LAK2012

lots of VC flowing into big data startups...

good chart at the end of the article comparing different IaaS solutions

Alliances...Knewton, adaptive learning, and Pearson, textbook content, team up. Why? "We want to power everyone's content," says Ferreira, CEO, Knewton.

CLO magazine, 2005, written by Chris Moore, Zeroed-In Technologies, post-THINQ and TrainingServer. Defines learning analytics as "... the study of the impact of learning on its learners." This is an industry take on the term/practice, which focuses on learning effectiveness and operational excellence. Current solutions include visual dashboards for managing talent and measuring education initiatives/including 'strategic/tactical scorecards'. Saying all the right things to HR/VPs ...

"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.

Analytics meets the Academy Awards...The "People's Oscar" tool co-developed by the L.A. Times, IBM and the University of Southern California Annenberg Innovation Lab analyzes Twitter opinions about who's going to win Academy Awards. An 'entertaining' example of how semantic analysis is performed on large set of unstructured data/tweets.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

This project seeks to assess the emergence of Personal Learning Environmentsboth as a concept and as a new set of tools in the area of E-Learning. While existinglearning or instructional design theories within formal education have traditionally beenadopted in E-Learning to deliver content in the form of Learning Management Systemsfor instance, recent technological and sociological developments are starting to challengethis dominant design. Over the last few years, Web 2.0 technologies have enabled a moreactive user participation, interaction and collaboration which in turn have affected theway people learn in general. A new learning theory like Connectivism theory is echoingthese changes while at the same time acknowledging that the process of knowledgeacquisition is no longer confined to formal education. Learning also takes place ininformal settings, in the workplace and is increasingly becoming a social activity. Auser-centric Personal Learning Environment can support these new approaches tolearning in a wide range of contexts. This research proposes a conceptual model for ageneric Personal Learning Environment using the PersonalBrain mind-mapping software.Even though every individual user of a PLE will have a different perspective and require separate tools to fulfil distinct objectives, the proposed generic PLE conceptual modeldemonstrates that it can fulfil core activities of searching, analysing, authoring,collaborating, organising and presenting/