Penetrating the Fog

in Siemens' and Long's Penetrating the Fog piece:
"Since we risk a return to behaviorism as a learning theory if we confine analytics to behavioral data, how can we account for more than behavioral data?"
These authors also point out that learning analytics can help us better understand student learning, motivation, and what factors make students drop out. The big piece I got from this is that we understand over and over again that the amount of information in our world today is too much to handle. We need to manage it in new ways, more effective ways. Learning analytics is on the cusp of creating new practices, using new tools, and getting student feedback on the systems now in place.

Summary of Behaviorism

Penetrating the Fog (Long & Siemens) described evidence-based medical analysis used for prediction, and then taking action on these predictions. The medical field seems to have advanced beyond education. We are constantly told that we have a plethora of data, but we haven't yet turned the data into refined evidence-based analytics about learning. Sharon Slade (from the OU Business School) blogs here, we need to think how we manage this data explosion for the benefit of our learners.