The data mining company inBloom died, killed off by parent
opposition, but the data mining industry is not dead. Far from it. It is
growing and metastasizing as investors see new opportunities to profit from the
data surreptitiously collected while children are using computers, taking tests
online, chatting online, and practicing for state tests online.
According to this article
in Model View Culture, investors have poured billions of dollars
into new technologies to track students’ movements.
They are also being used to track and record every move students
make in the classroom, grooming students for a lifetime of surveillance and
turning education into one of the most data-intensive industries on the face of
the earth.
The NSA has nothing on the monitoring tools that education
technologists have developed in to “personalize” and “adapt” learning for
students in public school districts across the United States.
The federal government and the law called FERPA (the Family
Educational Rights and Privacy Act, passed in 1974) were supposed to prevent
invasions of privacy, but the U.S. Department of Education loosened the FERPA
regulations in 2011 to make it easier for vendors to data mine. Make no
mistake, this is big business. It will not easily be stopped.
“Adaptive”, “personalized” learning platforms are one of the most
heavily-funded verticals in education technology.
By breaking down learning
into a series of tasks, and further distilling those tasks down to a series of
clicks that can be measured and analyzed, companies like Knewton (which has
raised $105 million in venture capital), or the recently shuttered inBloom
(which raised over $100 million from the Gates Foundation) gather immense
amounts of information about students into a lengthy profile containing
personal information, socioeconomic status and other data that is mined for
patterns and insights to improve performance.
For students, these clickstreams
and data trails begin when they are 5 years old, barely able to read much less
type in usernames and passwords required to access their online learning
portals.
These developments are alarming. Why should commercial vendors
have the right to monitor our every move? Why should the government?
This must
be stopped, and the successful fight against inBloom proved that it can be
stopped.
Parents will have to inform themselves and protect their children by
demanding legislation that puts an end to the surveillance of their children at
school and at home, whenever they are online.
