The autopsy/biopsy distinction can indeed be useful, here. Leading to insight. Especially if it’s not about which one is better. A biopsy can help prevent something in an individual patient, but it’s also a dangerous, potentially life-threatening operation. An autopsy can famously identify a “cause of death” but, more broadly, it’s been the way we’ve learnt a lot about health, not just about individual patients. So, while Teamann frames it as a severe limitation, the “autopsy” part of Learning Analytics could do a lot to bring us beyond the individual focus.

Funny that privacy wasn’t expected to be a key affordance of eBooks. Sounds obvious, a posteriori. But it wasn’t on publishers’ collective radar and wasn’t discussed at big eBook conferences, it sounds like. Maybe because publishers focus on selling prepackaged experiences.