technology: The end is a really simple mission. Only 22% of the world finishes high school, and only 55% finish sixth grade. Those are just appalling numbers. As a species, we’re wasting almost four-fifths of the talent we produce. […] I want to solve the access problem for the human race once and for all.

Ethics

Because they rely on capturing large amounts of personal data, both behaviourism and adaptive learning quickly run into ethical problems. Even where informed consent is used, the subjects must remain partly ignorant of exactly what is being tested, or else there is the fear that they might adjust their behaviour accordingly. The goal is to minimise conscious understanding of what is going on[10]. For adaptive learning, the ethical problem is much greater because of the impossibility of ensuring the security of this data. Everything is hackable.

Marketing

Behaviourism was seen as a god-send by the world of advertising. J. B. Watson, after a front-page scandal about his affair with a student, and losing his job at John Hopkins University, quickly found employment on Madison Avenue. ‘Scientific advertising’, as practised by the Mad Men from the 1920s onwards, was based on behaviourism. The use of data analytics by Google, Amazon, et al is a direct descendant of scientific advertising, so it is richly appropriate that adaptive learning is the child of data analytics.

[1] Hunter, D. and Smith, R. (2012) ‘Unpacking the past: “CLT” through ELTJ keywords’. ELT Journal, 66/4: 430-439.

[2] Kara, N. & Sevim, N. 2013. ‘Adaptive learning systems: beyond teaching machines’, Contemporary Educational Technology, 4(2), 108-120

[3] Mills, J. A. (1998) Control: A History of Behavioral Psychology. New York: New York University Press, p.5

[4] Davies, W. (2015) The Happiness Industry. London: Verso. p.91

[5] Mayer-Schönberger, V. & Cukier, K. (2013) Big Data. London: John Murray, p.7

[6] Davies, W. (2015) The Happiness Industry. London: Verso. p.87

[7] Mills, J. A. (1998) Control: A History of Behavioral Psychology. New York: New York University Press, p.2

[8] Watson, J. B. (1913) ‘Behaviorism as the Psychologist Views it’ Psychological Review 20: 158

[9] Davies, W. (2015) The Happiness Industry. London: Verso. p.88

[10] Davies, W. (2015) The Happiness Industry. London: Verso. p.92

Analytics and ELT course materials

Back in December 2013, in an interview with eltjam , David Liu, COO of the adaptive learning company, Knewton, described how his company’s data analysis could help ELT publishers ‘create more effective learning materials’. He focused on what he calls ‘content efficacy[i]’ (he uses the word ‘efficacy’ five times in the interview), a term which he explains below:

A good example is when we look at the knowledge graph of our partners, which is a map of how concepts relate to other concepts and prerequisites within their product. There may be two or three prerequisites identified in a knowledge graph that a student needs to learn in order to understand a next concept. And when we have hundreds of thousands of students progressing through a course, we begin to understand the efficacy of those said prerequisites, which quite frankly were made by an author or set of authors. In most cases they’re quite good because these authors are actually good in what they do. But in a lot of cases we may find that one of those prerequisites actually is not necessary, and not proven to be useful in achieving true learning or understanding of the current concept that you’re trying to learn. This is interesting information that can be brought back to the publisher as they do revisions, as they actually begin to look at the content as a whole.

One commenter on the post, Tom Ewens, found the idea interesting. It could, potentially, he wrote, give us new insights into how languages are learned much in the same way as how corpora have given us new insights into how language is used. Did Knewton have any plans to disseminate the information publicly, he asked. His question remains unanswered.

At the time, Knewton had just raised $51 million (bringing their total venture capital funding to over $105 million). Now, 16 months later, Knewton have launched their new product, which they are calling Knewton Content Insights. They describe it as the world’s first and only web-based engine to automatically extract statistics comparing the relative quality of content items — enabling us to infer more information about student proficiency and content performance than ever before possible.

The software analyses particular exercises within the learning content (and particular items within them). It measures the relative difficulty of individual items by, for example, analysing how often a question is answered incorrectly and how many tries it takes each student to answer correctly. It also looks at what they call ‘exhaustion’ – how much content students are using in a particular area – and whether they run out of content. The software can correlate difficulty with exhaustion. Lastly, it analyses what they call ‘assessment quality’ – how well  individual questions assess a student’s understanding of a topic.

Knewton’s approach is premised on the idea that learning (in this case language learning) can be broken down into knowledge graphs, in which the information that needs to be learned can be arranged and presented hierarchically. The ‘granular’ concepts are then ‘delivered’ to the learner, and Knewton’s software can optimise the delivery. The first problem, as I explored in a previous post, is that language is a messy, complex system: it doesn’t lend itself terribly well to granularisation. The second problem is that language learning does not proceed in a linear, hierarchical way: it is also messy and complex. The third is that ‘language learning content’ cannot simply be delivered: a process of mediation is unavoidable. Are the people at Knewton unaware of the extensive literature devoted to the differences between synthetic and analytic syllabuses, of the differences between product-oriented and process-oriented approaches? It would seem so.

Knewton’s ‘Content Insights’ can only, at best, provide some sort of insight into the ‘language knowledge’ part of any learning content. It can say nothing about the work that learners do to practise language skills, since these are not susceptible to granularisation: you simply can’t take a piece of material that focuses on reading or listening and analyse its ‘content efficacy at the concept level’. Because of this, I predicted (in the post about Knowledge Graphs) that the likely focus of Knewton’s analytics would be discrete item, sentence-level grammar (typically tenses). It turns out that I was right.

