How much do you really know about education in terms of data and privacy? The landscape of edtech can be confusing, ambiguous, and contradictory.
A new survey from Common Sense Media points out that adults, even those without children, are “intensely concerned about using personal data to market to children, inside or outside the school setting.” However, parents don’t really know very much about the information schools collect and store online.
According to Common Sense Media:
Almost 6 in 10 parents have heard little or nothing about schools letting private companies store personal data about their children.
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When informed that there are currently no restrictions limiting these companies from using this information for marketing, parents and non-parents alike express overwhelming concern.
Education technology makes a lot of promises. Most of those promises are aimed at making great teaching available to more students.
As a teacher myself, I can tell you that personalization is one of the things that separates good teaching from bad teaching. Anyone who’s been responsible for what happens in any sort of classroom can tell you: standardization just doesn’t work. Everyone learns differently and therefore needs different kinds of teaching.
In my classroom at Temple University, I manage things intuitively. I scan the room at any given time, assess the level of engagement against the quality of work that’s being handed in, and decide whether or not I’m using the best approach.
I generally assume that if a student is not getting it, I’m probably doing something wrong. I change my teaching style. I personalize the way I teach for each individual student. This is possible, especially in my honors classes, because I only have 20 students. But what if I had 50 students, or 100. What if I wanted to figure out a way to personalize learning for an entire school district?
Education technology’s priority is to bring a personalized educational experience to every student. And many of the game based approaches, in particular, look very promising.
At first, it sounds fantastic. Bring it on!! What are we waiting for?
Think about it. If Amazon can tailor my online shopping experience according to my personal preferences, why can’t Algebra 1 be tailored to every student’s personal ability. If Google knows exactly which advertisements to show me and can intuit my queries based on a single keystroke, surely someone can build a teaching algorithm that answers questions before a student asks them. And if Netflix knows exactly what I’ve watched, how long I’ve watched it, and what I watched afterward, surely someone can figure out what’s the best way to present multimedia information for each individual.
The trouble is, in the world of internet marketing, this kind of personalized user experience is about advertising and it is called “targeting.”
Think about that word for a moment. TARGETING.
Language is more than just a bunch of representative symbols. There’s an image in every word, a feeling, a timbre. What’s more, according to the theories of acclaimed French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, deep unconscious motivations reside in our word choices.
The word “target” is aggressive. It implies an attack. The word is derived from “targe,” a small shield used for shooting practice. It calls to mind visions of ambush.
Just imagine concentric circles painted on school students and suddenly the flip side of edtech’s coin is revealed: a dystopian vision of a data driven national education system. (I won’t offer the conspiracy theorists’ references to the surveillance state in George Orwell’s 1984, you’ve read these theories often enough to let your own imagination wander). Search the internet and you’ll find lots of well placed paranoia.
Diane Ravitch, for example, one outspoken critic of edtech, wrote an article called “3 Dubious Uses of Technology in Schools” for Scientific American just this past July.
“The most worrisome use of technology is to accumulate and store personal, confidential data about every public school student.” Ravitch is critical of gigantic philanthropically backed organizations like inBloom, which “will gather student data from several districts and states, including New York, Georgia, Delaware, Kentucky and Louisiana” and store the data on a Amazon’s cloud servers. “On the cloud.” Ravitch writes, “will be students’ names, addresses, grades, test scores, disability status, attendance, program participation and many other details about students.”
“Who needs all this personal information, and why is it being shared?” Asks Ravitch, “Advocates say that the goal is to create better products for individual students. Critics believe that the information will be given or sold to vendors, who will use it to market products to children and their parents.”
Ravitch, and others, point out that FERPA (the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act) used to protect student data, requiring parental consent for the release. “In 2011, however, the U.S. Department of Education revised the FERPA regulations, making this data project legal.”
