If you are worried about data mining, you probably dont want to read any of this post or you will ruin your weekend. https://youtube/watch?v=Lr7Z7ysDluQ&feature=youtu.be More from Knewton CEO: https://insidehighered/news/2013/01/25/arizona-st-and-knewtons-grand-experiment-adaptive-learning Note that Knewton and Pearson are partners and are appointed school officials in order to have the access to data as shown in the graphic a few paragraphs down. Explained in the article: The designation is a legal maneuver devised to let noneducation entities handle sensitive student data without running afoul of the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, commonly known as FERPA. Its really long. Here are some key quotes from the article that jumped out to me: -- In education, if you do the work, tagging everything down to the sentence, it starts bleeding data,” says Ferreira. -- [Referring to limitations of Google type of data mining.] “The words in the sentences are correlated in a way that make sense to a human being, but there’s no underlying taxonomy [i.e. Common Core] of concepts you could tag all that stuff to down to an atomic level. In education, there is.” In other words, education is not only another sensible landscape for Big Data to take root; it is an ideal one. -- Meanwhile the stakes of who sees a student’s education record, and what they do with it, have never been higher. Under a Knewton regime a student’s “education record” would not just comprise a transcript and some grades; it would be a “psychometric profile”: a strategic blueprint of her brain, describing her relationship to every single concept in every Knewton-powered course she takes, along with a raft of insights on how she absorbs and retains different kinds of ideas. In the hands of Arizona State instructors or Knewton’s engineers, this information could be used to improve teaching and learning. In the hands of outside companies, it could be used to fashion more effective advertising campaigns. -- “Millions of data per user per day,” says Ferreira. “That’s what Knewton gets today. We get millions of data per student per day. Next year we think it’s going to be in the billions.” -- Nassirian does not trust that the penalties the Education Department has at its disposal will adequately deter these for-profit “school officials” from exploiting their privilege, especially if those companies do so within the gray area of the law. First of all, the department cannot touch the companies themselves. --While the law prohibits the companies from disclosing individual student records outright, it does not prevent companies from capitalizing on the privileged data in other ways that don’t necessarily violate FERPA, says Nassirian — declining to sell borrowed land while at the same time planting trees and selling their fruit, as he put it. --“That scares me a lot, says Ferreira. “I’m sort of damned if I do, damned if I don’t here. I’m sitting on this wealth of data for — each student is sitting on a wealth of data. If Knewton says, ‘O.K., any student can decide for themselves whom to share it with,’ then all students actually lost the ability to not share it. Because every school and every employer will demand it.”
Posted on: Sat, 13 Sep 2014 21:40:27 +0000
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