Teaching-oriented faculty and computing education research

Two pieces in The november cAcm caught my eye. The first appeared in the BLOG@CACM column [4]. Greg Linden sees a future where students learn online, and “Our logs fill with a massive new data stream, millions of students doing billions of exercises”. Linden alluded to the data mining work he did at Amazon, and then connects that work to the potential for mining new pedagogical insights from those logs of student data. What caught my eye was this sentence: “Teachers might think one concept should always be taught before another, but what if the data shows us different?”