Learning Analytics

The first impressions I have of a venture like this are positive but not without hesitation. I won't conceal it from you that it is less the topic of "learning analytics" that's of interest to me (although I am ready to learn something about this too), but the course itself. This is also where my hesitation lies, but we shall talk more about this later in the course.

Last week ReadWriteWeb asked: "Is Linked Data Gaining Acceptance?" Our answer: definitely yes. Projects like DBPedia, a community effort to structure the information from Wikipedia and provide it as Linked Open Data, have come a long way and work really well. For example, you can search for all scientists born in Zürich, Switzerland.

"VizThink is a global community for visual thinkers and communicators who like to get beyond words and believe that visuals can be an effective tool whether you're just trying to work through your ideas or working to get your message across as simply as possible." Shared by Adam Weisblatt during Feb 18, 2011 web conference with Simon Buckingham Shum

There are plenty of reasons to be skeptical about the BD market. But big data probably deserves a place in overall enterprise IT strategy for generating business insight. Best practices include generating a list of important challenges or questions that the current approach to data does not address. Could big data deliver the answers enterprises are looking for? If so, then it's all about discipline. A disciplined, targeted approach to big data - one focused on answering very specific questions. (my emphasis - I'll get to those later)

"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

A browser extension that stops major third parties and search engines from tracking the webpages you go to and searches you do

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."

From retailing to counterterrorism, the ability to analyse social connections is proving increasingly useful

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.

Analysis of 1,461 Blackboard courses. D & F students used CMS 47% less than students earning a C or higher. LAK11 http://tinyurl.com/4fp7oyk

"The Effective Lifelong Learning Inventory (ELLI) research first identified, then devised a scientifically rigorous way of assessing the essential characteristics of effective lifelong learners." Shared during Feb 18, 2011 web conference with Simon Buckingham Shum

Ah… the semantic web. The saviour of the internet, and the evil empire enforcing its evil standardization upon my freedom. I've always been a little suspicious of this particular topic. Not that I'm opposed to any kind of stardardization, railroads and the lack of standardizations with bank cards at grocery stores come to mind (grrr…) But the semantic web and how data is 'linked' is pretty important to analytics. time to dive in.

The father of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee defines the Semantic Web as "a web of data that can be processed directly and indirectly by machines."

But the bigger point is, adding more, independent data usually beats out designing ever-better algorithms to analyze an existing data set. I'm often suprised that many people in the business, and even in academia, don't realize this.

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.