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The Department of Education's (ED) Office of Educational Technology today released a draft issue brief - Enhancing Teaching and Learning Through Educational Data Mining and Learning Analytics - representing the results of a months-long discourse among 8 academic and 15 industrial data mining and learning analytics experts conducted by SRI International. The brief, inspired by ED's 2010 National Educational Technology Plan (NETP), articulates the challenges and opportunities of Big Data in improving student outcomes and overall productivity of K-2 education systems. It focuses on three key research areas - educational data mining, learning analytics, and visual data analytics - and offers a set of corresponding recommendations, categorized by various stakeholders. ED is now seeking public comment on the draft.

Resources about accessing and using big data sets.

"R is an open source statistical programming language"

"Meta-data contains a great deal of information, and when gathered together it forms a startlingly clear picture of the person it comes from. A point that Professor César Hidalgo and graduate students Daniel Smilkov and Deepak Jagdish of MIT are trying to get across. They have created a new program called Immersion. It works by signing you into your Gmail account and collecting only the meta-data from your account usage history. From there you can get a picture of your emailing habits from that single account, and you will be shocked at what you see."

"Some might argue that the analytics tools at our disposal are currently mainly used for boring purposes, such as improving processes and making money. In this paper we will try to define learning analytics and their purpose for learning and education. We will ponder on the best possible fit of particular types of research methods and their analysis. Methodological concerns related to the analysis of Big Data collected on online networks as well as ethical and privacy concerns will also be highlighted and a case study of the use of learning analytics in a Massive Open Online Course explored."

"Brute computing force alone can't solve the world's problems. Data mining innovator Shyam Sankar explains why solving big problems (like catching terrorists or identifying huge hidden trends) is not a question of finding the right algorithm, but rather the right symbiotic relationship between computation and human creativity."

Like most marriages, the tie between citizens and the big corporations that dominate the web is one of both great joy and intense resentment. On the one hand, they are very good at helping us with web chores: Need information? Google has more of the stuff than you could ever process. Want to keep in touch with friends? Facebook eliminates the need to pick up the phone. On the other, they do not always give us the space we need. Privacy, it seems, is becoming the thorn in the side of this marriage of convenience.