LAK11 Week 2: The Rise of Big Data

This was great stuff, from the concrete (10 Ways Data is Changing How we Live,) to the extremely abstract (Computing a Theory of Everything)  and everything in between.  In fact, there’s something for the paranoid, the optimist,  the experimenter, the database/computing guru, the physicist or chemist, and more!

Given my propensity for fascination (i.e. distraction) , many other links were followed.  Now I’m faced with the dilemma of how to synthesize all of that into something I can post that has meaning, yet represents the pool of resources (data) traversed. Should I summarize, find patterns, correlate, or simply comment on the outliers that I either especially enjoyed, or deplored? Ah…I get it now – a microcosm of what I’m studying – but an up close experience-within-an experience of how a human handles “big data” which, in my case, is MANY orders of magnitude LESS than what a computer is capable of handling. Since I’m doing the processing, I’ll forgo the exhaustive approach for the efficient. :-) How about a list of appetizing sample quotes from the resources?  [Kind of like Costco on Saturdays .  You can go find (click-on) the whole package if you like the sample.]  Here goes, and don’t forget to properly dispose of your toothpicks on the way out.

"Number-crunchers have even uncovered match-fixing in Japanese sumo wrestling."

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”.