The Future of Big Data in the Classroom and Beyond
March 13, 2014
The Harvard Magazine article Why “Big Data” Is a Big Deal cheers for big data and lexalytics. The lengthy article touches on many of the details of big data. Harvard is noticing a thirst for big data and data analysis in almost every field from government to sociology to social sciences. The article noted that it is troubling that big data is not being shared among these fields, for legitimate reasons like privacy, and less legitimate reasons like vanity among academics. On top of this, businesses now own more big data than academia does, and they certainly aren’t sharing. The article gets into many of the current uses of big data,
“In the public realm, there are all kinds of applications: allocating police resources by predicting where and when crimes are most likely to occur; finding associations between air quality and health; or using genomic analysis to speed the breeding of crops like rice for drought resistance.”
These uses are exciting and innovative. The article also explains that given all of these areas of usefulness, big data must be brought into the “foundational courses for all undergraduates.” Teaching undergrads how to work with big data might solve one of the large pitfalls that the article pinpoints. When you are looking through such huge swaths of data, the possibility for false correlations is magnified. Bringing data analytics into the core of undergraduate studies might help prevent the misuse of data. Overall the article is a celebration of how big data is being used to help real people all over the world.
Chelsea Kerwin, March 13, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
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