The October 2012 Issue of the Harvard Business Review features the topic of “Big Data” and how it is sparking a management revolution. 

Just what is “Big Data” you ask and how does it differ from analytics or data-driven decision making historically in industries?  The difference as HBR authors Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson of MIT suggest lie in 3 dimensions:  volume, velocity and variety. 

“As of 2012, about 2.5 exabytes of data are created each day, and that number is doubling every 40 months or so.”  McAfee & Brynijolfsson explain that an exabyte is 1B gigabytes or the equivalent 20,000,000,000 filing cabinets.  This data is being created at real-time or nearly real-time speeds.  This data is coming from a variety of sources including message, images, GPS signals, social network updates, etc. 

Think about this – major social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, the iPhone and iPad are all less than a decade old and so we’ve yet to really see how all this data can and will crest into management disciplines and decisions around trends, behaviors and opportunities.  Mankind’s insight, foresight and even hindsight will likely logarithmically jump ahead in the next five years when compared to the last five years and continue accelerating beyond there.  As more and more information is being communicated hourly through mobile devices with GPS sensors with updates immediately on our social, consumptive and professional choices, there will be an incredible triage of that information to create new products, services and technologies, new networks and communities, and new platforms and visions for collaboration, communication and impact. 

I can almost guarantee, and sadly so, that education may be one of the last frontiers to embrace the Big Data movement.  Even healthcare and the military are already way ahead on their forays into the use and management of Big Data comparatively speaking.  We’ve only just recently moved beyond the single year-end assessment as the only form of data feedback on students while most States still rely on their end of year State examinations as the primary default record of student progress and achievement. 

There’s an unhealthy and painfully narrow rhetoric in public education circles that frames any kind of assessments and data capture as demeaning to the teaching profession and reductive in good pedagogical practice.  The adjectives “high stakes” have been dropped when talking about assessments and data capture in general while the implication of “high stakes” is implied when talking about any kind of data capture when in fact most assessments done throughout the year are not high stakes but rather formative in nature, informing teachers on what to do next with students as opposed to trying to incite “teaching to the test”. 

The truth is that if you have a school age child, the online video game they play captures more information about their level of engagement, mastery, proficiency, and learning profile than their school does.  Zynga, the social media game company (makers of the game Farmville) process over 1 petabyte of data each day on its users (20M filing cabinets worth of data).  How much data does your local public school collect on the children it serves?  Our schools are counting with abacuses in a super mainframe number crunching world. 

Imagine a day when every student is commissioned a device (tablet, netbook, desktop, some to-be-invented mobile device, it doesn’t matter) starting in Kindergarten where every keystroke is captured, synched with the device’s webcam to capture student emotion/engagement and the classroom’s 360 degree webcam to triangulate student performance, student attitude/engagement and teacher performance.  Some might decry this as an incredibly invasive intrusion into a student’s privacy.  However, these same critics and the students they are “defending” are likely conveying an equivalent amount of daily data outside of the classrooms whenever they interact online via their phones and other devices.  Why not inside the classroom?  If Zynga and companies like it capture and analyze this data to enable them to better personalize their games for entertainment, should we not also do the same to personalize school for learning? 

Big Data here we come.