Big Data, the Science of Learning, Analytics, and Transformation of Education
From the mediaX Conference “Platforms for Collaboration and Productivity”, Candace Thille, with the Stanford Graduate School of Education highlights the power of platform tools and technologies to transform observation and data collection. This process enables researchers from industry and academia to know their user better – as consumers, as producers, and as learners.
via YouTube https://youtu.be/cYqs0Ei2tFo
Analyzing and modeling complex and big data
The following video raised some interesting points that I will investigate further when considering learning analytics and big data this week:
- How big is big data?
- What to be careful not to miss when using big data?
- Why do patterns emerge from big data and do we address them and learn from them?
Professor Maria Fasli reminds us that that we should ‘mind the gap’ between big data and hypotheses to avoid missing the opportunity to discover new knowledge.
Liked on YouTube: Red Dwarf Redux – S10E04 – Fathers and Suns
Viewing points – between 8 mins 40 seconds and 10 minutes
This video popped into my head when I was reading the contents of my previous blog post ‘How algorithms rule the world’.
I drew comparison between the idea of allocating police resources based on the output of algorithms and the actions of the on-board computer in the above video.
Both sources suggest that algorithms can be used to predict future behaviors based on past behaviors, probability and recent trends.
The video also links the cyyberpunk themes (covered in Block 1) to algorithmic theme that we are currently studying.
Liked on YouTube: Global Digital Culture: Cultural Differences and the Internet
I stumbled across this video and in my opinion it is like watching a documentary version of the Lister et al (2009) reading. The themes, story, facts and issues are exactly the same.
References
Lister, M., Dovey, J., Giddings, S., Kelly, K. (2009). Networks, users and economics. In New media: a critical introduction. M. Lister (Eds.) (London, Routledge): pp. 163-236.
YouTube description:
Global Digital Culture: Cultural Differences and the Internet
Now, from portraits of individuals painted on canvato that vast virtual image of modern society that is the Internet,journalist Alexs Krotoski looks into the evolving face of the web,to find out what it says about who we are.
The founders of the web had a dream: they imagined the global cyber-utopia founded on the ethos of free information for all. But the problem with this vision is that it assumes that we’re all one people with the same shared ideals. But we’re not. The web isn´t neutral.It mirrors the values of those of us who go online and it reflects the ideologies of the people who design and build the services.
Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia believes shared information promotes democracy. Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, says privacy is dead. And Larry Page and Sergey Brin from Google have decided that the most valuable information should be determined and filtered by the crowd. These are profoundly political positions, immersed in western democratic ideas. The web that the majority of us recognise and use, here in the English speaking western world, has characteristics of our ideological and cultural values, but the Internet centre of gravity is quickly shifting away from the West.
A new Internet world is coming online. Of the 2 billion Internet users, 272 million are in North America: that´s more than three quarters of their population. But China has 485 million Internet users, the biggest number of any country. And that´s still only a third of its population. This burgeoning and colossal online community does not access the western web but it’s developed its own home grown websites like Baidu, Tencent and Sina Weibo. But perhaps the greatest difference, at least from our western perspective, is the degree to which China´s Internet is controlled by government censorship, referred to as “The Great Firewall”. It´s the perfect example of how technology can be imbued with an ideology, in this case of top-down control.
That perception of censorship…How aware are the Chinese people of this?
via YouTube https://youtu.be/UNwnQkGpKPE