This Is Your Learning:

http://www.solaresearch.org/OpenLearningAnalytics.pdf

Open Learning Analytics: an integrated & modularized platform 

Proposal to design, implement and evaluate an open platform to integrate heterogeneous learning analytics techniques

Citation:   Siemens G., Gasevic D., Haythornthwaite C., Dawson S.,  Buckingham Shum S., Ferguson R., Duval E., Verbert K., Baker R. (2011). Open learning analytics: an integrated & modularized platform. Society for Learning Analytics Research, 178 (28), 3-19

A veritable plethora of analytic resources abound for educators attempting to assess learning.  In fact, we may have too many resources and so be doing nothing useful with them at all because the mere availability of resources is staggering and overwhelming.  This article attempts to integrate tools for analysis in a new way.  This article proposes an integrated learning analytics platform by providing an open infrastructure for researchers, educators and learners to develop new technologies and methods.  The primary method is user controlled visualizations allowing for a completely customizable and entirely trackable learning environment.  

This article takes tools and concepts with which we are already familiar, and reformulates how we think about using them.  The authors offer thinking that takes a simple concept, customizing your environment as in a google theme for your email, and applies it to a TEL environment.  The tools aren't revolutionary and the ideas are not groundbreaking, but they do offer a new spin personalized learning environments.  

Using previously-existing tools in new ways fundamentally changes how we do things.  The misuse of data in the digital ocean of information in analytics for learning is not an isolated occurrence.  Teachers have been inundating their very own students with too much useless information. Check out what Mr. Dewitt has to say about learning science:  

This article was well-written, clear, and provides important ideas around streamlining and making more efficient use of data in analytics for learning.  Much more research on this topic is needed.  The digital information age requires new theories and research that account for the data deluge of the 21st century.  What I find most useful in the article as it pertains to my work is integrating different TEL environments with social media and assessment data gathering using tools I'd like to invite into my learning environment.  It has me thinking about how I might even model bringing diverse technology into the adult learning environment in part for the purpose of modeling.  I'm excited about the interface of the customizable learning dashboard and the learner, and what useful data might be mined from that interaction.