Festival of Learning

Open Session Limited to 40 Participants (First-Come, First-In)

What is Big Data? Why should I care? How, if at all, can I use Big Data to good effect? Learn the terminology, background, and potential future directions of Big Data (also known as Analytics), the trend now underlying much of modern business.  Risk, liability and privacy concerns are also introduced. This presentation is founded in a draft paper. Specifically, but primarily as an example of the spectrum of issues emerging now, this paper is focused on the most basic element of growing online (TME) applications – to wit, youth-adolescent-student effectiveness combined with an enhanced understanding and awareness of the need for safety.

As Big Data-Analytics emerges as a tool for business, making the internet increasingly ubiquitous, the demonstrable need to balance expertise in application with this understanding and safety awareness also increases.  Families (i.e., parents, grandparents, even older siblings) and educators for appropriate age cohorts (i.e., teachers of K-12 learners) are too rarely providing necessary frameworks for the youth and adolescents in their orbits. These prospective mentors, seldom truly active in the process of implementing TMEs to date, are increasingly disenfranchised and distanced from the process at a time when their general experience is more necessary and applicable than ever.

This paper elaborates on work, over several years, in the area of instilling an increased understanding of the concepts of Web Presence-Digital Footprint amongst youth and adolescents. The results of this work suggest strongly that as creators of knowledge, facilitators of the creation of knowledge and managers of knowledge it behooves us to strongly recommend that more research be conducted in order to begin to establish a consistent recognizable research literature base to (1) nurture the learners of this youngest cohort of learners effectively, and (2) ease the transition of the system of education from ‘traditional’ to the most effective TME-related models possible.

This presentation will detail the core contents of the paper in question in the form of a conversation and that presenter will seek active dialogue to enhance the effectiveness of the paper when published.


Participants 
Rob Thompson, Royal Roads University