I use RSS feeds to keep track of what people are talking about and the new and interesting stories. This is pointed at a few sites, blogs, and publishers but can also track specific phrases, words, and topics.

One topic I’ve set up is Learning Data. It tracks any mentions of it and usually pulls in 300+ links a week. There are a couple of interesting points I noticed last week.

Firstly, the majority of articles are about machine learning. It searches articles which have both learning and data in them. I thought, when I set it up, there would be plenty of articles where learning professionals are talking about data in their work and how they use it to inform their practice. Surprisingly this isn’t the case and of the 345 articles published in the last 7 days, only a dozen or so weren’t about machine learning.

Next, I’m the only person on Feedly searching for ‘learning’ AND ‘data’. Isn’t that a bit peculiar? Surely, if learning people are trying to understand evaluation, they’d be seeking out what’s happening in the data space to support their evaluative activity? In case you were wondering, the search for ‘learning’ and ‘evaluation’ AND ‘data’ produces about 10 articles a week and – again – I’m the only person using this search term on Feedly.

It could be the user base of 12 million aren’t using search or don’t have it enabled. It might be they don’t understand how to use it and need to educate their customers. Do learning people not know where to find news outside their curated spaces?

I’m really keen to understand this – please do let me know in the comments.