Purpose: This study aims to report on an automatic deidentification system for labeling and obfuscating personally identifiable information (PII) in student-generated text. Design/methodology/approach: The authors evaluate the performance of their deidentification system on two data sets of student-generated text. Each data set was human-annotated…

Areal data have been used to good effect in a wide range of sociological research. One of the most persistent problems associated with this type of data, however, is the need to combine data sets with incongruous boundaries. To help address this problem, we introduce a new method for identifying common geographies. We show that identifying common…

This article is a revised version of the keynote presented at LAK '16 in Edinburgh. The article investigates some of the assumptions of learning analytics, notably those related to behaviourism. Building on the work of Ivan Pavlov, Herbert Simon, and James Gibson as ways of "learning as a machine," the article then develops two levels of…