I was able to attend the second half of this event and I thought I might share some points made by the panels.

Natasha Singer, Reporter, The New York Times; Fellow, Data & Society

4K+(?) apps are in use in K-12 education. Three cases of apps she investigated:

• Reward/penalty system (ClassDojo)
  • The reward / penalties can be arbitrary
• Attendance app which I forgot the name
  • This app provides an interface to the teacher, who can swipe the names in the class roster to the left (absent) or to the right (tardy; the teacher can input how late the student was). The system will then send a text to the parent.
  • The particular school which uses this app is using it alongside other measures to increase attendance such as mentorship, so it’s not like it’s out of the blue. Still, the question stands of what it means to take out of the equation direct communication to the student (as far as the app is concerned); also, the data points (app usage, attendance, graduation rate) do not show the students’ irritation
• The third app provides students with micro-scholarships—from 10+ USD to 1000+ USD—which can be obtained by various achievements such as getting an A (or B) in a course, doing some sports or other activities, taking AP courses, etc. If I understood correctly, the app does not actually give money away but rather serves as a calculator which translates a student’s achievement into how much money that achievement might be worth in terms of scholarship.
  • One of the students who gave positive feedback said that the app is nice because it does not try to know anything about their parent’s information.
  • What is the implication of encouraging students through such a direct promise of monetary reward?

Brett Frischmann, Professor, Cardozo Law School

• Is working on a book on what it means to be human in this technological change (w/ Sellinger)
• The story of mandatory Fitbit for undergraduate students
  • Criticism ranged from the creepiness of surveillance to privacy issues like the lack of consent. Advocacy was also present, especially the one which noted that this is just an extension of what the school has always been doing (tracking students’ physical status)
  • Looking at this issue as a matter of consent or opt-out (which the school technically did provide), or that the argument that this is not different from the records students were providing to the school for many years, show the limits of the current paradigm.
  • Because it diverts the attention from important issues such as self-reflection, judgement and human involvement – all being dismissed in automatic collection (student’s active decision, autonomy, is not trivial) – students become passive objects in data collection.
  • Surveillance creep works both ways: gradual increase of the surveilling activity, and also of the surveilled people being accustomed to it)
  • It’s not just universities, elementary school programs are being funded

Mitchell Stevens, Associate Professor of Education and Director of Data Policy in the Office of the Vice Provost for Teaching and Learning, Stanford University

• The mid-20th century U.S. has built something which became the best higher education system in the world during 25 years or so. Although federal support was crucial in the establishment of research universities, these institutions were also given enough independence to effectively act as non-profit organizations, and assume agency from the “national interest”, although the latter was a big reasoning for providing federal support in the first place.
• However, recent years are seeing a renegotiation of this cold war era-based relationship towards increased influence of private capital, partly in the form of digital education. In short, business and higher ed are becoming increasingly intimate.
• This is in a way a continuation of what rich people like Ford, Carnegie and Mellon did in the past: achieving a huge success in their industry by using scientific management and applying the same method in education—something the Gates are doing, for instance.
• However, as the status of universities as non-profit has been in decline along with the federal system providing capital, the relationship between the government, educational institutions and businesses are changing; governance is yet to be determined.

Elana Zeide, Research Fellow, New York University; Affiliate, Data & Society

• Importance of local context in setting rules
• There has been rising attention towards student privacy
• Typical use of notion ‘privacy’ in lawmaking and parents organization, for example, focus more on the access/disclosure of data, than the usage of it. But the latter is becoming more and more important.
• Also, in the age of big data, conventional expressions such as limiting something to “educational purposes” do not mean the same thing anymore
  • Ex) think face recognition- not being tagged is not the same level of privacy as before

Q&A, Comments

• The ubiquity of evaluation and data collection has a substantial impact in people’s behavior; students can become more conforming to the majority’s norm, without even noticing it. Knowing more may not be for the best.
• The tools may seem neutral, but in practice they incorporate power relations. Also, many tools now equal businesses
• Formative assessment, summative assessment, credentialing used to be separate things. Now not only is the separation blurred, but also the evaluation is managed by third party for-profits
• Are there studies on the effect of such classroom technologies on brain development?
• The “science” of teaching. Pedagogy itself becoming an engineering of the classroom— Need to define what success is in education
• Automation bias, or the tendency to act as the machine tells people to
• Education as citizen-making (which according to Stevens is what the U.S. had systemized during the 20C) vs worker-raising
• The right to be off (disconnected)