The university campus is a really complicated space for a number of reasons. Some of us (more than others) may feel like being in this intellectual bubble is a safety shield that often is portrayed as a beacon of free speech and progressive ideals, but this recent report is telling.. and it is quite frightening for all of us. Long story short, Social Sentinel, a big data tool, has been contracted by university administrations to monitor and surveil student protests, organizing, and other political movements. While this is relevant to the contents and themes of the class, it seems to personally affect all of us more than a lot of the other stuff we have talked about. Last I checked, USC was not one of the listed universities using this surveillance tool, however, my previous institution was, and unfortunately, it was during my time as a student there.
ReplyDeleteDalia Hatalova Blog Post #12/15
Hi Pratik, the topic of students being tracked is very interesting. I wasn't able to access the article because I lack a subscription, but your description made me think of the way that professors can track students' movements on Canvas and Blackboard and how the chats are accessible to hosts of Zoom lectures. In the former two, when students open up links and how they browse the course site is not considered private information in the sense that it is accessible to educators. While this can be a great aid to fields such as learning analytics, it does raise the question of how much privacy students should have on these sites. Also, another question is, what will be done with the resultant data? Based on the results, student experiences on these websites can be altered so that they can learn more effectively. However, would such alterations impede having equal access to educational materials when they are enrolled in the same course? Or does it mimic real-world learning approaches where instructors tailor their interactions with individual students based on their needs? In short, do we want our educational platforms to adopt the methods Facebook and Google do for economic gains to engage users in the attention economy to engage students' attention more effectively in online learning tools?