WebWise - Who's Learning is it Anyway?

The keynote presentation took place on the final day of the WebWise Conference in Baltimore on Friday, March 8, 2013.  Audrey Watters of the blog Hack Education addressed the question, "Who's Learning is it Anyway?".  Specifically, who owns student data? Who owns our education data after we’re out of school?

The learner's voice can often be left out of what's happening in education.  However, the recent open educational movement has made available an enormous variety of learning opportunities to huge audiences through MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses).  Audrey related the MOOC movement to improv as a collaborative, innovative, remixing endeavor.  MOOCs work on the idea that if we have enough data, that we might be able to build algorithms that will personalize education and make education adaptive.  It leads to self-directed learning.

In formal education environments, who owns learners' data?  The student?  Institution?  Government?  Software provider?  Opinions vary widely.  We also need to consider, who has control and who has access to the data?  We are now creating situations where we have very limited access to our student content.  It's locked away in content management systems and apps.  Compare that to the manila envelope that your mom kept your 4th grade art and report cards.  Is that data portable?  Is it secure?  In some ways more, in other ways less.

 

Is there safe digital place to keep all of our data for posterity?  One recent solution has been put forward by the University of Mary Washington, the Domain of One's Own initiative.  When they enroll, students are given an electronic portfolio and control their own domain. They take it with them when they graduate.

 

The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) states that the school is a steward of the record, that's it.  Do you what data is being collected by your school?  Think about all of the data available that potentially could be collected:  Times that you checked in and out of your residence hall, food you purchased in the dining hall, visits to the health center, pages that have been read in course management systems, login and forum comment history. Are students even aware that all of this data is being collected about them?  What if you would be able to review your education data as it was being collected?

 

Students data is of major interest to education companies and venture capitalists.  There is lots of buzz right now about financial opportunities that big data presents.  Audry attended SXSWedu last week and heard this again and again.  Data is the new oil.  As far as these companies are concerned, our lives are to be mined and extracted.  One example: inBloom intends to build a new education database for K-12 education.  They want to build one giant database for all of our students' data.  It would also contain health and behavioral records.

 

Can we build personal data lockers?  The QuantifiedSelf is a recent movement that promotes empowerment through self-tracking.  Within education this implies personal ownership and control over your data.  It requires your own personal definition of learning.  You decide what you want to track and why.  It requires that students understand how to retrieve their data and get it out of systems.  It requires that students build their own data visualizations.  It also requires that we pay more attention to terms of service.

 

What if all of a student's data could not be tracked and mined without a student's consent?  How would students benefit from this shift? The Locker Project is an initiative that serves to give the owner the ability to decide how to control, protect, and share personal data.

 

Terms of Service Didn't Read is a project built on the notion that terms of service are too long to read.  It started as a kickstarter project to give a rating to companies.  They look at how these applications handle copyright, transparency, if there's been a government request for your data, if company gives you advance notice of changes, etc.  It also highlights positive traits, such as Google letting you download your own usage data.

 

We need to make sure that the learner is central to these discussions about how owns their data and how it can be used.  We need to make sure that the learner's data is not simply mined for profit.

 

Something for us to consider in the context of public libraries:  How much control over personal data do our ILS/catalog systems allow our customers to manage themselves?  What about our online subscriptions?

 

-Joe