Data-mining: Do we really want to know?

"Big data" is appearing frequently in any discussion of technology.  It is the ability to mine huge databases to find patterns or monitor developments.

Generally the data miners claim the wonders of good that will come from the practices--but one has to wonder.  An example is an item from the Globe and Mail titled "Big Brother on campus?"

Data mining is creeping into every aspect of student life – classrooms, advising, socializing. And now it’s hitting textbooks, too,” reports The Chronicle of Higher Education.

“CourseSmart, which sells digital versions of textbooks to big publishers, announced [this month] a new tool to help professors and others measure students’ engagement with electronic course materials.

When students use print textbooks, professors can’t track their reading. But as learning shifts online, everything students do in digital spaces can be monitored, including the intimate details of their reading habits. … [CourseSmart can] track students’ behaviour: how much time they spend reading, how many pages they view, and how many notes and highlights they make.

[Those] data will get crunched into an engagement score for each student.” Faculty members can reach out to students showing low engagement."

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/facts-and-arguments/twentysomethings-dont-know-how-cold-it-used-to-be/article5534829/

Copyright improvements for education take effect

The use of copyrighted materials for education expanded substantially in November when the new Canadian law came into effect.

Some of the gains for education, as identified by Michael Geist, the public intellectual most on top of copyright issues:

*The addition of education as a category for "fair dealing" purposes.

*No penalty for infringement on copyright for non-commercial activity under $5000, reducing potential liability of educational institutions for infringement.

*The inclusion of an exception for publicly available materials on the Internet for education. This covers the content found on millions of websites that can now be communicated and reproduced by educational institutions without the need for permission or compensation.

*The adoption of a technology-neutral approach for the reproduction of materials for display purposes. The current law is limited to manual reproduction or on an overhead projector. The provision may be applicable in the online learning context and open the door to digitization activities.

*The implementation of a distance learning provision, though use of the exception features significant restrictions that require the destruction of lessons at the conclusion of the course.

These open up many areas for use of materials in classrooms and online, without having to get permissions or paying a fee.  The tens of millions currently paid by ministries of education to Cancopy can now be used for other purposes, such as buying more materials for libraries.

The one strange provision in the law is the one that requires the destruction of online lessons at the end of an online course.  However, since many courses are given on a continuing basis, with students signing up at any time during the year, the provision may not have much impact.

As Geist points out, the major gains in the legislation are that user rights have been acknowledged and balanced with creator rights.  Previous legislation primarily enshrined only the rights of the owners of copyright.

Source:  www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/6692/125/

BCeSIS is going, but not soon

This article will appear in the November issue of TEACHER, the newsmagazine of the BCTF.

 

The good news is that BCeSIS will be replaced.  The bad news is that it won't be soon, and getting it right the next time will not be easy.

BCeSIS is the troubled student information system that the Ministry has spent $100 million on in the last decade.  That doesn't count the many local costs and the price of extreme aggravation of many teachers produced by the limitations of BCeSIS.

The Ministry knew by the fall of 2010 that BCeSIS had to be replaced. There had been a disastrous opening of school where the system simply failed to deliver at a crucial time in the school year. In addition, the Pearson corporation bought out the company that developed the software for BCeSIS, the AAL company.

Pearson is expanding its reach into all aspects of education by buying companies and closing down their products. In effect, they are buying a customer base for their existing products. This is what Pearson did--it told the ministry that the company would stop supporting BCeSIS software as of 2013 and offered its PowerSchool student information system to replace it.

Pearson's offer was not accepted and the Ministry started a process of finding another alternative.  The process has included getting advice from consultants and defining design requirements.

The Ministry last summer brought together a group of 44 administrators, teachers and others to define the "Functional Requirements."  Those involved were recommended to the Ministry by superintendents. The functional requirements are a key to whether the new system will be better or worse for educational practice.

Ursula Franklin tells us that "every tool shapes the task."  The student information system shapes what goes on in our schools and a different one will shape it differently.  That is why it must be consistent with what we philosophically believe is appropriate for a sound public education.

The tool shapes the task--so the design of the tool is crucial.  The "functional requirements" are that chance to influence the design of the tool.

The document that the Ministry has produced has 48 pages of what will be told to the businesses that want the contract for the next student information system.  The functional requirements are up on the Ministry website at www.bcedplan.ca/actions/technology.php. 

Not surprisingly, a significant share of the requirements identified are aimed at not repeating the problems we all had with BCeSIS.  It must have a user interface that is friendly and easy to use.  It has to be flexible and eliminate what Assistant Deputy Minister Renate Butterfield calls the "pain points," the many elements that took too much time, were inflexible and didn't do what they should.

