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Richard Saul Wurman, Radical Media, and Esri bring you the Urban Observatory-a live museum with a data pulse. You'll have access to rich datasets for cities around the world that let you simultaneously view answers to the most important questions impacting today's global cities-and you. Compare and contrast visualized information for a greater understanding of life in the 21st century.

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have the potential to enable free university-level education on an enormous scale. A concern often raised about MOOCs is that although thousands enrol for courses, a very small proportion actually complete the course. The release of information about enrollment and completion rates from MOOCs appears to be ad hoc at the moment - that is, official statistics are not published for every course. This data visualisation draws together information about enrollment numbers and completion rates from across online news stories and blogs.

"Preliminary results of a study of 16 massive open online courses offered through the University of Pennsylvania show that only a small percentage of people who start the courses finish them-and that, on average, only half of those who register for the courses even watch the first lecture. The study, conducted by the university's Graduate School of Education, is reviewing data from about a million users of the courses, which Penn offered on the Coursera platform, from June 2012 to June 2013. Two of the seven researchers involved-Laura W. Perna, a professor of higher education, and Alan Ruby, senior fellow for international education-described the study on Thursday in a presentation at the MOOC Research Conference now under way in Arlington, Tex."

"GPAs don't predict anything about who is going to be a successful employee. "One of the things we've seen from all our data crunching is that G.P.A.'s are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless - no correlation at all except for brand-new college grads, where there's a slight correlation,"" "After two or three years, your ability to perform at Google is completely unrelated to how you performed when you were in school, because the skills you required in college are very different," he said. "You're also fundamentally a different person. You learn and grow, you think about things differently. Another reason is that I think academic environments are artificial environments. People who succeed there are sort of finely trained, they're conditioned to succeed in that environment. 

"As Google Plus continues to grow its active user base and integrate its "social layer" across its other products and services, the number of ways to utilize this powerful social media marketing channel only continues to grow. For any user or brand that wants to take a deep dive into their circles, sharing, engagement and posting activity, this post is for you. By using these four Google Plus analysis tools, you'll be able to get valuable insights into meaningful Google Plus data which will allow you to be more strategic with how you circle, engage, share and make your time on the network more effective and efficient."

"Data is great, but the purpose of Analytics is to get insights so that we can take action. In this post, I will cover some sample reports from the new app tracking interface and how they can help us make decisions for our business."

"Fortunately, a group of tireless researchers-who I've had the honor of collaborating with-has put a wooden stake through the dark heart of this demon. In the most recent addition of the scientific journal Educational Technology, Deepak Subramony, Michael Molenda, Anthony Betrus, and I (my contribution was small) produced four articles on the dangers of this misinformation and the genesis of it. After working separately over the years to debunk this bit of mythology, the four of us have come together in a joint effort to rally the troops-people like you, dedicated professionals who want to create the best outcomes for your learners."

"while these are worthwhile efforts, it is crucial for institutions to use predictive analytics ethically. Without ethical practices, student data could be used to curtail academic success rather than help ensure it. For example, without a clear plan in place, an institution could use predictive analytics to justify using fewer resources to recruit low-income students because their chances of enrolling are less sure than for more affluent prospective students. "

"To hold ourselves accountable for building upon this favorable impact, we made the Learner Outcomes Survey a permanent part of our platform experience: every learner, anywhere in the world, who completes a course now receives a survey a few months later. And since a lot has changed on Coursera since 2015 - we've gone from 90 active courses on our platform to 2,000, and more than doubled the size of our learner community - we decided it was time for another deep dive into the data."

"U.S. News & World Report has stripped the University of Oklahoma of its ranking, citing incorrect information provided about alumni giving. The university told U.S. News that it has been supplying incorrect data since 1999."

"with nothing more than this anonymous location data, someone who wanted to badly enough could easily figure out who you are by tracking your smartphone. Patterns of our movements, when traced on a map, create something akin to a fingerprint that is unique to every person."

"The success of San Jose State University's (SJSU) incorporation of a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) into their curriculum is indisputable: in side-by-side comparisons of two traditionally-taught sections of an introductory electrical engineering course with an edX-provided MOOC variant, the pass rates went from 55-59 percent to 91 percent.[1] This mirrors results that the Open Learning Initiative (OLI) at Carnegie Mellon University has been achieving for years. However, interestingly, SJSU incorporated MOOCs as a course supplement in a flipped classroom. If you think about that, it is the beginning of disaggregation of MOOCs into technological (big data), content and pedagogical (peer learning) components."

Of course the current big buzz in the LMS arena is analytics: over the past few years each and all of the LMS providers, on their own or in partnership with other firms, have announced an analytics strategy and analytic applications that allow faculty, departments, and institutions to leverage student transactional data extracted from the LMS for analytic purposes intended to aid student academic performance, course completion, student retention, and learning outcomes.

"Recently Leo @leohavemann and I were discussing on how was the best way to encourage academics to use OER and share their materials, how can we make them see at the impact that sharing content can have and after reviewing some very interesting models of data visualisation, we decided that the best way was to generate a map with a which contains the list taken from the directory of repositories of OER and some new more."

First, like every other company on the web that stores user data, Instagram has always had an expansive license to use and copy your photos. It has to - that's how it runs its networks of servers around the world. And Instagram's existing terms specifically give the company the right to "place such advertising and promotions on the Instagram Services or on, about, or in conjunction with your Content." Instagram has always had the right to use your photos in ads, almost any way it wants. We could have had the exact same freakout last week, or a year ago, or the day Instagram launched.

While most of us will prepare a will at some point in our lives in order to divvy up physical assets, what happens to our digital lives? Google today tackled the subject of the "digital afterlife" with the launch of a service that will allow users to designate how they want their accounts handled after they die. The offering, dubbed Inactive Account Manager, lets people "tell us what to do with your Gmail messages and data from several other Google services if your account becomes inactive for any reason," Google said in a blog post.

"gRSShopper is a personal web environment that combines resource aggregation, a personal dataspace, and personal publishing. It allows you to organize your online content any way you want to, to import content - your own or others' - from remote sites, to remix and repurpose it, and to distribute it as RSS, web pages, JSON data, or RSS feeds."

As more and more mechanisms are built to provide meme-tracking data on social media campaigns, marketers are able to provide more and more dazzling charts and graphs on reach and impact. Social media memes are a high impact, low cost way to show audience engagement. When that engagement is good, it's great. When that engagement is faux-bad (in the case of Hamm's junk), it's also great. While it's not always possible to demonstrate that audience engagement translates into ratings, or sales, or donations, engagement is a good thing in and of itself, right?

"This is absolutely awesome for managing student work in Google Apps. Doctopus allows you to share a document with your entire class without having to share individually and without having to place it in the Template Gallery. Plus, it collects all of the data in one spreadsheet! You can share the document for the whole class to work on it, for group work, or for individual work."

Every entity must learn to curate their Social Identity. Social Identity is how the world perceives an entity. In the past that audience might have been limited or filtered to a select few. No more, social media is the great equalizer and spreads the word fast. Some might call this your brand. Regardless of the naming, data is being collected and directed for use about you. You are being watched and talked about, so what can you do about it? There are six elements of a person, group or government's Social Identity: