Every child defined in a database

A new database is in place to capture every US student in the name of "personalizing" their education.  It is a $100 million database called inBloom, funded by the Gates foundation to track students from kindergarten through high school.  The database was built by News Corps' Amplify Education subsidiary and turned over to a non-profit to run.

A Reuters report says that in its first "three months, the database already holds files on millions of children identified by name, address and sometimes social security number. Learning disabilities are documented, test scores recorded, attendance noted. In some cases, the database tracks student hobbies, career goals, attitudes toward school -- even homework completion."

Who is most excited about this product?  Entrepreneurs who see education as a market.

By the public release of information about the database, some two dozen companies already had developed applications that mine the database to create products--educational games, lesson plans and progress reports for principals.  The Gates Foundation has promised another $70 million to private companies that develop applications.

Promoters say that the database will transform education by "personalizing." Some examples:

Does Johnny have trouble converting decimals to fractions? The database will have  

recorded that - and may have recorded as well that he finds textbooks boring, adores    animation and plays baseball after school. Personalized learning software can use that   data to serve up a tailor-made math lesson, perhaps an animated game that uses baseball statistics to teach decimals.

Johnny's teacher can watch his development on a "dashboard" that uses bright graphic to map each of her students' progress on dozens, even hundreds, of discrete skills.

"You can start to see what's effective for each particular student," said Adria Moersen, a high   school teacher in Colorado who has tested some of the new products.

Companies with access to the database will also be able to identify struggling teachers and pinpoint which concepts their students are failing to master.

 

One startup that couldbenefit: BloomBoard, which sells schools professional development plans customized to each teacher.

Privacy concerns are bound to arise with so much data collected in one place from many sources.  InBloom promises to guard the data, but its privacy policy correctly points out that it "cannot guarantee the security of the information stored...or that the information will not be intercepted when it is being transmitted."

Not everyone, of course, sees this database as an advance.  Education technology consultant Frank Catalano told Reuters "The hype in the tech press is that education is an engineering problem that can be fixed by technology. To my mind, that's a very naive and destructive view."

Reference: http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/03/04/us-education-database-idUSBRE92204W20130304

With thanks to Susan Ohanian:  http://susanohanian.org/core.php?id=443

 

 

 

News Corp to capture education with a tablet

The corporate dream is to dominate a market.  Two corporations are after the K-12 market in the US, with the global market to follow.

Pearson has its plan in place and has been joined by News Corporation in a race to dominate education as a market.  News Corp is owned by Rupert Murdoch and its entry was slowed by the scandal in Britain over its phone hacking.

News Corp's education arm is called Amplify and it has just announced its own Android tablet aimed specifically at education, according to the New York Times (March 6, 2013).

"Amplify will not sell just its curriculum on existing tablets, but will also offer the Amplify Tablet, its own 10-inch Android tablet for K-12 schoolchildren.  In addition to tablets and curriculum, Amplify will also provide schools with infrastructure to store students’ data," the Times reports.  This is the student information system that News Corp bought as part of its move into education.

The Amplify tablet has the usual touch screen.  If it appears the student's attention is focused elsewhere, an "eyes on teacher" prompt pops up.  Tests on the content provided on the tablet use emoticons of smiley and sad faces--the teacher is supposed to use these to tell which students need help.

The curriculum will include video games and students can take the tablet home to play games as well.

The tablet, preloaded, costs $299 along with a two-year subscription for $99.  It depends on wireless access, but is also available with a data plan.

The US market for textbooks is about $3 billion a year, but districts are holding back on some purchases, waiting for texts that are geared to the new standard national curriculum being adopted by most states.  The handful of textbook corporations will have a more uniform market than in the past when each state has had a different curriculum.

News Corp also owns publisher HarperCollins which will supply content for the Amplify tablet and is also a player in the testing market.

Blogger Walt Gardner asks if the News Corp's move is a case of a camel's nose in the education tent.

 

 

 

BC's 21st Century Education Agenda--analysis

The British Columbia government has embarked on what they describe as a "transformation" of K-12 education in the province. 

Unlike "reform" programs in the U.S., the reform movement in B.C. is not based on claims that the schools are failing.  In fact, the K-12 system is characterized as high performing in the international assessments such as the OECD's PISA and most recently the PIRLS (Progress in International Reading Literacy Study).   Canada scores among the top countries and B.C. generally scores above the Canadian average.

Why, then, a demand for transforming the education system?

The impetus for this reform is a policy document called A Vision for 21st Century Education released in 2010.  It was the product of the BC Premier's Technology Council and was adopted as government policy by the premier of the day, Gordon Campbell.