Aware of both sides of the edtech sword, Common Sense Media is one example of an organization that’s trying to stay ahead of the issue. They’ve long been an advocate for children when it comes to making sure we adopt technology wisely. They recognize that edtech adoption is inevitable and regularly sponsor summits promoting the future of education technology. But CEO Jim Steyer is also crystal clear when it comes to data. He says, “schools should be completely off limits when it comes to collecting the personal information of students for marketing purposes. The school zone must, at all times, be a safe privacy zone. It is critical that educators, the technology industry, and our nation’s leaders establish universal best practices that safeguard students' personal information that is collected by schools.”
Steyer’s comments are right in line with the findings from Common Sense Media’s recent survey. They found that over two-thirds of adults (with or without children) in the US are very concerned about advertisers using kids’ personal data to market to them. (68% and 67% very concerned, respectively; 89% of both groups are very or somewhat concerned). But they are uninformed. “Most – even parents – are unaware that schools contract with private companies to store students’ personal data like age, weight, attendance, grades, or other performance measures. A majority (57%) of parents hasn’t heard much if anything about these contracts and only 18% have heard ‘a great deal.’”
Still, even in a time of “significant cynicism toward government” 85% of adults believe the government could do more to protect student data. “Almost no one sides with the idea that tighter regulations would stifle innovation, increase costs, or be overly burdensome.”
If you follow me on Forbes, you know that I generally write about the ways digital media and educational technologies are changing our children’s experience of the world. I’m not so interested in trite black and white, good and bad, dichotomies that are locked into an oppositional battle between old and new. This is what we see in the education gurus who complain that we need to eliminate 20th Century education in favor of something shiny and fancier. In my opinion, it is this kind of thinking is rooted in the linear mythology of the past--the youthful hero slays the aged ogre king. This is precisely the kind of adolescent, youth-worshipping, rebellious thinking that has led to a culture of planned obsolescence, disposability, age-defying anti-wrinkle creams, and an enormous amount of trash. All this has been developed in celebration of progress and innovation--what’s new and, therefore, supposedly better.
Alternatively, we might adopt a more intelligent perspective, keeping one foot in the past and one in the future.
When it comes to questions of privacy, I love the idea that social media might completely change the way we think about privacy. I’ll happily step one foot into that future. So much of our current conception of the self (and the individual) is guarded. We’re constantly caught up in considering which cards to keep close to my chest and which ones to reveal. We are conditioned to ask what is internal, personal, and private. We are conditioned to ask what is public, external, and shared.
The internet is not only changing privacy, but simultaneously changing how we think about ourselves. When I consider the fact that Amazon knows my desires before I do, I need to reevaluate what it means to have personal desire. In the best of all possible worlds, this will lead to a less consumption oriented concept of satisfaction. Hopefully, I’ll be less likely to define myself by what I own and therefore less likely to construct hard protective boundaries between my stuff and my neighbors’.
On the other hand, it is precisely the modern definitions of the individual self that have made it possible for us to end countless human rights violations around the world. Paradoxically, I’d also likely to keep that foot rooted in the past.
Because of Descartes image of the self--I think, therefore I am--we have learned to value the private and subjective experience of myriad individuals. Because of the romantic image of the self, we’ve developed modern psychology and the notion of transformative personal growth. Without these concepts, which divide experience into inner and outer worlds, we would hardly be able to imagine that people who seem remarkably different from us on the surface might be alike on the inside. How could we ever have arrived at the idea that we need to treat others equitably?
See, the tension that arises in almost all discussions of privacy--whether we’re talking about education technology or the NSA--is that it eventually boils down to a much larger political question about the nature of ownership. As long as we live in a capitalist society, we need to protect our individual privacies. After all, is there a property more private than the inner self? The trouble is that many of our technological innovations seem to be calling for something altogether different. With our technologies, we seem to be imagining a world where one individual blends right into the next. Our narcissistic vulnerabilities are always on disply. In that world, there’s nothing left to call one’s own. In other words, there’s no ownership.
Like most questions of education, we should probably start by re evaluating our objectives. We educate our children in order to create the best possible citizens for our desired society. However, when we’re implicitly confused about what kind of society we want, chances are we’re going to end up with a mess.
Jordan Shapiro is author of FREEPLAY: A Video Game Guide to Maximum Euphoric Bliss. For information on his upcoming books and events click here.
