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All Your Child's Data Are Belong To InBloom
theodp writes "Q. What do you get when Bill Gates and Rupert Murdoch put their heads together? A. inBloom (aka SLC), the Gates Foundation-bankrolled and News Corp. subsidiary-implemented collaboration whose stated mission is to 'inform and involve each student and teacher with data and tools designed to personalize learning.' It's noble enough sounding, but as the NY Times reports, the devil is in the details when it comes to deciding who sees students' academic and behavioral data. inBloom execs maintain their service has been unfairly maligned, saying it is entirely up to school districts or states to decide which details about students to store in the system and with whom to share them. However, a video on inBloom's Web site suggesting what this techno-utopia might look like may give readers of 1984 some pause. In one scene, a teacher with a tablet crouches next to a second-grader evaluating how many words per minute he can read: 55 words read; 43 correctly. Later, she moves to a student named Tyler and selects an e-book 'for at-risk students' for his further reading. The video follows Tyler home, where his mom logs into a parent portal for an update on his status — attendance, 86%; performance, 72% — and taps a button to send the e-book to play on the family TV. And another scene shows a geometry teacher reassigning students' seating assignments based on their 'character strengths', moving a green-coded female student ('actively participates: 98%') next to a red-and-yellow coded boy ('shows enthusiasm: 67%'). The NYT also mentions a parent's concern that school officials hoping to receive hefty Gates Foundation Grants may not think an agreement with the Gates-backed inBloom completely through."
And all of that collected data can end up on a torrent. I wouldn't want to be on the receiving end of all those lawsuits.
Sounds a little like Brave New World, too
See this link where the Gates Foundation project is described as a database which tracks "student hobbies, career goals, attitudes toward school", and other factors, and makes that data available to private companies without the parents' consent.
Furthermore, InBloom says: While inBloom pledges to guard the data tightly, its own privacy policy states that it “cannot guarantee the security of the information stored or that the information will not be intercepted when it is being transmitted.”
Since when is the idea of a teacher evaluating a student's abilities an Orwellian concept? Or does it magically become Orwellian just because a tablet is involved?
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
...so yes..can't we just agree already that networked computers are gathering data points on everyone and everything at an astounding pace, and much of it is freely donated by the people themselves thru SN's and other social portals.
but is it a net plus or a net negative? it's easy to argue both sides of this Gate's Foundation initiative to track student progress and use the date to tailor individual plans...i mean really isn't this the promise of the Network Society?
but wait!! collecting all this data and centralizing and making the results just a SQL query away can have dangerous consequences! blah blah i get it ...
i guess, as Einstein showed over 100 years ago, it REALLY IS all relative (except the speed of light of course)...
never bring a twinkie to a food fight.
A lot of this data is collected now and goes to the state. Is the sky-is-falling reaction due to the fact that the data will go to InBloom, a private entity? In one scene, a teacher with a tablet crouches next to a second-grader evaluating how many words per minute he can read: 55 words read; 43 correctly. -- This has been done since typewriters were introduced in classes Later, she moves to a student named Tyler and selects an e-book 'for at-risk students' for his further reading. The video follows Tyler home, where his mom logs into a parent portal for an update on his status — attendance, 86%; performance, 72% — and taps a button to send the e-book to play on the family TV. -- Supplemental reading? The only difference is, it is going to a TV And another scene shows a geometry teacher reassigning students' seating assignments based on their 'character strengths', moving a green-coded female student ('actively participates: 98%') next to a red-and-yellow coded boy ('shows enthusiasm: 67%'). -- And kids with vision problems are also moved to the front of the class. What the point?
What's sad thing here is that Gates is probably well-meaning.
The same can never ever be said of the other side.
Sorry, formatting lost in my previous post. A lot of this data is collected now and goes to the state. Is the sky-is-falling reaction due to the fact that the data will go to InBloom, a private entity?
In one scene, a teacher with a tablet crouches next to a second-grader evaluating how many words per minute he can read: 55 words read; 43 correctly.
-- This has been done since typewriters were introduced in classes
Later, she moves to a student named Tyler and selects an e-book 'for at-risk students' for his further reading. The video follows Tyler home, where his mom logs into a parent portal for an update on his status — attendance, 86%; performance, 72% — and taps a button to send the e-book to play on the family TV.
-- Supplemental reading? The only difference is, it is going to a TV
And another scene shows a geometry teacher reassigning students' seating assignments based on their 'character strengths', moving a green-coded female student ('actively participates: 98%') next to a red-and-yellow coded boy ('shows enthusiasm: 67%').
-- And kids with vision problems are also moved to the front of the class. What the point?
...grooming the next gen of surveillance-state consumer husks.
