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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
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.”
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?
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.
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.
Not magically and not because of the tablet. But when one actor becomes the keeper, gatekeeper and salesperson through yet another "nice-data-you-have-there-maybe-we-should-hold-that-for.you"-based (ie. cloud) solution, then yes, we are moving closer to an Orwellian concept (with a few corporate, not one state, big brothers).
It is not because the teacher is marking it on a tablet, it is because one big corp is going to be analysing, using and reselling the data from everything both student and teacher does to advertisers, government and related industries that this becomes a problem.
IAIFARSIJDPOOTV - I Am In Fact A Reality Star; I Just Don't Play One On 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?
Personally, one of the things I hated the most in school was being used like this to "help the teacher manage the unruly ones". Way to go, teacher, rewarding the students who do a good job by (implicitly) giving them a crappy job.
for i in `facebook friends "=bday" 2>/dev/null | cut -d " " -f 3-`; do facebook wallpost $i "Happy birthday!"; done
Exploit? All of that data is on an unencrypted USB stick on the table next to a marketing exec having an outdoor espresso lunch right now.
New rule of thumb for data: If you've collected it, the internet already knows.
May the Maths Be with you!
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.
I agree with you that the particular example of the teacher checking the student's reading speed and accuracy in real time is not Orwellian.
What I am more uncomfortable with is the example of:
Here we have a system where, early on, students are being sorted by behavior -- or more accurately, on the teacher's subjective impression of their behavior. Let's hope the teacher is totally fair and unbiased, because anyone who's too different from his/her preconceptions is going to get labeled with an official-looking percentage. My concern is that these numbers, which sound very arbitrary and subject to emotional judgments, will create a self-fulfilling prophecy.
In school, did you ever have a teacher you just didn't click with? I hated my sixth-grade math teacher's guts, and as far as I can tell that sentiment was totally mutual (I remember her body language.) But for me, it was no problem, because the seventh-grade math teacher didn't give a damn what Mrs. G. thought. With this system, Mrs. G. could have labelled me red (40%) in some "character" category and that data would stay with me into seventh grade. So the seventh grade teacher could say "oh, little Sir Garlon is an insubordinate slacker, I'd better not waste my limited time on him -- I'll concentrate on the yellow students because I need to end the year with 50% green to get tenure."
This is more or less what happened to my brother, whose IQ is 10 points higher than mine but who had a hearing disability that made the educational system sideline him. Now he's driving a truck instead of curing cancer or building space probes.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
it's easy to argue both sides of this Gate's Foundation initiative to track student progress
Then go ahead and argue the pro side, because I seem to lack the imagination (or ability to lie without laughing at the idea tht anyone would believe me). Students have been tracked for many years - they're called school records. Part of them was kept confidential, and there is no reason to share them beyond a student's parents, teachers, and maybe a few school officials. Let's keep it out of the "cloud". Woz was right - the "cloud" is dangerous and downright un-American. People should own their own data.
isn't this the promise of the Network Society
What the hell is a "network society", and where do I go to opt out (and opt out on my children's behalf)? Sounds a lot to me like the old society, except with information needlessly given to certain parties with a vested interest.
What's sad thing here is that Gates is probably well-meaning.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
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.
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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.
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."