[LINK] Big Data - bad or otherwise

[stephen at melbpc.org.au]

Janet writes,

> Here is an education student data proposal.
> Apologies if this has already been linked.
> Building a Student Data Infrastructure: Privacy, Transparency and the 
Gates
> Foundation-Funded inBloom
> <http://hackeducation.com/2013/02/10/inbloom-student-data-privacy-
security-transparency/>

An interesting link Janet. Thanks.

So, as this link notes, the reasonably widely respected "do-good" Gates 
Foundation is now also involved in the creation/promotion of opensource 
education-data software infrastructures. <https://www.inbloom.org>

A lofty aim. However as this link also notes, one fraught with concerns.

As the writer notes, "After all, it’s a project with some $100 million in 
funding from the Gates and Carnegie Foundations and built (in part) by News 
Corp-owned Wireless Generation, with a new CEO who comes from Promethean, 
maker of interactive whiteboards."

Both NewsCorp & Promethean are strongly profit-driven with somewhat dodgy
reputations in the past for their openness, and any charitable heartiness. 

But, from personal experience, any such software for education could well
be very useful. So time will tell if this is simply a grab for the entire  
education/school big data records of a generation of young people, or one
useful, private & secure education record-keeping software infrastructure.

Thus, I would suggest Aussie schools etc NOT jump on board quite just yet,
as this link writer also 'suggests' regarding our children's edu-big-data.

(Link Quote ..)

Building an Student Data Infrastructure

The Shared Learning Collaborative, a Gates Foundation-funded initiative, 
rebranded itself this week. There’s a new name — inBloom, Inc. — but the 
mission and plans remain the same, the new non-profit insists.

That mission is to build an open source, cloud-based education data 
infrastructure in the hopes of addressing a number of problems schools 
face: the lack of data interoperability between the various databases and 
software systems that they utilize and the merits of spending money to 
update outdated administrative IT (versus, say, buying instructional — or 
other — tech and/or versus spending money on something altogether non-
tech).

While we’re seeing an explosion in the number of technology tools that 
schools utilize (hardware, software, apps, the Web), these tend not to 
“talk” to one another nor to the student information systems that store 
students’ education records. That makes for a lot of bureaucratic 
inefficiencies with teachers and staff manually downloading, uploading, re-
entering student information — rosters, grades, and so on — into various 
applications. All this also means that it’s difficult to build a full 
profile on students and to track and support their progress.

The latter is of increasing interest to schools and to states and to 
service providers, particularly now that education is supposed to be more 
“data driven.”

Concerns about Sharing and Storing Student Data

“Data driven” — that’s code for more standardized testing, some folks fear. 
More testing, more hiring and firing of teachers based on testing, more 
surveillance. In that light, it’s no surprise that the Shared Learning 
Collaborative — now iBloom — has faced some pushback from those who link it 
to corporate education reform, After all, it’s a project with some $100 
million in funding from the Gates and Carnegie Foundations and built (in 
part) by News Corp-owned Wireless Generation, with a new CEO who comes from 
Promethean, maker of interactive whiteboards.

A number of organizations — the Massachusetts ACLU, the Massachusetts state 
PTA, the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, Class Size Matters, and 
others — have expressed their concerns about the project, arguing that the 
initiative will have schools sharing “confidential student and teacher 
information with the Gates Foundation. The information to be shared will 
likely include student names, test scores, grades, disciplinary and 
attendance records, special education and free lunch status.” According to 
Leonie Haimson, executive director of the NYC organization Class Size 
Matters, this data grab by the Shared Learning Collaborative — now inBloom 
— is “unprecedented.”

Haimson contends that this initiative, currently being piloted in 9 states 
(Colorado, Delaware, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Massachusetts, 
New York, and North Carolina), has been undertaken without parental consent 
and furthermore will open access to students’ data to third-party vendors, 
again, without parental consent. “‘Open access,’ ‘open source’ and ‘open 
this’ and ‘open that,’” Haimson told me in a phone interview on Friday, 
suggesting that the interest in student data was more about “opening for 
business” and appealing to startups than it was addressing a demand by 
teachers or parents.

Haimson also cites concerns about privacy and security in the cloud, as 
schools move their data storage and servers from a local to a virtualized 
environment, pointing to inBloom’s privacy and security policies that state 
that the company “cannot guarantee the security of the information stored 
in inBloom or that the information will not be intercepted when it is being 
transmitted.” “I wonder if NY state and the other states involved realize 
that they may be vulnerable for multi-million dollar class action lawsuits 
if and when this highly sensitive data leaks out,” Haimson wrote in a 
recent blog post, “especially since Gates and inBloom appear to have 
disclaimed all responsibility for its safety.” ..

Thanks, Janet
Stephen Loosley


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