It’s not often you get to discuss the negatives of having too much data, but Viktor Mayer-Schönberger (Oxford) and Kenneth Cukier (The Economist) do just that.  In their recently published book, Learning with Big Data, they explore the dystopian extrapolation of the current movement towards data gathering in education.  In some ways, theirs is a warning as old as Nineteen Eighty Four (or even Brave New World); when authorities have at their fingertips every type of data they could desire, how can we trust them to act in our best interest?  (Maybe this goes all the way back to Juvenal?)

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