However, designing the future primarily based on correcting the failures of BCeSIS in the past is what Marshall McLuhan called driving forward while you are looking in the rear-view mirror.  The BC Education Plan is supposed to lead to some changes in practice in our schools.  What kind of a student information system will serve the needs of a system that is different from the one that existed when BCeSIS was designed?

But designing for the future is difficult when the BC Education Plan is a work in progress, is centred on "personalization," and which has no common definition.  The "functional requirements" document addresses that by calling for flexibility in many of the areas, presumably allowing the software to be shaped to fit the evolving definition of BC's education system.

The next stage of the Ministry process is to issue a request for proposals.  This invites companies to respond with a proposal for a system that would meet the needs defined by the "functional requirements."

Is any company likely to meet all those requirements?  They certainly were not when BCeSIS was developed.  The Ministry says that the technology consultants they hired to survey what is out there said that there are off-the-shelf systems that have been developed for a number of states in recent years.  The US government has thrown hundreds of millions to have states develop centralized data systems.  Unfortunately, that is because the No Child Left Behind and the Obama education policies require states to focus on identifying "failing schools" and creating systems aimed at merit pay and firing teachers based on student standardized test scores.  They are not directed at supporting progressive pedagogy in a high-performing school system.

The Ministry doesn't want to buy software or hardware or run the implementation and training necessary for a new system.  Rather, they want to buy a service for a 10-year period from a company, much as many employers buy a payroll service, for example.  Only a large corporation that is already running a similar service is likely to be able to provide this.  And, of course, the expectations of this system will be substantially more complex than for a payroll system which has a lot of standard components, rather than many flexible elements required of a personalized education system.

The Ministry--and most of the other "stakeholders" except the BCTF--insist that the new system must be centralized.  Two reasons are given for this.  One is that BC has a centralized education funding system and the student information system must provide the information needed for the allocation of funds.

The other reason for centralization is that BC has a situation where increasingly students are cross-enrolled.  Because of this, the Ministry contends a central system is necessary to keep track of students where ever they are.  As an example, a secondary student might have four face-to-face courses at one school and four other Distributed Learning courses offered in the DL programs of three different public school districts and their biology course at the Christian Heritage DL school.  To give the students this flexibility, a centralized system is required to track them.

Neither of these, of course, is the only way of organizing a school system.  The information needed for a funding system does not require all the other personal and academic information about an individual student to be in one comprehensive database. Other provinces don’t have students enrolling in DL courses outside their school district, unless it is through the district making arrangements with another and thus don’t have to track on a provincial basis.

A number of other elements will particularly the raise eyebrows of teachers.

One, for example, is that the functional requirements document suggests direct parent/student access to a portal with information from the teacher "grade book.”  The name "grade book" itself suggests a traditional record-keeping system of summative marks rather than a flexible system of formative assessment and feedback.

The requirements document also indicates that data from the student information system would feed a data warehouse and that “analytics” tools would be provided.  The data in the warehouse could be accessed from the school, district or provincial level.

Built into the definition of requirements is an assumption that personalization will require that every student has their own student learning plan.   Students with special needs would have IEPs that are just more complex versions of the student learning plan, thus facilitating inclusion by eliminating the labels.  This suggests some fundamental shifts in support for students with special needs that need to be discussed as policy issues, not adopted through the design of a student information system.

These and many more issues deserve attention by more than IT specialists and others whose job is specific to the technology.  Every tool shapes the task and it is essential that all teachers pay attention to the shaping of a new student information system.

 

 

 

 

 

"Investors are hungry" for education technology

The Financial Post says investors are hungry for edtech investments.  The evidence for this is an increase in U.S. education technology investments from $52 million in 2005 to $930 million in 2011.  The global "education market" is estimated to be about $2 trillion.

A spillover investor interest in Canada was identified by the Post as well.  Desire2Learn (D2L) raised $80 million from venture capital investments in September, the largest amount ever raised as a software investment in Canada, according to the Post.   The next step for D2L is to "start scooping up smaller startups with innovative technologies."

D2L is a learning management system (LMS), the software used to manage the assignments, marks and other information about students.  It is particularly used in online learning programs, but can be used to manage classroom information as well. 

The company that produces D2L is located in Waterloo, Ontario.  Its major proprietary competitor is Blackboard, which took over the other main Canadian-created LMS, WebCT.  Moodle is the main open source LMS, free to use, but with high time demands for maintenance and upgrades.

