Education
Related: About this forumGates foundation & the surveillance state
Last edited Mon Jul 8, 2013, 08:16 PM - Edit history (1)
I posted this in GD & it didn't get much traction. Posting it here because I think teachers should know what Gates et al is up to. For teachers to be seen as condoning this kind of thing I think will be intensely bad PR. Also, connections of Gates et al to the surveillance state shouldn't be ignored.
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You heard about the Orwellian 'biometric bracelet' funded by the Gates foundation that's going to be field-tested this fall? I call it the "Orwell Bracelet". But it's actually worse than you know.
The Gates-funded Orwell Bracelet
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation...is pushing to develop an "engagement pedometer." Biometric devices wrapped around the wrists of students would identify which classroom moments excite and interest them -- and which fall flat.
The foundation has given $1.4 million in grants to several university researchers to begin testing the devices in middle-school classrooms this fall...
Gates officials hope the devices, known as Q Sensors, can become a common classroom tool, enabling teachers to see, in real time, which kids are tuned in and which are zoned out.
http://sync.democraticunderground.com/10023163683
It's clear that:
1. This has nothing to do with education. Any trained teacher -- indeed, any engaged adult -- can see, 'in real time, which kids are tuned in and which are zoned out.' That is, in a normal classroom.
2. However, such a device makes a perverse kind of sense in the future classroom envisioned by Gates et al -- a large computer lab filled with students working on their 'individualized' computer lessons, with the lab, lessons, and teacher's script all produced by for-profit corporations, and a minimum-wage 'teacher/lab assistant' whose main function is to identify and wake up the 'zoned out' students.
3. Monitoring the internal affective states of students is an invasive violation of privacy, worse than 'inappropriate' in regard to minors in public schools.
4. The use of such a device opens up new frontiers in surveillance.
5. If allowed into classrooms, the data from such devices will be mined by both the state and large, international, unaccountable private corporations -- for their own purposes. The legalities for such data mining & the 'sharing' of such data are already in place, thanks to a recent legal change. Parental notice is not required for any specific instance of 'sharing'.
In 2008 and 2011, amendments to FERPA gave third parties, including private companies, increased access to student data. It is significant that in 2008, the amendments to FERPA expanded the definitions of “school officials” who have access to student data to include “contractors, consultants, volunteers, and other parties to whom an educational agency or institution has outsourced institutional services or functions it would otherwise use employees to perform.” This change has the effect of increasing the market for student data.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10023165276
But that's not all Gates Inc. is planning for 'education':
"Promoting Grit, Tenacity, and Perserverance: Critical Factors for Success in the 21st Century"
http://www.ed.gov/edblogs/technology/files/2013/02/OET-Draft-Grit-Report-2-17-13.pdf
Sounds innocuous. Who could quarrel with promoting grit, tenacity, and perserverance?
Well, here are some of the techniques the reports suggests could be used in the near future. They are reported together, here and in the paper, because they are implicitly & explicitly connected.
Educational data mining (EDM): “develops methods and applies techniques from statistics, machine learning, and data mining to analyze data collected during teaching and learning.”
Learning analytics: “applies techniques from information science, sociology, psychology, statistics, machine learning, and data mining to analyze data collected during education
administration and services, teaching, and learning."
Affective computing is the study and development of systems and devices that can recognize, interpret, process, and simulate aspects of human affect. Emotional or physiological variables can be used to enrich the understanding and usefulness of behavioral indicators.
Discrete emotions particularly relevant to reactions to challenge—such as interest, frustration, anxiety, and boredom— may be measured through analysis of facial expressions, EEG brain wave patterns, skin conductance, heart rate variability, posture, and eye-tracking.
The authors expand on these bullet points:
Student data collected in online learning systems can be used to develop models about processes associated with grit, which then can be used, for example, to design interventions or adaptations to a learning system to promote desirable behaviors. Dependent behavioral variables associated with a challenge at hand may include responses to failure (e.g., time on task, help-seeking, revisiting a problem, gaming the system, number of attempts to solve a problem, use of hints)...or delay of gratification or impulse control in the face of an enticing off-task stimulus.
