Penetrating the Fog (Long & Siemens) describes how medical decisions are becoming more evidence-based,  looking to use analytics to answer questions about who’ll get sick, then acting on the predictions.    I find that interesting because in the UK there is such an analytic diagnostic available for breast cancer sufferers called PREDICT, that takes just a few pieces of data to predict survival chances.  It’s been developed from research based on data from 5,694 women from 1999 to 2003, so should be reliable, not fuzzy and foggy.

To build such tools for other areas such as education you need to have a similarly large amount of data and my initial reaction to Penetrating the Fog was that presumably we haven’t yet collected enough of such data.  But the paper argues that we have a data explosion, and as Sharon Slade (from the OU Business School) blogs here, we need to think how we manage it.

A recent discussion in a university tutor forum reveals that we have information about our students, but that  it isn’t easily available in a manner that we can use.  These forum participants interestingly went on to debate  the ethics of using that information and  sharing it with students.   Ethics of learning analytics will be a topic on the MOOC in week five.  In the meantime, there’s plenty of reading and discussion available on learning analytics,  enough to feel to me like I’m fumbling in a fog of too much information.