Data, the story, the storyteller

This short position paper is focused on questions that arise from the entire data lifecycle, from data specification and gathering, to visualisation and interpretation, to data storytelling. We argue that storytelling and human sense-making are critical considerations in how we might determine the validity of learning analytics and highlight data literacy as a critical competency in the emerging era where data has increasing value. We use data collected by the Government of India to illustrate our argument in which two issues arise: lack of protocols and adequate structure supporting learning analytics methods based on sound educational research.