At first glance this system I think has the common tool problem.
It's naively neither good nor evil but depends on how it's used.
The scenarios illustrated in the synopsis could very well be seen as beneficial, if it's used in good faith and understood as such.
But I find it often is easier to use tools in non-beneficial ways. Will the teachers use the seating arrangement tool to try to make their problems with students other students problems (and they very well might not be able to handle the problem)?
Will teachers use the evaluation tools to help out weaker students or just to select them out, shuffling them to the sidelines so they can concentrate on the more successful students?
Will the company behind the system spring changes in the Terms of Use later on to make use of the data in malicious ways?
I'm jaded enough to expect only the worst a few years down the line.
http://xkcd.com/327/
How often until we see parents doing this?
The privacy issues here really don't bother me so much - We already have fairly strong laws regarding who can store/share information about minors, and with whom.
The bigger issue IMO comes from the described use of easily-measured statistics over more difficult, but meaningful measures of learning. 55WPM with 43 correct (what does that second number even mean, anyway? "No Billy, that says potato, not aardvark" )? Useless, unless we want to train a generation of speed-readers. More importantly, did he fully appreciate the racist subtext inherent in Jane ordering Spot to run?
Sad. On the one hand, I weep for the future of humanity; On the other, I have absolutely no concerns about job security for as long as I want to stay in the workforce. But hey, I see a great future for the the trophy manufacturing industry!
"When you're dying of malaria, I suppose you'll look up and see that balloon, and I'm not sure how it'll help you. When a kid gets diarrhoea, no, there's no website that relieves that,"
Not seeing this helping people dying of Malaria either.
... teachers invade students' privacy. This is a tool, nothing more. If you ban it, then you'll have to ban things like computers, because they can be used to invade people's privacy too.
(Not anticipating a positive reaction to this satire...)
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
...how education has fallen so far when we started adding all this technology and started treating education like Corporate Indoctrination and rating students' "active participation" and "shows enthusiasm" levels as if students were serfs...er, employees, to be controlled and used, rather than educated.
I suppose expressing a question contrary to the groupthink has always baited a flame, but somehow I think it's still an abuse of the flamebait mod.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
I personally have worked on the security of their systems, they are at least taking that part very seriously. They are spending money, without whining about it, on making sure the whole ball of wax is secure...and it isn't just theater. If we find an issue, or point out a weakness, they either fix it, or find someone who can. Not that this means it will be fool proof, but at least they are taking it serious.
My county's school system uses an on-line system to involve parent's in the education process. Student attendance, assignment status, and grades are posted in the system; parents access the system to monitor how their children are doing, and can theoretically use the information to apply virtually real-time corrective action. Everyone's involved, so this is good, right?
Unfortunately, we have discovered that not all of the teachers are good at getting data in. After several episodes of us correcting our child and then finding out that the data in the system was inaccurate (assignments turned in were not credited, leading to fails and missing assignments) we have very mixed feelings about using the system.
On the one hand, having access to see that assignments are/aren't being turned in, and seeing grades even if the work doesn't make it back home, is good. On the other hand, when the quality of the data is bad, it becomes virtually useless for the purpose of involving the parent in the education process. We can never be sure that a missing assignment is really missing; often a week or more later the system will be updated to show that the assignment was turned in after all.
In one extreme example, a report that was delivered in class and turned in at the end of the presentation was given a grade of zero for never being turned in, and it was an end of the year project report worth a significant portion of the grade. When we went to bat for our kid, the teacher eventually admitted that the report had been delivered in class but didn't know where the hardcopy went. It was too late to turn in a copy of the hardcopy, so in the end that grade was just removed from my child's average. Since she had an "A" anyway, it wasn't harmful, but could have been if she had a lower grade and the report would have brought it up.
My point with all this is that these systems all sound great, but unless an incredible effort is put in the data quality may not be sufficient for the purpose of the system. Its worse to have a system with low quality data that can't be relied upon than it would be to not have the system at all, in my opinion. Depending on how many people are relying on the system and in what ways, it could be extremely problematic. The traditional "end of marking period only" grading system has lots of play where teachers can make adjustments. This is bad if they abuse the power, but is good if they simply correct for lapses. A more realtime scoring system may not have the same flexibility yet may be being used in a more direct feedback manner. Data quality issues will be harder to correct, yet the dependency on the data correctness will be higher.
And do the parents and students have any say?
Because quite frankly it's not really up to the school boards to share private information about children with a corporation.
This definitely sounds like from pretty creepy level of tracking -- and the 'permanent record' we used to joke about as kids might become real. By the time a kid is out of highschool, companies are going to know every detail about them and have that information to use for their own purposes.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
... For very sarcastic definitions of fun.
