למידה, אינטרנט ... ומה שביניהם

Should big data be used to discourage poor students from university?

Young adults born into low socioeconomic families can use an algorithm built on government-collected data to determine whether or not they should bother with their tertiary education

Brockenhurst College in the New Forest is going even further, analysing students’ profiles before they even set foot on campus.

This is hard for you because you think of the students as cuddly bunnies, but you can’t. You just have to drown the bunnies … put a Glock to their heads.

A child born today will grow up with no conception of privacy at all. They’ll never know what it means to have a private moment to themselves, an unrecorded and unanalyzed thought. And that’s a problem because privacy matters. Privacy is what allows us to determine who we are, and who we want to be.

Using online learning, assessment and data analysis, we can more precisely pinpoint what students know and where they are still struggling at the moment they are struggling. We can then use that information to drive better learning.

Education technology, however, is shifting what’s possible – and the benefits for students and teachers could be tremendous, so long as recent attempts to protect student privacy – itself an important goal – don’t get in the way.

to have a chilling effect on the boon of education technology entrepreneurship and private investment currently bringing new tools into classrooms.

The software algorithm identifies exactly what a student does and doesn’t understand on a daily basis and directs each student to online and offline experiences that meet his needs. Teachers in a Teach to One classroom have up-to-date information on how every student is progressing through the material and can act accordingly.

A better summary of year one might be, "Most TTO schools had gains statistically indistinguishable from the national average, one school did substantially better, and one school did substantially worse." I made that sentence up. Here's another possibility, from the paper's conclusion "During year one, student gains were uneven across schools, with only two of seven schools making gains that were significantly above national norms." That would be a better choice for the executive summary.

Gates officials hope the devices, known as Q Sensors, can become a common classroom tool, enabling teachers to see, in real time, which kids are tuned in and which are zoned out.

Existing measures of student engagement, such as videotaping classes for expert review or simply asking kids what they liked in a lesson, "only get us so far," said Debbie Robinson, a spokeswoman for the Gates Foundation. To truly improve teaching and learning, she said, "we need universal, valid, reliable and practical instruments" such as the biosensors.

Still, if the technology proves reliable, it may in the future be used to assess teachers, Robinson acknowledged. "It's hard for one to say what people may, at some point, decide to do with this," she said.

These bracelets, as I understand it, would be worn by students to measure how engaged they are, how bored they are, how they respond to their teachers. If they are bored, it won’t look good for the teacher. If students who show a high level of engagement, the teacher will get credit. The teachers too will wear the bracelet, to find out how engaged or bored they are. If this technology works, it will provide a foolproof tool for teacher evaluation. Or that’s the idea behind it.

I’m sorry. I think this is madness. Is there a mad scientist or psychologist advising the Gates Foundation? ...

This stuff crosses the line from legitimate research to investing in technologies to control and manipulate people by monitoring their emotions.

• מה שאתם מפרסמים אודות עצמכם באינטרנט היום ישאר שם לעד, ולכן עליכם להזהר מאד
• מידע דיגיטאלי הולך לאיבוד בקלות, ולכן עליכם לגבות היטב כל מה שאתם מפרסמים