The cheer-leading for big data in education continues unabated. Almost everything you read online on the subject is an advertisement, usually disguised as a piece of news or a blog post, but which can invariably be traced back to an organisation with a vested interest in digital disruption. A typical example is this advergraphic which comes under a banner that reads ‘Big Data Improves Education’. The site, Datafloq, is selling itself as ‘the one-stop-shop around Big Data.’ Their ‘vision’ is ‘Connecting Data and People and [they] aim to achieve that by spurring the understanding, acceptance and application of Big Data in order to drive innovation and economic growth.’
Critical voices are rare, but growing. There’s a very useful bibliography of recent critiques here. And in the world of English language teaching, I was pleased to see that there’s a version of Gavin Dudeney’s talk, ‘Of Big Data & Little…
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