Hi George, thanks for your clarifications.
It's not that I'm not interested in tools at all, but as you indicate, they come after the question what you want to find out (and what you want to do with it, 'action analytics', right?) . I always find it very funny when on conferences you hear people say 'the tools don't matter, it's what you do with them', and then the Q&A goes exclusively on tools...
I've seen some things passing on projects and approaches for analytics in education from IBM, I'll look them up again.