Note: I am involved with this project and can answer questions. As might be expected, the article makes things sound further along than they actually are.
I am not sure where there is direct relevance to Learning Analytics. There is no doubt that mining the public data of social network will be useful for identifying trends, possibly with implications for learning. The big unknown is how reliable is it? Are these networks representative of a population or specific group? I am not convinced of that.
We use QM Perception extensively for evaluating learning/capability and deploying surveys. Most valuable to our analysis is the Item Analysis report which has extensive data and built in data for psychometric analysis.
I find this rather interesting. Twitter has had trouble building a revenue model. Apparently, in accordance with the mantra that 'data is an asset', Twitter is selling old tweets for analysis (and then for marketing purposes). The twitter stream of the last few years is one of humanity's more interesting data/content creations as it captures ideas, resources, sentiments, and more. a library in 140 characters :)
Today, we're announcing plans for a School of Data. The School will be a joint venture between the Open Knowledge Foundation and Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU). We also welcome other organizations who would like to participate - see below for more on this.