LAK-11 Further forays into big data and critiques of learning analytics

There are a few resources I found while looking at big-data articles that I would like to include in a post, if nothing else as a handy reference for my own memory.   They also seem to be tied in some way to concerns or questions that we should have about learning analytics.  I would also like to address some of George’s concerns in the LAK-11 forum: Critiques of Learning Analytics?

First some resources:

• A web-page about Data Mining and Discovering Knowledge in your Data is a straight forward and fairly simple explanation of data mining – the basic process and concepts. 
• An article by Tim Nigris entitled: Data Danger Lurking in Public Cloud Contracts, in the Cloud Computing Journal points out concerns that should be had by “organizations considering  or already using public cloud services especially for storing data and documents.”  This should be of concern to the general public as well because ultimately – guess whose data and documents they are storing?
• An article entitled Is the google-ification of education underway? is related to learning analytics (and personalized learning in particular).  But even more interesting (and found in a comment of that article) is this article by Maria Anderson : The World is My School.  She speaks to several pertinent

LAK11 : Where do we find good critiques of learning analytics?

George Siemens started the discussion in LAK-11 with both a post and a forum.  This post is in response to his question.

I’ve come to the preliminary conclusion that because the field is so new-especially referenced by the exact phrase “learning analytics”– that there probably aren’t a lot of good critiques.  However, if you consider one (ugly step?) sister from standardized testing – or  google “critiques of standardized testing”  there is a plethora of critiques and opinions.  Let’s try to ensure that learning analytics does NOT follow the mis-steps of standardized (mandated) testing.

I found one recent federal government publication(abstract) or (pdf) that attempts to report about the use of Educational data at the Local Level.  It focuses a lot on “data-driven decisions” and claims to address local uses of educational data from accountability to instructional improvement. The closest the article comes to critiquing the analytics is by addressing the "barriers to use" of the data.  These