Data analytics is shorthand for the method of warehousing, organizing, and interpreting the massive amounts of data accrued by online learning platforms and student information systems - now as elemental to higher education as classrooms and filing cabinets - in hopes of learning more about what makes students successful, then giving instructors (and the platforms themselves) the chance to nudge those students accordingly.

Life insurers are testing an intensely personal new use for the vast dossiers of data being amassed about Americans: predicting people's longevity.

Helping words from the "ombudsman" of the course

A profile in Wired Magazine of the founder of hunch (and founder of Flickr!): Caterina Fake

Summify automatically identifies the most important news stories for you across all of your social networks and delivers to you a personalized email digest in your inbox.

The syllabus for the course.

A solid explanation of learning in a connectivist mindset.

A webwalk by Bert DeCoutere talking about the three principles of analytics (in a humourous way!).

A first visualization of the LAK11 "twitterverse"

NodeXL is a template for Excel 2007 and 2010 that lets you enter a network edge list, click a button, and see the network graph, all in the Excel window. You can easily customize the graph's appearance; zoom, scale and pan the graph; dynamically filter vertices and edges; alter the graph's layout; find clusters of related vertices; and calculate a set of graph metrics. Networks can be imported from and exported to a variety of data formats, and built-in connections for getting networks from Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, and your local email are provided.

With so many websites to join, users must decide where to invest significant time in adding their same connections over and over. For developers, this means it is difficult to build successful web applications that hinge upon a critical mass of users for content and interaction. With the Social Graph API, developers can now utilize public connections their users have already created in other web services. It makes information about public connections between people easily available and useful.