Knewton illustrate their new product with screen shots such as those below.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

They give a specific example of the sort of questions their software can answer. It is: do students generally find the present simple tense easier to understand than the present perfect tense? Doh!

It may be the case that Knewton Content Insights might optimise the presentation of this kind of grammar, but optimisation of this presentation and practice is highly unlikely to have any impact on the rate of language acquisition. Students are typically required to study the present perfect at every level from ‘elementary’ upwards. They have to do this, not because the presentation in, say, Headway, is not optimised. What they need is to spend a significantly greater proportion of their time on ‘language use’ and less on ‘language knowledge’. This is not just my personal view: it has been extensively researched, and I am unaware of any dissenting voices.

The number-crunching in Knewton Content Insights is unlikely, therefore, to lead to any actionable insights. It is, however, very likely to lead (as writer colleagues at Pearson and other publishers are finding out) to an obsession with measuring the ‘efficacy’ of material which, quite simply, cannot meaningfully be measured in this way. It is likely to distract from much more pressing issues, notably the question of how we can move further and faster away from peddling sentence-level, discrete-item grammar.

In the long run, it is reasonable to predict that the attempt to optimise the delivery of language knowledge will come to be seen as an attempt to tackle the wrong question. It will make no significant difference to language learners and language learning. In the short term, how much time and money will be wasted?

[i] ‘Efficacy’ is the buzzword around which Pearson has built its materials creation strategy, a strategy which was launched around the same time as this interview. Pearson is a major investor in Knewton.

Datapalooza

Jose Ferreira, the fast-talking sales rep-in-chief of Knewton, likes to dazzle with numbers. In a 2012 talk hosted by the US Department of Education, Ferreira rattles off the stats: So Knewton students today, we have about 125,000, 180,000 right now, by December it’ll be 650,000, early next year it’ll be in the millions, and next year it’ll be close to 10 million. And that’s just through our Pearson partnership. For each of these students, Knewton gathers millions of data points every day. That, brags Ferreira, is five orders of magnitude more data about you than Google has. … We literally have more data about our students than any company has about anybody else about anything, and it’s not even close. With just a touch of breathless exaggeration, Ferreira goes on: We literally know everything about what you know and how you learn best, everything.

The data is mined to find correlations between learning outcomes and learning behaviours, and, once correlations have been established, learning programmes can be tailored to individual students. Ferreira explains: We take the combined data problem all hundred million to figure out exactly how to teach every concept to each kid. So the 100 million first shows up to learn the rules of exponents, great let’s go find a group of people who are psychometrically equivalent to that kid. They learn the same ways, they have the same learning style, they know the same stuff, because Knewton can figure out things like you learn math best in the morning between 8:40 and 9:13 am. You learn science best in 42 minute bite sizes the 44 minute mark you click right, you start missing questions you would normally get right.

The basic premise here is that the more data you have, the more accurately you can predict what will work best for any individual learner. But how accurate is it? In the absence of any decent, independent research (or, for that matter, any verifiable claims from Knewton), how should we respond to Ferreira’s contribution to the White House Education Datapalooza?

A new book by Stephen Finlay, Predictive Analytics, Data Mining and Big Data (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) suggests that predictive analytics are typically about 20 – 30% more accurate than humans attempting to make the same judgements. That’s pretty impressive and perhaps Knewton does better than that, but the key thing to remember is that, however much data Knewton is playing with, and however good their algorithms are, we are still talking about predictions and not certainties. If an adaptive system could predict with 90% accuracy (and the actual figure is typically much lower than that) what learning content and what learning approach would be effective for an individual learner, it would still mean that it was wrong 10% of the time. When this is scaled up to the numbers of students that use Knewton software, it means that millions of students are getting faulty recommendations. Beyond a certain point, further expansion of the data that is mined is unlikely to make any difference to the accuracy of predictions.

A further problem identified by Stephen Finlay is the tendency of people in predictive analytics to confuse correlation and causation. Certain students may have learnt maths best between 8.40 and 9.13, but it does not follow that they learnt it best because they studied at that time. If strong correlations do not involve causality, then actionable insights (such as individualised course design) can be no more than an informed gamble.

Knewton’s claim that they know how every student learns best is marketing hyperbole and should set alarm bells ringing. When it comes to language learning, we simply do not know how students learn (we do not have any generally accepted theory of second language acquisition), let alone how they learn best. More data won’t help our theories of learning! Ferreira’s claim that, with Knewton, every kid gets a perfectly optimized textbook, except it’s also video and other rich media dynamically generated in real time is equally preposterous, not least since the content of the textbook will be at least as significant as the way in which it is ‘optimized’. And, as we all know, textbooks have their faults.

Cui bono? Perhaps huge data and predictive analytics will benefit students; perhaps not. We will need to wait and find out. But Stephen Finlay reminds us that in gold rushes (and internet booms and the exciting world of Big Data) the people who sell the tools make a lot of money. Far more strike it rich selling picks and shovels to prospectors than do the prospectors. Likewise, there is a lot of money to be made selling Big Data solutions. Whether the buyer actually gets any benefit from them is not the primary concern of the sales people. (p.16/17) Which is, perhaps, one of the reasons that some sales people talk so fast.