BLEND-ONLINE : Call for Chapter Proposals– Privacy and Remote Learning
Digital Scholarship Initiatives at Middle Tennessee State University invites you to propose a chapter for our forthcoming book.
Working book title: Privacy and Safety in Remote Learning Environments
Proposal submission deadline: January 21, 2022
Interdisciplinary perspectives are highly encouraged
Topics may include but are not limited to:
- Privacy policies of 3rd party EdTech platforms (Google Classroom, Microsoft Teams, Schoology, etc)
- Parental “spying” and classroom privacy
- Family privacy and synchronous online schooling
- Online harassment among students (private chats, doxing, social media, etc)
- Cameras in student private spaces
- Surveillance of student online activities
- Exam proctoring software and privacy concerns
- Personally Identifiable Information in online learning systems and susceptibility to cybercriminals
- Privacy, storage, and deletion policies for recordings and data
- Handling data removal requests from students
- Appointing a privacy expert in schools, universities, or districts
- How and why to perform security/privacy audits
- Student attitudes about online privacy
- Instructor privacy/safety concerns
- Libraries: privacy policies of ebook platforms
- Libraries: online reference services and transcripts
- Identity authentication best practices
- Learning analytics and “big data” in higher education
More details, timelines, and submission instructions are available at dsi.mtsu.edu/cfpBook2022
The dark side of education research: widespread bias
Johns Hopkins study finds that insider research shows 70 percent more benefits to students than independent research
https://hechingerreport.org/the-dark-side-of-education-research-widespread-bias/
The study, “Do Developer-Commissioned Evaluations Inflate Effect Sizes?”
There are a number of reasons for why developer studies tend to show stronger results, according to Wolf, whose full time work is to evaluate educational programs. The first is that a company is unlikely to publish unfavorable results. Wolf speculates that developers are more likely to “brand a failed trial a ‘pilot’ and file it away.”
This isn’t the first study to detect bias in education research. The problem of hiding unfavorable results from publication was documented as far back as 1995. In 2016, one of Wolf’s co-authors, Robert Slavin, wrote about the positive results that researchers get when they devise their own measures to prove that their inventions work.
https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/45396/whats-at-risk-when-schools-focus-too-much-on-student-data
The U.S. Department of Education emphasizes “ensuring the use of multiple measures of school success based on academic outcomes, student progress, and school quality.”
starting to hear more about what might be lost when schools focus too much on data. Here are five arguments against the excesses of data-driven instruction.
1) Motivation (decrease)
as stereotype threat. threatening students’ sense of belonging, which is key to academic motivation.
2) Helicoptering
A style of overly involved “intrusive parenting” has been associated in studies with increased levels of anxiety and depression when students reach college.
3) Commercial Monitoring and Marketing
The National Education Policy Center releases annual reports on commercialization and marketing in public schools. In its most recent report in May, researchers there raised concerns about targeted marketing to students using computers for schoolwork and homework.
Companies like Google pledge not to track the content of schoolwork for the purposes of advertising. But in reality these boundaries can be a lot more porous.
4) Missing What Data Can’t Capture
5) Exposing Students’ “Permanent Records”
In the past few years several states have passed laws banning employers from looking at the credit reports of job applicants.
Similarly, for young people who get in trouble with the law, there is a procedure for sealing juvenile records
Educational transcripts, unlike credit reports or juvenile court records, are currently considered fair game for gatekeepers like colleges and employers. These records, though, are getting much more detailed.