Cory (Tobey) Steeves wrote his Master of Arts thesis as an analysis of this policy document:  (De/Re)--Constructing teachers and their work:  A discourse analysis of British Columbia's 21st-century policy agenda.

Steeves points out that the focus of the Technology Council report is on the practice of teaching, yet no teachers or education scholars were involved in drafting of the report.  In fact, the voices and values of teachers were marginalized in its development and the planning of its implementation.

The significance of the thesis is in clearly laying out the explicit and implicit directions for the work of teachers in the report and pointing out the inevitable conflict with the values and ideals of teachers.  The thesis has relevance beyond British Columbia as well in that versions of the "21st century skills" agenda for education are being promoted globally, not just in B.C.  Many of those promoting that agenda are the same technology corporations and foundations seen in B.C.

In fact, a human capital agenda of global competition is cited by the technology lobby as the reason that a high quality education system has to be transformed into a high tech education system.

In his discourse analysis, Steeves identifies two concepts central the transformation based on technology:  "learnification," which is essentially focusing education on skills rather than content, and "accountingization," which reduces education objectives and evaluation to an external, technocratic, audit-based numbers game.

Steeves uses a number of approaches to looking at the word choice in the Vision document that define the conception of teachers as technicians and teaching "transformed into a technical relay to achieve predetermined economic goals."  (p. 58)  In this vision, "teachers' work is (only) appropriately aimed at distributing skills to students." (p.58)

Steeve contrasts this "21st century skills" vision of the values and role of teachers with one that he prefers and believes is the dominant view among teachers:  teaching for democratic citizenship rather than being focused primarily on economic objectives.  He concludes the thesis with a call for teachers to "have meaningful influence over policies that regulate the horizons of their work" and for "teachers' resistance to the siren call of deceptively packaged policies." (p. 69)

Premier's Technology Council.  (2010). A vision for 21st century education.  Vancouver, BC http://www.gov.bc.ca/premier/attachments/PTC_vision%20for_education.pdf

Steves, C.  (2012).  (De/Re)--Constructing teachers and their work:  A discourse analysis of British Columbia's 21st--century policy agenda.  Unpublished thesis--University of British Columbia.  https://circle.ubc.ca/handle/2429/43675

Who owns teacher and student work?

The participatory nature of ICT is creating new issues of ownership of work in education.

Teaching has long had a ethos of sharing.  Many teachers have been happy to share what they have developed with colleagues.  And sometimes shared what wasn't really theirs, according to copyright law.  Usually that sharing has been in the form of photocopying.

Teachers developing their own material--particularly those teaching online--are raising new issues. 

Web sites now sell teacher-developed resources --take a look at  tpt (Teachers Pay Teachers) which calls itself "an open marketplace for educators" and now accepts school district purchase orders.  User ratings determine the rank of what is available.  Other sharing sites like Pinterest are used to advertise resources for sale online.

Who owns copyright?

The general belief has been that when a teacher is employed by a school board and develops an online resource it is the property of the employer.  When the teacher has been doing this with a specific contract to develop a resource or a course, there is no issue.  The teacher is delivering what they have agreed to explicitly.

However, not much of the development, at least in British Columbia, is done on that explicit contract basis.  The teacher may be developing or redeveloping materials as a course goes on--is there an assumption that this material belongs to the school district or the teacher?

And what if the teacher does it on their own time,  they use their own computer at home and post it on their own website?  

As long as the teacher creates it and makes it available, but does not use it in a course being offered as an employee, it clearly belongs to the developer.  But, some claim, if the teacher uses it in a course they are employed to teach, it now belongs to the employer, even if done entirely outside hours and on their own equipment.

One BC school district, New Westminster, in its collective agreement with teachers says it will give copyright to the teacher under an agreement that meets two conditions--the board retains rights for non-profit uses and may claim 10% of any royalties.  (see the wording in the references) 

That agreement, though, seems to be unique among school districts and for teachers in K-12 public schools.  Teachers in post-secondary institutions often have much broader claims to ownership than K-12 teachers.

Who owns student work?  Can we anticipate child labour e- sweat shops?

Until recently, that would have been a silly question.  But no more.

An article in the Washington Post reports on "A proposal by the Prince George’s County Board of Education to copyright work created by staff and students for school could mean that a picture drawn by a first-grader, a lesson plan developed by a teacher or an app created by a teen would belong to the school system, not the individual."

A school in Ohio is offering a course for writing apps for children in grades one to six using a program called "App Inventor" and the district is planning to capture revenue, according to an article in a Cincinnati paper.

news.cincinnati.com/article/20130204/NEWS0102/302040049/IN-OUR-SCHOOLS-Local-school-launches-app-class?nclick_check=1

Julia Hengstler, who brought these articles to my attention, raises the spectre of  how this might develop:  "How many schools running these types of app-incubator programs are reserving the proceeds for the schools without consideration for the kids who designed/drove them? Is this the technological version of child labour sweat shops?"

