11–20 of 95 posts
Why do people (schools) care? What's the goal here? How does tracking everything a student does help them and how can they justify wasting time and money on this?
Looks like I will be a parent in this mess! My own kids are done, but I have my granddaughter to raise. (Rough, but she is great and will probably make me live longer, so no worries.) This is going to be a fight! That level of surveillance is unacceptable. I have no plan yet, but will in a year or so. Guess it is wake up call time. Seriously, I look back at my upbringing and what I was able to do for my kids, and shu…
School the institution was not a very good place when I was there. It was not actually conducive to learning, peer influences were in general negative, authority figures were often abusive or at the very least ambivalent, and a sense of silent acquiescence to any authoritative demand was ingrained to the point that it takes young people years of their early adulthood to break this and begin building their own lives how they want them. Many of my peers went into massive debt on the presupposition that authority figures know what's best and that the institutional structure will look out for them, and I believe this is the direct result of the basically authoritarian environment they were raised in.
And this, all I had to deal with were grainy cameras in the halls and police writing children tickets. From what I hear from people younger than me, it is much worse now.
Ever increasing spyware, tracking this, recognition that, useless recommendations, ads everywhere I look.
This stuff is eating me up.
I feel like educators watched Ferris Bueller’s day off, and decided they would crush that spirit with totalitarian tactics. What’s the point of this level of control?
Raising kids being spied on is going to create a generation of spiritual fugitives and compromised, sadistic adult administrators. I could see home schooling being the next big tech platform trend, like a Montessori system with a way for parents to co-ordinate.
Looks like I will be a parent in this mess! My own kids are done, but I have my granddaughter to raise. (Rough, but she is great and will probably make me live longer, so no worries.) This is going to be a fight! That level of surveillance is unacceptable. I have no plan yet, but will in a year or so. Guess it is wake up call time. Seriously, I look back at my upbringing and what I was able to do for my kids, and shu…
I feel like educators watched Ferris Bueller’s day off, and decided they would crush that spirit with totalitarian tactics. What’s the point of this level of control?
If you’re talking about teaching staff, they almost certainly have no part in purchasing or deploying these systems.
However, this is in fact a real problem. Our district forced very obtrusive monitoring and blocking software, as well as literal bloat to be installed on the chromebooks - there's like 20 browser extensions that cannot even be turned off, making the already low performing chromebooks so laggy that it's hard to use. Obvious "bad sites" like pirate bay, porn, and etc are understandably blocked, but they also block access to "social media" like reddit and discord.
This doesn't sound that bad yet. The problem comes when students use their own devices instead of the school provided ones. Some sites and services are still blocked at the internet level, but can by bypassed easily. This means that, students with own laptops could communicate with each other using services that chromebook students cannot access. This means that students from families with lower income or with more siblings literally get blocked out of friend groups, with access only to heavily monitored google chat. During distance learning, this problem has only been made worse.
Additionally, district chromebooks are absolutely no less distracting with the various censorship and monitoring and bloat - kids would still much rather browse the limited internet than pay much attention in class. I think there was some study that showed laptops drastically reduced student's academic performance on average. (Though I think access to computer is really powerful for learning how to access internet resources and developing actual knowledge.)
TLDR my opinion and experience on technology + kids
As far as I know, there’s no legal equivalent to HIPAA(which itself only scratches the surface of things) for ensuring the data and logs of these invasive systems stays under tight supervision. Now add in the fact that the people monitoring these systems may have an infinite amount of their own selfish agendas in mind for what to do with the information they gather… well, this will end poorly.