Between the InBloom data collection, Common Core being implemented in such a way that the quality of education is declining fast, the high stakes testing in New York last school year which only 30% of students passed and which was administered by Pearson without any independent oversight whatsoever, and the governor of New York saying that public schools should be closed if they don't raise said test scores, I really fear for my kids' education. Right now, the teachers are being forced to use curriculum that they haven't designed and can't modify for individual students' strengths and weaknesses. Instead, they need to do what the book says when the book says to do it. They need to teach only what's going to be on the Pearson tests or else their kids will do poorly and then their jobs will be at risk. All in the name of getting "more data" on how our schools are performing. I feel like this is a really bad Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle joke where they're destroying the schools by attempting to measure them.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
I don't think that there's anything right about this, but it seems to me that InBloom is merely responding to demand. As long as there are a large body of helicopter parents, there will be companies that try to make better helicopters.
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
Based on the grammar in the headline, the submitter and any editors that approved this should have been tracked. They clearly never passed remedial grammar education.
It's almost like Gates and Co. have the intent to socially profile people starting at a young age while at the same time convert the entire educational learning process into a format and content delivery system which he can sell at whatever price he wants, along with controlling what kind of media is in the content. It's digital book burning and your kids will only know what Bill's educational system teaches them. Freakin creepy.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
Might have to first smuggle your way out of the US.
Learn Mexican Spanish, go work in a field somewhere -- and run when everybody else does, but not quite as fast.
Get the government to export you instead...
He’s the one
Who likes all our pretty songs
And he likes to sing along
And he likes to shoot his gun
But he knows not what it means
- Nirvana, "In bloom", 1992
true only if he isn't the one driving the truck with the rocket fuel...
In which case, he is also out of a job.
News flash: new powerful tool has great potential for both good and ill!
I’m not trying to discount the potential misuse of data-intelligence such as this, but data-tracking will inexorably become ubiquitous in our lives. Djinnis don’t go back into bottles. Not only will it become increasingly difficult to opt out of such data-tracking, the public will to opt out is diminishing as younger generations concept of privacy shifts. (I lazily try to opt out where I can, but I have no illusions.)
Again, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t care who has the data or how it’s used; and I know this is the cogent point for many in this thread. My point is simply that one shouldn’t get sidetracked by the tools themselves. Focus on the only realistic solution: that being laws that define how collected data can be used, shared, etc. It’s an imperfect solution, but the problem isn’t going to go way for lack of a perfect solution.
Why do you folks see conspiracy in everything Bill Gates does?
Oh, please, fanboy. The summary nor the vast majority of comments have fuck-all to do with Gates, other then mentioning that his foundation is bankrolling this intrusion; most people are talking about either the program or the corporation itself. Stop being so paranoid that you see attackers around every corner, sheesh.
Let's start by stealing private data from kindergarteners!
Aw, c'mon, man, you're not really that dense are you? It's not about "stealing data," whatever you mean by that - it's about creating a lifetime profile of a person that can be used for a myriad of reasons, from targeted advertising to targeted strikes.
Never ascribe to conspiracy what can be explained by incompetence.
Yea... this program is obviously quite well planned out, and by some rather competent people (Gates Foundation and Newscorp). I think what you meant to say is, 'never ascribe to malice what can be explained by ignorance (and possibly idiocy),' which actually describes your post better than any other.
Mark this one as a troll, if you like, but I'm actually just expressing my non-orthodox opinion - which I don't dare do here using my Slashdot login.
That's called being weak in your convictions (and, where I hail from, a total chickenshit). Or, maybe you're afraid that certain reactions to your posts may have a negative effect on your social status... which is deliciously ironic, considering the topic at hand.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
"a geometry teacher reassigning students' seating assignments based on their 'character strengths', moving a green-coded female student ('actively participates: 98%') next to a red-and-yellow coded boy ('shows enthusiasm: 67%'). "
Is it now the female students job to motivate the male? And do you not care that the male's behavior may have a negative impact on the female?
How nice of them to name it after a Nirvana song.
Blofeld teams up with Darth Vader and somehow people still manage to expect something other than an abuse.
Kids, you're going out into the big world now.
At school, as with any contact you have with any service industry person, remember:
Never hand anything over without getting the name, badge number, and a signed receipt.
No, not on your "tablet" -- use the paper notebook we've provided you, and the indelible ink pen.
Then photograph that immediately.
Remember, you're only as good as your database.
Please sign here to confirm you have heard and understood this parental advice.
See this testimony submitted to the Colorado Board of Education by EPIC:
http://epic.org/privacy/student/EPIC-Stmnt-CO-Study-5-13.pdf
Please donate to EPIC.
