Learning Analytics

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.

Ian Ayres visits Google's Mountain View, CA headquarters to discuss his book, "Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-by-Numbers Is the New Way to Be Smart." This event took place on November 8, 2007 as part of the Authors@Google series.

Cloudera is a company that helps developers with big database problems. Here the CEO Mike Olson gives us a tour through the major database changes that are hitting lots of startups now.

We've written a series of how-to guides explaining how we collected the data. Most of the techniques are within the ability of the moderately experienced programmer.

As the integration of community-centred teaching practices intensifies, an understanding of the types of relationships that manifest in this network and the associated impact on student learning is required. This paper explores the relationship between a student's position in a classroom social network and their reported level of sense of community. Quantitative methods, such as Rovai's (2002b) Classroom Community Scale and social network centrality measures, were incorporated to evaluate an individual's level of sense of community and their position within the classroom social network. Qualitative methods such as discussion forum content analysis and student interviews were adopted to clarify and further inform this relationship. The results demonstrate that the centrality measures of  closeness and  degrees are positive predictors of an individual's reported sense of community whereas,  betweenness indicates a negative correlation. Qualitative analyses indicate that an individual's pre-existing external social network influences the type of support and information exchanges an individual requires and therefore, the degree of sense of community ultimately experienced. The paper concludes by discussing future recommendations for teaching practices incorporating computer-mediated communications. 

What new things could we discover if social network analysis took time and space into account, in addition to the raw connections between people?

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.

With Gapminder Desktop you can show animated statistics from your own laptop

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)

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

Information has gone from scarce to superabundant. That brings huge new benefits, says Kenneth Cukier (interviewed here)-but also big headaches