I write only in June!

It's a fact: I write in this blog only in June. I spent like a year to go back to the blog and write something "interesting".
Right now I'm in Leuven, doing a research stay with Prof. Erik Duval. Right now, my main concern is to find out very concrete aspects to collaborate with the "ariadne" lab people. Last week, I gave a short presentation about my PhD stuff and raised 3 topics for collaboration:

• visualization of students data: I've collected a great amount of data during a experiment in class using classON; in order to make this data useful, I wanted to come up with nice visualization to make the data useful for teachers and students. I can distinguish two different scenarios: a) visualize in class (synchronous) what has to be very simple and straightforward (teacher and students are carrying out a task and the visual info is just a support); and b) visualize after the class, or even after the course (async), what could be much more elaborated and teachers/students could devote more attention to the artefact.
• gamification: as classON collects different types of data, a useful purpose is making use of it to engage students. I'd have to analyse some gamification strategies and patterns, but I had in mind that the goals/badges/medals/whatever should be granted based on the history of the individual, e.g., if an individual demonstrates improvement on his regular activity.
• use case: the last topic I proposed was to use classON in a course at KUL. The idea was not so well received, since it is designed of a scenario where the resources are scarce (the teacher's time to provide feedback) and that doesn't seem to happen in here. At the end, it could be used in a couple of sessions of different courses maybe...

Next step was to talk to each of the people in here, and propose them more concrete topics, relevant both for them and for me. After a few talks, I found 2 main topics of interest, both related to data visualization.

Firstly, try to exploit the relation between STEP UP! and classON, since both of them have commonalities: both are tools that provide awareness about what's happening in a course, and use visuals to transmit this info to the students/teachers. But they have also different approaches, since classON uses data related to progress, questions and question ratings; and stepup! makes use of more social data, like blog posts, comments on the blogs, tweets, toggle (time on activity report), etc. In this line, we envisage a couple of common interests: a) utility of the data types we collected for students and/or teachers; and b) utility of different visualizations for students/teachers (namely, data portraits, data tables, widget dashboard, etc). Besides, I want to explore another dimension that is the utility of visuals in class (sync) or after it (async). We'll see.

Secondly, we're trying to figure out common interests with a work for visualizing of the data collected in TiNYARM (papers read, toread, skimmed, etc.) in a community of research. Again, the data collected is "more social" and the subsequent SNA could be applied over it, but again there's a common ground on techniques we want to use (concretely, in the classon visualizations after the class for teachers/students to appraise what really happened and hints for improvement the learning activities). In this case, we roughly thought about a visualization like this one in order to represent questions and answers (instead of foo and bar), or papers read and recommended.

To sum up, on the one hand we have two groups of stuff: a set of types of data, and a set of visualization tools/techniques; on the other hand, we have two dimensions: target group (teachers/students), and synchrony of application (sync/async). Objetive: let's match of all these!