The day the Big Data hype died


“March 28, 2014 may well go down as the turning point where Big Data lost its placement as a silver bullet and came down to earth in a more productive manner,” writes Phil Hill. “Triggered by a March 14 article in Science Magazine that identified “big data hubris” as one of the sources of the well-known failures of Google Flu Trends, there were five significant articles in one day on the disillusionment with Big Data.

“Does this mean Big Data is over and that education will move past this over-hyped concept? Perhaps Mike Caulfield from the Hapgood Blog stated it best, including adding the education perspective:

‘I don’t know if I have to sketch out the parallels in education, but just in case: we have two really unhelpful parties in learning analytics. We have the “it’s all bunk” crowd, and we have the evangelists. And I don’t know which is worse.

‘Here’s the thing — saying “Big Data is bunk” is pretty close in ridiculousness to saying “Oceanography is bunk”. Seventy percent of the planet is ocean. Likewise, the “data exhaust” we emit on a daily basis is growing exponentially. There is no future where the study of this data is not going to play a large role in the research we do and the solutions we create. None. Nada.'”

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