The 20th annual session of Online Educa Berlin took place last week. I had intended to skip the conference this year, but changed my mind for three reasons: Howard Rheingold, George Siemens, and Stephen Downes. Rheingold spoke convincingly about the empowering potential of networks. Effective networking requires that students create their own public voice. When someone enters your name in Google, you want the results to include your own outputs, not only information written by others. Stephen Downes, in turn, advocated that each person needs his own independent online space. Services like Facebook are based on the premise that users are a product to sell to advertisers. Learning management systems, similarly, collect student data for the benefit of the organization and for the LMS company, even though the student should have the primary right to decide on its use. In the Online Educa debate, which is the culmination of the conference, George Siemens defended the idea that big data is not corrupting education, but rather helps to enhance and personalize instruction—when its use is open and transparent. In the post-debate poll, 72% of the audience agreed with him.