The link between privatization and education technology is made explicit in the Post article.  Teach for America (TFA)  is a program that puts university grads without teaching qualifications into U.S. public schools as teachers.  The Post reports that TFA "has trained an education corps of almost 28,000 young teachers interested in education reform. Many of them, disillusioned with traditional classroom teaching, have started private companies or not-for-profits to change the system from the outside."

The Post does have some strategic advice for edtech businesses that might be directed to the promoters of the BC Education Plan as well :

"Smart entrepreneurs dole out their technological solutions in easily digestible chunks that don’t force busy teachers to re-imagine their classrooms from the ground up. After all, teachers still have many other low-tech realities to consider: paper report cards, chalkboards and overhead[s]. The everyday reality of a ringing bell and a packed curriculum makes implementation of sweeping digital reform all the more difficult."

Find the Financial Post article from September 10, 2012 at http://natpo.st/SdZngW

Please, not another $100 million failed system

 

BCeSIS is the troubled student information system that the Ministry has spent $100 million on in the last decade.  This article is a description of the plan by the Ministry to replace it with a new system for the next decade.

The Ministry knew by the fall of 2010 that BCeSIS had to be replaced.  There had been a disastrous opening of school where the system simply failed to deliver at a crucial time in the school year.  In addition, the Pearson corporation bought out the company that developed the software for BCeSIS, the AAL company.  Pearson is expanding its reach into all aspects of education by buying companies and closing down their products.  In effect, they are buying a customer base for their existing products.  This is what Pearson did, when it told the ministry that the company would stop supporting BCeSIS software as of 2013.

To get an idea of how to move beyond these problems, the Ministry hired Gartner, a technology consulting corporation, to look at BCeSIS, consult with users about future directions and make recommendations.

The consultants interviewed technology coordinators and people who had played a role in BCeSIS.  They also developed a questionnaire and ask superintendents to identify who should be surveyed.  In at least some cases, only administrators and technology staff were identified for the survey.

The consultants interviewed me as well.

The report Gartner produced recommended that the province develop another centralized system and that the province should buy off-the-shelf software that could meet the system needs. You can find their report at http://www.bcedplan.ca/actions/technology/gartner-report-highlights.php

The report said that everyone they interviewed, except the BCTF, essentially wanted what BCeSIS was supposed to be—an “enterprise” system where all the data for the system goes into a central database.  It noted that I had disagreed with this—I had said that it should be a decentralized system where data was held locally and only data that needed to be reported provincially should be drawn from the locally held database and sent to a central database.

The ministry then had another consultant contact people who had been contacted before to see if they agreed with the Gartner recommendations. 

In a recent meeting, the ministry offered to brief the BCTF on the developments in proceeding with the replacement system.

I had a phone discussion on October 22 with Renate Butterfield, an Associate Deputy Minister and this is some of the information from that meeting:

*It will be an “enterprise-wide” system—meaning a single point database and access.

*It will be based on a 10-year service contract—the ministry or districts won’t own it. Rather, a company will provide the service.

*It will not be just “off-the-shelf”—in other words, there will be programming to meet the needs identified.  This is essential if it is to meet the changing needs of the BC Education Plan.

*Lots of companies have expressed interest through the processes of requests for information and qualifications to carry out a project of this size.

*The request for proposals will be based on a description of the functional requirements aimed at meeting the administrative needs, the teacher needs and student and parent needs.  Each would have access to only a pre-determined level according to role.

*The request for proposals will be issued at the end of November.

*The functional requirements will be an important part of the request.

*The ministry brought together 44 people over the last summer to create the functional requirements document.  They say that some of those were teachers, but the BCTF was not asked to identify participants, as far as I know. 

*The 56 page list of functional requirements was posted on the ministry web site this week.  It can be found on the BC Education Plan web site at www.bcedplan.ca/actions/technology.php.

*The ministry is looking for feedback which must be posted by November 16.  A web-based survey is on the ministry website at http://www.bcedplan.ca/actions/technology/sis-feedback.php

*The “Application Design Requirements” are

            1)         It will be a single student record/data model

            2)         It will be built on an information sharing/security model

3)         It will include analytics and a data warehouse (analytics tools have been developed by the ministry, including a dashboard provided to districts)

4)         It will include data retention for 55 years

5)         It will be usable on mobile platforms

6)         It should support attaching digital files to student records

*The ministry estimates that the cost of this system will be $10 each per student for the board and the ministry.  That, of course, is only the cost of operating the system, not the hardware, training and support locally required to actually run the student information system.

One of the dangers of consultation on technology issues is that people comfortable with the technology are more likely to respond to consultation.  Since the day to day work of all teachers will be affected by the nature of the student information system, all teachers should spend some time looking at the functional needs.

