one of the problems with unstructured and fragmented data lies in getting a coherent view of what's happening. Automated solutions like this offer one response...

example of user-focused analytics tools, built on existing SN systems such as FB/Twitter

Rather depressing, but data trails are neutral. The only value they hold is what we apply to them during analysis.

good article for our opening week on trends and factors driving analytics

Good overview of different hadoop providers...

This is a fairly broad biblio of learning analytics related literature. We should likely take the LAK11 and LAK12 conference submissions and mine the citations to get a sense of how people are defining the analytics space.