Talk & Workshop: Dr. David Shaffer

David Williamson Shaffer is the Vilas Distinguished Professor Learning Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the Department of Educational Psychology, the Obel Professor of Learning Analytics at Aalborg University in Copenhagen and a data philosopher at the Wisconsin Center for Education Research. He is the author of “How Computer Games Help Children Learn and Quantitative Ethnography.”

Quantitative Ethnography talk from 9:30 – 11:30 a.m. 

In the age of Big Data, we have more information than ever about what students are doing and how they are thinking. However, the sheer volume of data available can overwhelm traditional qualitative and quantitative research methods, leading to research that finds significance without meaning. The science of quantitative ethnography connects the study of culture with statistical tools to understand learning, taking a critical step in the new field of learning analytics: going beyond looking for patterns in mountains of data to tell textured stories at scale.

Workshop: “Interactive Workshop on Quantitative Ethnography: Open source tools for analyzing large sets of discourse data” from 1:00 – 3:30 p.m. 

This interactive workshop will provide an overview of Quantitative Ethnography, with an emphasis on the conceptual and practical issues of data management, coding and modeling, and open-source tools to address these issues: nCoder, a tool for generating and validating qualitative codes; and ENA, a tool for modeling, visualizing and testing connections in data. Participants are invited to share their projects and data to explore how Quantitative Ethnography would apply to their work. A laptop with web access is helpful, but not required.