Data, Data Everywhere

One of the things about Google that seems to scare people is the amount of data that they collect on individuals and the things that they do on the web.  If you've never done it, I'd suggest looking at your own Google web history to get some sense of the magnitude of the data trail you leave on the web.  On the one hand, you have the creepy feeling that you're being watched.  On the other hand, these search histories help Google deliver better search results to you and everyone else.  Data is an increasingly double-edged sword, giving efficient transactions and more targeted answers as a byproduct of diminished privacy.  It's an argument we'll likely be having as a culture for another generation or two.  

  What's important here, however, is not that Google sucks up our data like a rabid vacuum cleaner in the sky.  The critical thing is that this be a two way street.  Google learns about us, and we learn about Google.  Or, put into more broad terms: Institutions collect our data and we get access to it as a result.  We need to become shareholders in the data market.   Information, and more importantly its organization into meaningful equations has never been so close to the surface before.  Never before has the human race had the opportunity to gather and interpret such large samples of data about itself--and that opportunity would be a shame to overlook or give over solely to those who collect the data.  

  Toward that end, Google has recently introduced a tool that has the potential to take the power of search and visual data manipulation to the largest data sets in the world.  Google Public Data Explorer gives the user access to huge (albeit limited at the moment) pieces of data on all kinds of subjects.  The potential here for census information, government data, educational data, research data, and so much more is hard to overstate.  One of the more dissapointing problems in education is the translation and interpretation of the primary sources, often just data, into a meaningful lesson--one that is often not the only interpretation or even the correct one.  This tool makes cutting out that interpretive middle-man incredibly simple, putting the student in control of how that data gets arranged.  Tangentially, learning to arrange and interpret large sets of data is a crucial skill this tool could help teach to the generations who are going to be exposed to it from day one.  

  The tool is more of a toy now, lacking enough data sets to make it truly powerful.  But if Google keeps feeding this library of data sets we might some day have a repository for the human condition by the raw numbers--for everyone to see and extrapolate from.