A culture of sharing through Creative Commons

Teachers and students being creative is a good thing.  Making everything into an "immaterial" market is not.

An alternative is to ensure that places to share without payment exist and are promoted.  Developing a culture of sharing can be done with Creative Commons licenses that rely on an ethic of working collectively for educational purposes.

References:

1.         New Westminster Collective Agreement, Article D33 COPYRIGHT

D33.1 The ownership of and copyright to educational materials such as: teaching aids, films, outlines, notes, manuals, apparatus, which have been designed, written or constructed by teachers with materials, with funds, and/or technical or clerical assistance provided by the Board, is vested in the Board. If a teacher wishes, he/she may discuss details with the Board and an agreement will be reached to give copyrights to a teacher on the following conditions:

D33.1.1 that the Board retains the right in perpetuity and without penalty to use these strategies/materials and/or alter these strategies/materials for their use but not for the purpose of profit; and

D33.1.2 the Board may require that 10% of all royalties paid to, for or on behalf of the author, following such release of copyright by the Board to him/her, be repaid, retained or paid to the Board to defray the Board‟s costs of their development.

2. www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/prince-georges-considers-copyright-policy-that-takes-ownership-of-students-work/2013/02/02/dc592dea-6b08-11e2-ada3-d86a4806d5ee_story_1.html

3.  news.cincinnati.com/article/20130204/NEWS0102/302040049/IN-OUR-SCHOOLS-Local-school-launches-app-class?nclick_check=1

4. Teachers Pay Teachers (tpt):     http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/

 

 

"Churn" in the for-profit education industry

The digital age and changing corporate strategies have produced some handoffs among the three corporations that have dominated education publishing:  McGraw-Hill, Pearson and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Apollo Global Management has bought the education publishing side of McGraw-Hill for $2.5 billion.  McGraw-Hill had dropped 11% of revenues between 2008 and 2011, according to Education Week (December 12, 2012).  The head of Apollo's version of the company says they want to put together digital content and services into a package, rather than separate development.

The other two of the big publishers revenues also dropped in that period:  Houghton-Mifflin-Harcourt lost 13% and Pearson's publishing revenue dropped 3%.

Edweek says the situation is a result of several trends:  moves from print to digital, austerity in school district budgets and states deciding not to purchase new textbooks until the new US Common Curriculum is in place and textbooks reflect new content.

While McGraw-Hill sold off its education side, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt came out of bankruptcy protection after restructuring $3.1 billion in debt because of previous acquisitions of other education publishing companies.   They had expanded into a declining market.

Pearson is “acquiring technology to create platforms for its content,” according to the Edweek report. It has bought Harcourt Assessment, “America’s Choice” school improvement company, Schoolnet software, and Connections Education, a virtual school operator.  They bought Connections Education from Apollo Global management that, in turn, just bought McGraw-Hill.

For Pearson, this is a continuation of a corporate strategy of buying up other companies to develop an integrated company that offers one-stop shopping for every stage of the education process.  This was described in another digicritic post.  http://digicritic.blogspot.ca/2012/09/corporate-control-of-education-pearson.html

Apollo, the company that bought McGraw-Hill, owns Phoenix University.  Apollo is closing down more than 100 Phoenix University campuses in the US and putting the savings into expanding its already large online programs.  A US Senate committee has reported on an investigation of Phoenix University practices:

“The report outlines widespread problems in the sector, including overpriced tuition, predatory recruiting practices, high dropout rates and aggressive marketing campaigns. It calls for enhanced transparency, stronger oversight and meaningful protections. The report suggested that the education department create an online student complaint clearinghouse and require all higher education institutions to provide a link on their websites.”  [From the Phoenix, Arizona, Business Journal.]

www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2012/12/12/14mcgrawhill.h32.html

www.bizjournals.com/phoenix/news/2012/10/16/apollo-group-to-close-100-university.html?page=all

 

 

The Age of the Electronic Mob

Against the machine:  Being human in the age of the electronic mob

By Lee Siegel

Spiegel & Grau  (2008)

We are all under attack from the “electronic mob,” according to Lee Siegel.

Lots has been written about the democratic potential of the internet.  For example, Howard Rheingold’s book on the topic is called Smart Mobs: the next social revolution.

 Author Lee Siegel takes aim at this idea in his book, Against the machine:  Being human in the age of the electronic mob.  Siegel characterizes Web 2.0 as a “crude caricature of egalitarianism.”

 Siegel’s challenge to the wisdom of crowds theory of the internet falls into three categories:  its commodification, standardization and radical individualism.

