John Fritz did an excellent job yesterday starting off the conversation about learning analytics.  One of the things he talked about was the need to better use existing LMS data and to share that data with others.  

His talk prompted me to do some digging into the data currently available from the LAK11 Moodle site and to re-present it back to the larger group.  I found out that there are:

233 members of the Moodle course representing 42 countries.  The most heavily represented countries are the US, Canada and Australia.  There are also two participants from Iran and 1 from Guyana.

121 of the 233 registered members have visited the Week 1 Forums.  The most views by a single participant in that section? 54.  It also told me that there were more views by guests than logged in members.  53 people have posted to the Week 1 forum in the last day, and only 19 registered members didn't post at least once to the introductions forum.

The overall activity thus far in the course looks like this:

Looks impressive doesn't it?  It looks to me like there were over 3200 views on the site, and the number of views is continuing to climb.  That's good right?  But if we take a look at the next one, the number of posts, it is starting to fall...Is that bad?  Are all types of activity created equal or is posting a "better" indicator of involvement?

The Moodle stats also showed me a pretty graph showing that I was really active on the site between 8 and 9 pm (while I was compiling these numbers). 

It also told me that Dave Cormier has yet to view the Week 1 forums as a logged in user.

But anyone who checks out Dave's blog will quickly see that he has completed both the readings and the acitvities for week 1.  He either accessed the information another way, or as a Guest.  In this case, although the numbers make it appear that I've been more active, much of my time has been spent playing around while Dave has been interacting with both the content and other participants via his blog and email. 

Although interesting, numbers (data) have their limits.  Figuring out how to interpret them and use them effectively, that's where the fun stuff really begins.