Then, when you finally toss some crumbs to the monkeys in your cage, they all think it's a reward, and refuse to look any gift horses in the mouth.
Sadly, a Libertarian cannot force his views on another, and freedom cannot spread as does the cancer known as religion.
Sounds pretty creepy.
"That's called being weak in your convictions (and, where I hail from, a total chickenshit). Or, maybe you're afraid that certain reactions to your posts may have a negative effect on your social status... which is deliciously ironic, considering the topic at hand."
Indeed, Captain. That's the way the system works around here. I've tried expressing my opinion before, and I had to create another login afterwords. When in Rome, groupthink as the Romans groupthink.
(Oh, and can't you express your otherwise well-reasoned opinion without cussing?)
I wouldn't have lasted five minutes in this environment. I don't think Bill Gates would have lasted five minutes. So what happens to these students? Will they be excluded from society? Sent to re-education camps?
Will all creativity be squashed completely from society?
Something like this?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GL74sQ44_RA
See, there's more Slashdot orthodoxy: anyone who doesn't think Bill Gates is solidly Evil must be a fanboy. Isn't there a middle ground? Isn't it possible to recognize that, like all of us, Gates has done both good and evil?
paranoid conspiracy theorists which, according to MSNBC, makes you all racists, bigots, homophobes, terrorist, teabagging, hate-mongering, hating haters who hate.
http://www.theblaze.com/contributions/who-has-access-to-your-kids-information-more-people-than-you-think/
http://eagnews.org/medical-laboratory-procedure-results-and-religion-invasive-common-core-data-mining-worries-parents/
http://nces.ed.gov/forum/datamodel/eiebrowser/techview.aspx?instance=studentElementarySecondary
"Now, I doubt any of you would prefer a rolled up newspaper as a weapon against a dictator or a criminal intruder."
Beware technologists bearing gifts for schools out of the goodness of their hearts.
Mission: To provide products that consume time and energy as entertainingly as permitted by the laws of thermodynamics.
Quantizable and meaningfully quantizable are both beside the points of usefully quantizable, and useful to whom.
Case in point: one of my wife's middle school students in humanities (basically English + history) was getting quite competitive and was obsessing over her grades in specific, narrow areas, to the point that her overall performance in class was deteriorating -- her scores on individual tests and assignments were good, but her actual comprehension was lacking. After talking with the parents, my wife floated the notion of not providing the child with a grade, i.e. not quantizing her performance, in an effort to get the child to stop obsessing over the number. The student calmed down, stopped obsessing, and her understanding of the material increased. And, in not being so competitive about the number she was assigned, she became friendlier and socialized more.
Part of the dynamic in this case is something that gets lost by any test-centric approach. Specifically, there's more to school than just the subject matter, particularly at the younger grades. How does one quantize a student's sociability? Friendliness? Cooperativeness? Etc. Many of these different aspects certainly can be quantized, but without any objective measure for doing so, these numbers are meaningless outside of the subjective context of whomever is assigning them. Sure, 1 + 1 = 2. But how does one objectively work out the math for "my pet hamster died and I feel sad and don't know how to talk about it, and don't want to"? Or, "I don't get along well with this teacher because our communication styles are too different, and she reminds me of that horrible Aunt Edith who spits when she talks and always gives me scratchy wool for Christmas, and I'm allergic to wool"?
Humans are deeply contextual. Math isn't. Trying to apply math to human contexts doesn't always work very well, and often has unintended consequences. One of the biggest issues is when a number score ostensibly represents a particular metric, but a deeper inspection of the scoring algorithm reveals that the metric doesn't actually measure what it's supposedly measuring. Quantization represents a gross kind of summarization, and in extreme cases, the baby does get thrown out with the bathwater (that is, all of the detail that's been summarized away). Sometimes the numbers do effectively lie.
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
So, the system tracks what a student is doing in school and helps keep parents (at least those willing to be actively engaged) informed and able to better help their child. Exactly what part of that is wrong?
inBloom is Open Source software (APLv2) a school district can install and administer themselves.
The whole point of the software is to increase the security of this data which is currently sitting in a dozen different proprietary databases. The hope is that the various Student Enrollment Management Systems vendors will be forced by large school districts to use inBloom as the backend for their systems. Then schools will be able to switch vendors without enormous switching costs which in turn will lower the cost of these systems by encouraging competition.
If inBloom is successful it will also, as a side benefit, lower the cost of entry for small educational software vendors as they will not need to make their code compatible with all the various SEMS, but will instead just need to code to one API which has much higher security. As an aside the inBloom framework supports various security policies and enforces sane minimums, while some existing APIs use knowledge of a teachers e-mail address as authentication to access their students data!