Group items tagged

Which brings us to the underlying point of the piece - we are all leaving digital trails behind us, as we make our way around our individual lives. These trails are largely considered individual - even ethereal - yet technology is making these trails more visible and more readable everyday.

Over the last year, I've produced five data-driven pieces for Wired UK. Four of them have been for the two-page infoporn spread that can be found in every issue. I've looked at the UK's National DNA Database, used mined Twitter data to find people's travel paths, and mapped traffic in some of the world's busiest sea ports.

The British universities, Oxford and Cambridge included, are under siege from a system of state control that is undermining the one thing upon which their worldwide reputation depends: the caliber of their scholarship. The theories and practices that are driving this assault are mostly American in origin, conceived in American business schools and management consulting firms. They are frequently embedded in intensive management systems that make use of information technology (IT) marketed by corporations such as IBM, Oracle, and SAP. They are then sold to clients such as the UK government and its bureaucracies, including the universities. This alliance between the public and private sector has become a threat to academic freedom in the UK, and a warning to the American academy about how its own freedoms can be threatened.

Shared by Sheila MacNeill during Jan 25 web conference with Dragan Gasevic -- short briefing paper on the Sematic Web, linked and open data from JISC CETIS (PDF)

Slides from Feb 18, 2011 web conference Learning Analytics: Notes on the Future Simon Buckingham Shum, Knowledge Media Institute Open University UK

The majority of the information that we use in our daily lives is "dumb", or unconnected. The next step is "linked data", or data that talks to each other.

The availability of new sets of data has changed the way we live our lives: here are 10 examples of data which have changed everything from how we assess wars to how companies deliver milk.

. I think the interesting thing about Learning Analytics is it's one of those areas we think will be important, but we're not quite sure what it is yet, so there's room to explore

Along with about 400 or so others world-wide, I've signed up for the LAK11 (Learning and Knowledge Analytics) MOOC run by George Siemens and colleagues at the Technology Enhanced Knowledge Research Institute (TEKRI) at Athabasca University. We're now into week 2, and I think I'm just about getting into the swing of things.

Shared by Sheila MacNeill during January 25 web conference with Dragan Gasevic. "another great site taking linked data approach from the BBC" 

"Cohere is a visual tool to create, connect and share Ideas. Back them up with websites. Support or challenge them. Embed them to spread virally. Discover who - literally - connects with your thinking." From Feb 18, 2011 web conference with Simon Buckingham Shum

Knowledge Cartography: Software Tools and Mapping Techniques. (Eds.) Okada, A., Buckingham Shum, S. and Sherborne, T. Springer: Advanced Information and Knowledge Processing Series. ISBN: 978-1-84800-148-0"