EDCI 339 Topic 1 discussion post – Edtech Challenges

I found that the “Ethical challenges of edtech, big data and personalized learning: Twenty-first century student sorting and tracking” paper by Regan and Jesse proposes some very interesting ideas and revelations on a very important and surprisingly nuanced topic. They argue that the conventional wisdom regarding challenges in edtech revolve around the broad category of privacy, and that they are a gross oversimplification. The current laws and regulations that apply to edtech mostly have to do with privacy. They do not do enough to effectively provide adequate safeguards for students against potential harm. Rather than simply looking through a privacy lens, the paper suggests that it is necessary to really open up the black box of what the edtech applications do, how they work, how they collect information and how their algorithms operate on that information. They provide a very interesting suggestion to address the challenges that come with adopting edtech, where they propose that a neutral, third-party software be used to review the algorithms of the edtech application to ensure an unbiased evaluation. In my personal opinion, this is definitely a step in the right direction. However, how can you ensure that this third-party reviewing software is truly neutral and unbiased? Just like the edtech applications, they can also have their own biases. Furthermore, such software based evaluation tools really only make sense where automating away the labour of doing such an evaluation provides such massive savings that its benefits outweighs the potential harm of anything the software may have overlooked due to some inherent flaw that it has. In such situations, since such technologies are usually evaluated and adopted by a whole school district at once or some higher level educational authority, it is possibly more prudent to have a committee consisting of a diverse set of expert and stakeholder representatives to manually evaluate it and come to a collective conclusion. This makes it much easier to have an evaluation of the edtech platform that is much more thorough and balanced. Or such an approach can even be used in conjunction with third-party reviewing software. less

1 Comment

  1. Ryan Banow

    Hi Joseph,
    You highlight some important points. At USask, where I primarily work, there is a Technology Assessment process that tools go through. You can find it here: https://teaching.usask.ca/learning-technology/technology-assessment/what-is-tech-assess.php. Does that meet what you are suggesting? What is it missing in your opinion? Can you find info on similar processes at other schools?

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