 Commodification is no surprise.  In an amazingly short time, the non-commercial internet morphed into the huge profit centre that it has become.  The commodity for sale is really attention, much as has been the case for the newspaper, radio and TV.  However, in the case of the internet, ironically, what is for sale is frequently the content that has been created by the very person who is also the consumer.  Leisure time is, in effect, turned into work; private experience into a public commodity.

 Some 70 million blogs exist in the blogosphere, growing rapidly toward 100 million.  Siegel see this, rather than imperialism, as the true final phase of capitalism.  It reflects the individual learning to “retail his privacy as a public performance.”  Leisure play is fused with production and consumption.  The internet culture, Siegel claims, operates on a belief “that the market contains all values.”

While boosters of the internet talk about “demassification,” in fact it produces more standardization.  Many of the information sources on the internet provide information through algorithms based on popularity—such as Google search returns.  The New York Times online replaces “All the news that’s fit to print” with sidebars giving links to the 10 most e-mailed, blogged and searched items.

The individual gets customized information through tools like Google Reader—what Nicholas Negroponte calls “The Daily Me” and others call “crowdsourcing.”  Siegel has another word for it—the “youniverse” that only reflects back to the user what he/she wants to hear.  Mass customization is really a new form of standardization.

But it is a standardization that at the same time promotes an extreme individualism through the illusion of choice, access and increased opportunity for individual expression.  These produce the feeling of individual agency, but not the reality.  The anonymity of putting out ideas without a real name attached, as is often the case, encourages a lack of accountability and reflects an absence of the positive influence of institutional ethics.

So what does Siegel want?  Siegel sees his work as being one of unmasking “the emperor’s new modem.”  

Like Neil Postman, who laments “the surrender of culture to technology,” Siegel wants some institutions that operate on ethical principles and social responsibility.  For example, Siegel contends that the “the culture needs authoritative institutions like a powerful newspaper.”  Without that, he suggests, we are subjected to the “electronic mob.”

Yes, but….. Short of a total global ecological disaster, we are not likely to abandon the new tools and networks.  But we can try to shape them, to work at creating responsible, democratic and ethical communication systems that are not new forms of commodification and profit centres.

Ironically, Siegel himself was caught up in 2006 in a blogging situation that was not either responsible or ethical, in the view of many.  He had been a blogger at the New Republic magazine and had come under attack by others in the blogging world. 

Siegel created a pseudonym and joined in the blog wars in defense of himself and against what he called ‘blogofascism.’  Creating a pseudonym to defend your self is labeled as creating a ‘sock puppet’ and he got fired from the magazine when it was exposed. 

Despite this, Lee Siegel does us a favour by challenging the hyper-promotion of the new technologies by those who profit from them and by those who are uncritical proponents of a new world, without looking below the surface at the social dangers that lurk in the very structure of the technology.  Without challenges like his, we will never get to the task of shaping technology to fit our social values, rather than the other way around.

Education Technology--"Oversold and Underused"

A decade ago I wrote a review of Larry Cuban's book critical of the claims about bringing computers into classrooms.  Interestingly, it was the most viewed review over a period of several years on the Education Review web site. 

The Education Review is a wonderful site for giving open access to reviews of most of the books published on education--well worth subscribing to. 

Certainly, people came the review because of interest in Cuban's ideas, not because I wrote the review. He is undoubtedly  the most significant education historian who is critical of technology in education. 

I started the review by describing the ambitions of the presidents of Mexico and Cuba about how computer technology would transform teaching practice.  Looking back over the decade since the review was published, I have to say that Cuban's point in the title of his book still resonates, not just in the Cuba, Mexico and the U.S., but here in Canada as well. 

 

Cuban, Larry. (2001). Oversold and Underused: Computers in the Classroom. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

256 pages
$27.95 (cloth) ISBN 067400602

Reviewed by Larry Kuehn
University of British Columbia

June 6, 2002

When he was running for office in 2000, Vicente Fox—the current president of Mexico from the right-wing party PAN—included in his education platform the placing of computers in every school. In outlining new directions for education in Cuba in the new century, Fidel Castro said he wants—that's right—computers in every school. Will computers in every school transform teaching practice in Mexico or Cuba? Not likely, if the experience in already computer-rich Silicon Valley is any indicator. To find out if computers are changing education practice, Stanford historian of technology in education, Larry Cuban, took a look at the impact of computers in the community where extensive integration seems most likely. He looked into the preschools, Kindergartens and secondary schools where the people who develop the new technologies send their children. He also looked at Stanford University, an institution that feeds the developers of the high tech industries of the Silicon Valley region of California.

 

Read the full review here:

http://www.edrev.info/reviews/rev168.htm