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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.

Stephen Wolfram, creator of Mathematica, talks about his quest to make all knowledge computational -- able to be searched, processed and manipulated. His new search engine, Wolfram Alpha, has no lesser goal than to model and explain the physics underlying the universe.

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.

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

According to Eva Tardos, Jacob Gould Schurman Professor of Computer Science at Cornell University, the researchers' paper "is more the beginning of research than a definitive result or end product." The researchers' models make several simplifying assumptions - including the number of competitors - that make the math easier but limit their applicability. Nonetheless, "just raising the questions is an important step forward," Tardos says.

Singapore's government has also provided substantial support for the Living Analytics Research Centre. The Centre, a research partnership between Carnegie Mellon and Singapore Management University, "seeks to make Singapore one of the world's premier locations for the development and applied use of real-time consumer and social analytics, as well as one of the world's leading centres for computational social science related R&D and education."

The plan unveiled on Thursday designates money to create a "dashboard"-an interactive, online database-to give students, parents, and legislators access to detailed measures of departments' and colleges' productivity and efficiency. Data on individual professors will probably also be included, although Dr. Cigarroa stressed that each campus would be able to develop its own system of metrics and the details have not yet been worked out