Derek Briton

Big Data and Learning Analytics: The “New” Teaching Machine

Some 13 years ago, John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid (The social life of information. Harvard Business School Press, Boston, 2000) authored The Social Life of Information. Among the many positive accolades reproduced in the book’s opening pages are those of William J. Mitchell: “neither cheerleaders nor debunkers, these knowledgeable and reflective Silicon Valley insiders provide a much-needed critical perspective on the buzzwords, myths, and conventional wisdom of the digital revolution.” The two argue convincingly that “our future world is evolving from the complex interaction of powerful new technology with resistant existing structures and practices.” The authors, in fact, decry what they describe as the “6-D vision” of their Silicon Valley colleagues, an “overreliance on information” that they argue “is not necessarily twice as good as the ordinary 3-D kind.”