LAK11 Week 1: Readings

I was already familiar with ECAR key findings about Analytics in Higher Education, but so excited about finding Tanya’s paper: Learning Analytics: The Definitions, the Processes, and the Potential.   It was exactly the type of article I had been searching for – without a lot of success.  About a year ago I had attempted to begin a literature review of the use of web-anlytics in education, and there wasna’t a lot out there--at least at the level of my focus: analytics that inform and improve instructional design,  assessments, and evaluation of web-mediated learning “events”. 
I was reading along in Tanya’s well-written paper and was very pleasantly surprised (ok, I admit it - shocked) to find references to a chapter I co-authored with two colleagues, in the book : Emerging Technologies in Distance Education.  (Do you ever get past wondering if anyone actually reads the stuff you sweat over?  I wouldn’t know, because I’m such a newbie)  Anyway, thanks Tanya for a such a straightforward informative piece – will there be more? :-) Please?

George’s slides were great, but boy did I get side-tracked!  I looked up the reference to one of the quotes and found the June 23, 2008 essay from WIRED Magazine: The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete .  Of course that was written over two years ago, and I’ve yet to notice the scientific method obsolescing much since then (but maybe it will take a few years to trickle down to mainstream academics? ;-).  The whole magazine issue is relevant, I think, to LAK in either direct or indirect ways.  If you haven’t read the essay, and you don’t mind a thought-provoking side-track, I highly recommend it!