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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."
Sounds a little like Brave New World, too
Or does it magically become Orwellian just because a tablet is involved?
It is Orwellian because it tracks data well beyond academic results, such as student's outside interests and "attitudes", and makes that data available to for-profit commercial interests: "federal law allows for sharing of it with private entities and then used to sell commercial education-related products ... The businesses operating in the sector call the data contained within the database a treasure trove..."
That's why many parents are calling this Orwellian. And they have NO CHOICE. It cannot be opted out of.
Corporations do not have SWAT teams, and cannot generally imprison you or kill you for "resisting arrest" ("stop resisting!" shouted over and over to the dying man unable to breathe whose chest is compressed by the weight of 5 officers). Corporations do not generally shell thousands of innocents to death. So no, they are not "worse than any government". It is far more dangerous for the government to have this data. Marketing is bad, and annoying, but it is nowhere close to what governments do to people they don't like.
Random Corp cant hold a gun to my head. Great, I feel so much better.
They can however, prevent me from obtaining employment (and being self-employed is not always an option folks), obtaining credit (That's an awfully nice credit score you have there...be a shame if something...happened...to it.), track my every movement through various means, take me to court on bogus charges then drop them forcing me to miss days of work to defend myself (if I am already employed), or bill me for services they did not provide and force me to spend more time and money fighting them in court.
They might not be able to kill me, but they sure as heck can make me want to kill myself. Is that really any better?
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."