Not to mention that, at least theoretically, you have a choice to interact with the other people surveilling you. Kids have no choice and are forced to go to school and would be under forced surveillance and data harvesting.
I personally think it is ethically imperative to analyze patterns of student performance and motivation within learning software, with the goal of system/software improvement. Why? Because enhancing the efficacy of education at scale is really, really valuable—and I’m not speaking from a finance perspective. In fact, there is very little money to be made by making online education more effective.
I don’t agree that using data for continuous product improvement should be called “forced surveillance and data harvesting.”
I know there is a real issue with advergaming and “user as product.” This is not what I’m referring to. I’m asking for more nuance.
This is not a new discussion, the research community has long ago established a near-consensus about what are the appropriate ethical boundaries, permissible tradeoffs, and non-negotiable safeguards when studying human subjects, and this goes waaaaay beyond that.
Those consensual agreements you speak of specifically include the use of research to support normal educational practices. That’s why conducting research on normal educational practices is one of the few exceptions to the requirements for informed consent in research. That’s because it was understood that there is an ethical trade off —gathering informed consent from kids in education settings is so difficult that they knew requiring consent would prevent the research from occurring. That’s what I’m saying —rather than “black and white” thinking that collecting data from kids is evil, consider the real societal losses from banning research to improve educational practices— including what is now normal online educational practices. This needs nuance.
For more information: https://research.virginia.edu/irb-sbs/normal-educational-pra...
And then you have the audacity to tell us to "don’t do the extreme outrage machine"?
Just wow.
Unfortunately, our definitions are extraordinarily broad and technically almost anything is human research by the letter of the definition. In practice, we don't call everything that interacts with data about people "human experimentation", but figuring out the exact line is very hard.
E.g. I am a teacher. I do things differently from year to year. I do my best to gather the best metrics on this time series data that I can in order to inform my choices on what I consider best practices. Do I need to get an IRB involved? My institution doesn't have an IRB.
I really wish there were high quality controlled experiments in education that I could rely upon. But the vast majority of the educational research is crap.
Think about, say, Khan Academy. I have a hard time imagining a world where interacting with millions of kids on a protocol is OK, but the second we take some basic metrics to try and figure out how well it works, it's bad. I'd arguably ethically one needs to perform a certain basic level of monitoring and optimization of any intervention.
Intent doesn't matter unless the data collection includes legally binding provisions to delete all collected data in the case of bankruptcy or acquisition. Otherwise this is just a pile of user data waiting to be scooped up by private equity and sold to third parties.
> In fact, there is very little money to be made by making online education more effective.
Right. So when the ed-tech company gets into financial trouble the data becomes an asset to be sold.