LAK2012

Good overview of different hadoop providers...

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

The opportunity that IBM is chasing-analytics that power everything-is much bigger than the Internet boom of the last decade. "This will be the largest business opportunity IBM has ever had. It will dwarf ERP, back office, anything," Corgel said.

Behaviorism,  4 cognitivism, and constructivism are the three broad learning  1 theories most often utilized in the creation of instructional environments. These theories, however, were developed in a time when learning was not impacted through technology. Over the last twenty years, technology has reorganized how we live, how we communicate, and how we learn. Learning needs and theories that describe learning principles and processes, should be reflective of underlying social environments. Connectivism is the integration of principles explored by chaos, network, and complexity and self-organization theories. Learning is a process that occurs within nebulous environments of shifting core elements - not entirely under the control of the individual. Learning (defined as actionable knowledge) can reside outside of ourselves (within an organization or a database), is focused on connecting specialized information sets, and the connections that enable us to learn more are more important than our current state of knowing. Connectivism is driven by the understanding that decisions are based on rapidly altering foundations. New information is continually being acquired. The ability to draw distinctions between important and unimportant information is vital. The ability to recognize when new information alters the landscape based on decisions made yesterday is also critical. The article defines connectivism.

this is intimidating, knowing the degree to which our habits are monetized by organizations

BI in PaaS model

Connectivism offers a theory of learning for the digital age that is usually understood as contrasting with traditional behaviourist, cognitivist, and constructivist approaches. This article will provide an original and significant development of this theory through arguing and demonstrating how it can benefit from social constructivist perspectives and a focus on dialogue. Similarly, I argue that we need to ask whether networked social media is, essentially, a new landscape for dialogue and therefore should be conceived and investigated based on this premise, through considering dialogue as the primary means to develop and exploit connections for learning. A key lever in this argument is the increasingly important requirement for greater criticality on the Internet in relation to our assessment and development of connections with people and resources. The open, participative, and social Web actually requires a greater emphasis on higher order cognitive and social competencies that are realised predominantly through dialogue and discourse. Or, as Siemens (2005) implies in his call to rethink the fundamental precepts of learning, we need to shift our focus to promoting core evaluative skills for flexible learning that will, for example, allow us to actuate the knowledge we need at the point that we need it. A corollary of this is the need to reorient educational experiences to ensure that we develop in our learners the ability "to think, reason, and analyse." In considering how we can achieve these aims this article will review the principles of connectivism from a dialogue perspective; propose some social constructivist approaches based on dialectic and dialogic dimensions of dialogue, which can act as levers in realising connectivist learning dialogue; demonstrate how dialogue games can link the discussed theories to the design and performance of networked dialogue processes; and consider the broader implications of this work for designing and delivering sociot

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.

outstanding implementation of big data to addressing poverty and social concerns.

good short article that introduces the concept of learning analytics

"Data science is not your father's BI..." and "data scientists are the rock stars of the future" ... Another plug for a career in analytics.

a bit over the top, biased, and hyped. Still, an example of seeing data as an asset...