Again, the functional needs can be found here [www.bcedplan.ca/actions/technology.php.]

 

The Internet is in the ground

We got a good lesson in the realities of the Internet at the BCTF today.  Our access to the world--and the world to us--was cut off when a crew working outside our office cut through the cable that connects us to the Internet.  Our telephones were down as well because we have voice over the Internet.

It reminded me of a book I read just last week called Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet by Andrew Blum.

Blum said the image we have of the Internet is that it is in the air--circulating around us, making connections globally.  Talk of the "cloud" as a place where you can save files outside of your own hard drive accentuates that ethereal sense of the Internet.

The reality, though, is the Internet is actually tubes that carry the data around the world.  It is almost all under the ground or under the oceans, with mostly fiber optic cable carrying the information.

Blum's story is a good read.  He is a journalist, not a techie, and brings journalistic skills to the book.

He travelled around the world, looking at the physical elements--the tubes that carry the data and the hubs that link the various networks to make it the internet.  He watched as a cable emerged from under the ocean with a new connection between Africa and North America.  He went down a manhole in New York where some workers were installing another cable.

He visited the massive server farms of Google and Facebook in eastern Oregon--again the physical places that store data in concrete, physical buildings.  The "cloud" is thousands of servers that are so physical that they require vast air conditioning to cool off the heat generated.

The real irony of our situation of losing the connection to the Internet was that the crew that cut through our cable right outside the office in Vancouver was putting in an additional tube to carry more cables to add to the Internet.

The Internet is really in the ground, not in the cloud.

Print your gun on a 3D printer

Cory Doctorow warns of a scary future--the new 3D printing technology will allow people to create their own guns...and many other handy tools and objects.

Doctorow spoke at the Centre for Digital Media on October 22 to a crowd made up of students from the Centre and members of the BC Civil Liberties Association.  His lecture was entitled "An appliance is a computer with spyware on it out of the box."

Wikipedia says "3D printing is a process of making three dimensional solid objects from a digital model. 3D printing is achieved using additive processes, where an object is created by laying down successive layers of material.  3D printing is considered distinct from traditional machining techniques (subtractive processes) which mostly rely on the removal of material by drilling, cutting etc."

Doctorow chose to talk about a potentially frightening use of this new technology as away of raising issues around efforts to control technology.  He built up to 3D technology by giving a history of the failed attempts to control technology with other technology.

His story started with the days a quarter century ago when people shared software by "sneaker net."  That involved downloading software to a floppy disk in your computer and wearing your sneakers as you walked to a friend's computer and copied the software onto their computer.  He then described how tech companies tried to control this by putting blocks onto the disks.  And then other computer users found ways to break the locks. 

Doctorow followed this with a range of further examples of technology limits broken by other technologies.

The other approach to control is through laws.  The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) was created as a control system, effectively working for corporate interests.  The Canadian Conservative government when it passed the new Copyright Act this last summer went even further than required by international agreements.  The new law makes it illegal to break a digital lock to use software, even if you own the content that is behind the lock--a law adopted at the behest of the technology and movie corporations.

Doctorow expanded on his point of corporate control by describing McDonalds and Walmart as technology companies--their domination is created by the technology of their supply chains.  He also lamented our government joining the TPP--the Trans-Pacific Economic Partnership.  The treaty will likely give even more power to corporations on technology issues--and Canada has signed on to accept whatever is negotiated by the other countries involved, without being able to influence the outcomes.

Back to printing our own gun.  The dangers in this will likely lead for calls for controls both in laws and in technology.  Doctorow described the ways that tech companies imbed controls within the technology that hide the control code so that the owner of the machine is supposed not to be able to find it.  But every time a new approach is created, other techies have found ways of finding it and getting around it.

One of the attempts at controls is to include spyware when the computer is built and its presence is hidden so the user is unaware of its existence.  This allows the behavior of the computer user to be monitored.

Ah, hidden spyware--an explanation for this being an issue of interest to the BC Civil Liberties Association. 

Doctorow illustrated the problem with a story about a school (in Texas, I believe) that provided an Apple laptop to every student with spyware built in that allowed the principal to watch the students, including when they took the computers home and had them on in the room where they were changing clothes.  It was discovered when a student was called in to the office to be challenged on some behavior that the principal could not have known about otherwise.

So how are we going to control the 3D created guns?  Doctorow said he didn't know.  But he was sure that both the legal and technology approaches used in the past would not accomplish the task and attempts to use these approaches will have many negative implications.

Cory Doctorow is a science fiction author and has been active in the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the UK Open Rights Group.