I attended this program for insight into school-age patron assignments and to see if there were any applications for RCLS computer classes.
"Big Data" is defined by the 3 Vs of BIGness – volume, velocity, variety. It's a new way of looking at information: multipurpose, crowd sourced, accessible, participatory.
Big Data can be used to teach original research and the importance of evidence in argument by having students gathering their own data. Two sites that were mentioned: Gapminder, designed for teachers to use in classroom, and Google Books Ngram Viewer, which tracks references in literature.
Big Data is also useful for teaching about privacy/plagiarism in their daily lives AND their school work. Wolfram Alpha shows what information is available to Facebook apps and creates an avatar based on your Twitter posts. For plagiarism, students can consider how they'd feel if their posts on Facebook were plagiarized.
The perils of Big Data: an over-emphasis on data; forgetting that bias and context are still important; remembering stories, not just numbers.
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