By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Datapalooza
Jose Ferreira, Adaptive Learning in ELT, 2014/10/01
Knewton's sales representative, Jose Ferreira, is making some big claims. "We literally have more data about our students than any company has about anybody else about anything, and it’s not even close.... We literally know everything about what you know and how you learn best, everything." Except, responds Philop Kerr, it's not that simple. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. A National Look at Student Data Privacy Legislation
Tanya Roscorla, Center for Digital Education, 2014/09/25
This underscores the importance of data privacy in education: in the United States, "state policymakers introduced 110 bills on student data privacy in 36 states this session, with 30 of them passing both houses and 24 being signed into law, according to an analysis by the Data Quality Campaign.". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Hidden Biases in Big Data
Kate Crawford, Harvard Business Review Blogs, April 1, 2013
Norwood Russell Hanson authored one of the most significant attacks on traditional empiricism with ther argument that all data is 'theory-laden', that is, that what counts as data depends on how we interpret what we perceive. The figures in the image above, for example, may resemble antelopes, but in a different context, the same figures may be interpreted as pelicans. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. “Like”-able Content: Spread Your Message with Third-Party Metadata
Clinton Forry, A List Apart, March 26, 2013
This is a look at some of the third-party metadata that can be attached to content. In this case, 'third-party' refers to the source of the metadata schema, it being a third party such as Facebook or Twitter, specifically Facebook’s Open Graph protocol and Twitter Cards. More...