#LAK19 Conference Report [Part 2]: Main Conference

(This is the second part of a report of the #LAK19 conference. See Part 1 here.) It was the only beginning of many fun conversations when the Main Conference kicked off on Wednesday! Our conference and program chairs delivered an exciting welcome message. LAK is becoming larger, Largest LAK ever & 60% attendees are 1st timers! - shared by conference chair @shoha99 #LAK19 pic.twitter.com/k7C02NGWol — Bodong Chen (@bod0ng) March 6, 2019 but still selective – with a 33% acceptance rate for Full and Short papers.

#LAK19 Conference Report [Part 1]: Pre-Conference Workshops

I just came back from the 2019 Learning Analytics and Knowledge (LAK) conference hosted by Arizona State University. This conference, surely one of my favorites, is inching to its 10th anniversary next year. I still remember when I was in the 2nd year of my PhD in 2010, Chris Teplovs told me about an exciting, upcoming gathering of 60~ people in Banff, Canada to discuss a thing called “learning analytics.”

#OAWeek 2018: My Personal Journey

This week is the Open Access Week 2018. Yesterday we spent some time during a student advising meeting talking about the what and why of Open Access. The Open Access Week website has provided a great list of ideas for researchers to get involved in Open Access. My own institution does have an Open Access policy. Our univeristy library system also provides support for Open Access including an Open Access Publishing Fund, a Digital Conservancy system, a Research Data Repository, etc.

An Ongoing Experiment: Public Scholarly Annotation

Background stories I value Open Scholarship and have been practicing it for years – both in terms of doing it and learning to do it. Stian Haklev, an OER and Open Access champion, introduced me to this idea. He built a wiki-based workflow system, named researchr, and convinced a few OISE friends, including Cresencia Fong and Alisa Acosta, to share our annotations publicly, in a well-organized manner.

Open Textbooks and Open Educational Practices

I was included in an MN Daily story about open textbooks last week. It was actually a bit embarrassing as I thought a few other colleagues would ‘co-star’ with me in this story because there are exciting work on open textbooks and affordable content going on at UMN. University of Minnesota professors use their free time to write free textbooks: https://t.co/iCgMCxC3qf @mndailynews @bod0ng @dernst @UMNews #UMNproud #CEHD Learn more: https://t.co/eydHtKE8Em @open_textbooks #oer @LTMediaLab @UMN_CI pic.