Such data can be examined for discrete tasks or aggregated over many tasks. The field of
affective computing is also emerging. Researchers are exploring how to gather complex affective data and generate meaningful and usable information to feed back to learners, teachers, researchers, and the technology itself. Connections to neuroscience are also beginning to emerge...
The field of neuroscience also offers methods for insight into some of the psychological resources associated with grit, especially effortful control. Using neuroimaging techniques, such as fMRI, it is possible to examine which parts of the brain are active during times of anxiety or stress and the effects of some interventions...While it is impractical to use fMRI in the classroom... Ed Dieterle and Ash Vasudeva of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation point out that researchers such as Jon Gabrieli and Richard Davidson are beginning to use multiple methods to explore how specific brain activity is correlated with other cognitive and affective indicators that are practical to measure in school settings....
And what is 'affective computing'?
Detecting emotional information begins with passive sensors which capture data about the user's physical state or behavior ...a video camera might capture facial expressions, body posture and gestures, while a microphone might capture speech. Other sensors detect emotional cues by directly measuring physiological data, such as skin temperature and galvanic resistance.
Recognizing emotional information requires the extraction of meaningful patterns from the gathered data. This is done using machine learning techniques that process different modalities speech recognition, natural language processing, or facial expression detection, and produce either labels (i.e. 'confused') or coordinates in a valence-arousal space...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affective_computing
The authors conclude & recommend: (p. 92)
Recommendation 11: Researchers should continue to investigate how to leverage and
augment new technology-based digital learning environments, using methods such as
educational data mining and affective computing. Research efforts should include assessment
experts, who can apply techniques such as ECD to design and validate measures aligned with
advances in theory.
There's a great deal more, but here's what it adds up to:
The Gates education machine (& by this I mean not only Gates, but all the IT, education and finance companies driving this gravy train) want to use schoolchildren as unpaid & unknowing lab rats, to be monitored not only from the outside, but also from the inside while they are supposedly being 'educated'.
From this monitoring the Gates machine will extract & aggregate its 'data,' to be stored in databases created & managed by the machine, to be 'shared' (& likely at some point sold) with private corporations & used for whatever purposes they deem fit.
Please read the summary about the data collection systems that are being put in place, state by state, as you read this:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10023165276
What's in it for the IT sector is pretty obvious.
The data from schoolchildren will be used to develop & refine the next generation of computing, 'affective computing,' which, while it will undoubtably have some benign uses, will also have many malignant ones, and will generally increase the power of the surveillance state & the 1% to control and manipulate the 99%.
And you will pay for it in the name of 'education'.
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xchrom
(108,903 posts)
enlightenment
(8,830 posts)so many people think Gates is the second-coming.
Smarmie Doofus
(14,498 posts)Largely politicians and educrats, it would appear.
enlightenment
(8,830 posts)I don't often develop a marked disdain for people I don't know, but this guy has always set off my jerk alert sensor.
Not sure why, but it is what it is and time has not improved my opinion.
duffyduff
(3,251 posts)Gates and his billionaire ilk along with hedge fund crooks are waging an overt class war on everybody else, and they are going after the big prize, public education, in order to kill it and democracy once and for all.
felix_numinous
(5,198 posts)Some young geek will learn to hack them.
HiPointDem
(20,729 posts)duffyduff
(3,251 posts)This is bad enough, but his "Common Core" bullshit is what will kill public education once and for all by turning it into nothing but a network of online academies with students being monitored by teacher aides. Software will be by Microsoft with curriculum by Pearson.
This insanity must end.
HiPointDem
(20,729 posts)the national standards aspect of common core i don't really care about one way or another. it's all the add-ons that are pernicious, mainly that common core is going to be used as a vehicle to privatize education, fire teachers, monitor students, etc.
duffyduff
(3,251 posts)It's completely opposed to the concept of local control, the hallmark of public education in the United States. It's anti-democratic. The U.S. isn't an itty-bitty European country--it is vast with a diverse population. One size does NOT fit all in education when public schools must take all comers, regardless of ability.
Common Core is the first step to destroying schools completely and turning them into online academies which would breed a whole generation of sociopaths and people who cannot think for themselves.