All Your Child's Data Are Belong To InBloom 211
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."
Speaking of classic literature... (Score:5, Insightful)
What's the problem? (Score:2, Insightful)
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?
Re:What's the problem? (Score:5, Insightful)
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..." [educationnews.org]
That's why many parents are calling this Orwellian. And they have NO CHOICE. It cannot be opted out of.
I have a charity and don't have to pay tax (Score:5, Insightful)
"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.
Re:What's the problem? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Objecting to InBloom or the data collection? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:it's much worse than the summary indicates (Score:3, Insightful)
Corporations (which control the government effectively anyway) are worse than any government at this point.
Re:All it takes is one zero day exploit... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:the debate rages on... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:it's much worse than the summary indicates (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:The Snake and the Crab (Score:4, Insightful)
What's sad thing here is that Gates is probably well-meaning.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Yeah, but ... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Speaking of classic literature... (Score:5, Insightful)
Sounds to me like those people think the essentials of education can be quantized. Sure some measurements are important, but that's not all there is to learning. And those students probably will start valuing themselves by their ranking, and only have those numbers in their heads.
I can see how HR departmants will be fans. Another method, like the IQ statistic, to assign numbers to people. What a dumb idea to get yourself ranked.
Re:What's the problem? (Score:2, Insightful)
Its not a new thing that people place "judgement" on certain types of attitudes.
But it IS a new thing that we track this subjective assessment in databases which are no longer private to the student/parents/teachers. It IS a new thing that "outside interests" outside of the school domain are logged in the same database. It IS a new thing that all this information can be sold and will follow students forever.
Re: What's the problem? (Score:2, Insightful)
Simple: take it to its extreme. Every class mark, outburst, school habit from k-12 will be evaluated fr your college transcript.
You have the grades, but so do 500 other applicants, and there are 2 slots left. And you happen to make the top 4, but you have recorded 'play problems' in grades 4-6, while the others don't. And now your rejected from college. Better off at a trade school, right?
Point is, this moves toward a direction where future workers are highly redirected based on a learning system that only benefits those who are predisposed to that type of classroom learning environment.
I'd be more receptive to this if steps in classroom size, as well as curriculum rewrite every few years weren't a concern, but that isn't happening. Instead we throw technology at it and hope it fixes the problem. There's 40+ years of Ed. Psych. data available almost proving that technology does not directly improve the learning ability in a child.
When the hell did technology become a learning savior, and who the hell thought it was a good idea?
Re:it's much worse than the summary indicates (Score:4, Insightful)
Thankfully I did read your comment correctly. /. crowd just cannot read between the lines and require points to be spelled out. Perhaps, if they received a better education and used their HOTS (High Order Thinking Skills) which was under discussion a few years ago when Texas wanted to ban this in schools, they would have understood what you meant in your submission.
I agree with you.
It seems that a large portion of the
Now you could consider this comment a bit of a troll. It is undeniable. However, just try to understand the point that is being made by a submitter before modding it. (This submission included).
Re:Speaking of classic literature... (Score:2, Insightful)
Everything can be quantized, the only question is whether doing so is better than not doing so. You've offered no evidence either way.
Re:it's much worse than the summary indicates (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Re:Speaking of classic literature... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: Speaking of classic literature... (Score:4, Insightful)
This however is mostly forgotten I'm the corporate, and apparently academic world.
Anecdotes, data, and all that, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.