Big Data in K-12: Attack of the Recommendation Engines – Part I – from EdNetInsight.com by Nelson B. Heller, President, The HellerResults Group — Friday, October 12, 2012

Excerpt:

Big Data Meets Education
A wave of K-12 entrepreneurial initiatives sees the application of “big data” as the key to instructional technology’s Holy Grail—intelligent real-time differentiated instruction akin to working one-on-one with a brilliant personal instructor. Investors, aware of the powerful strides made in recommendation engines by Internet giants Google, Amazon, LinkedIn, Netflix, and Zynga, as well as for a host of military and commercial applications, see in big data education’s “next big thing.” In this and my next article, I’m going to explore what’s happening in this arena and in voice recognition technology, which, if you look under the hood, can be thought of as being driven by the same advances in data science and recommendation engines. These articles are based in part on my recent View From the Catbird Seat presentation at EdNET 2012. Read on to see what threats and opportunities this new frontier represents for your own organization.