“Anyone who has observed the enthusiasm for training students to show more “grit” or develop a “growth mindset” should know what it means to focus on fixing the kid so he or she can better adapt to the system rather than asking inconvenient questions about the system itself. Big data basically gives us more information, based on grades, about which kids need fixing (and how and when), making it even less likely that anyone would think to challenge the destructive effects of – and explore alternatives to – the practice of grading students.
Here’s a rule of thumb for you: An individual’s enthusiasm about the employment of “data” in education is directly proportional to his or her distance from actual students.
By now we should have realized that methods leave an imprint on goals and technology in particular has a causal impact.
The reckless reduction of human beings to numbers is offensive regardless of what’s done with those numbers. An aerial view by definition fails to capture the individuality of the people on the ground, and there’s a price to pay if we spend our days looking at humanity — or even literature — that way.
Part of the problem is that we end up ignoring or minimizing the significance of whatever doesn’t lend itself to data analytics.
Noam Scheiber, a reporter who covers workplace issues, recently observed that big data is “massively increasing the power asymmetry between exploiters and exploitees.”
At the same time that this approach reduces human beings to a pile of academic performance data, it also discourages critical thought about how the system, including teaching and evaluation, affects those human beings.
Author: Ryan Boren
Howdy. I’m Ryan Boren (he/they) with Stimpunks Foundation, a nonprofit by and for neurodivergent, disabled, and queer people. I’m a retired tech worker turned wannabe sociologist.
CV: I helped start WordPress.org, WordPress.com, WordCamp.org, and Automattic.com, among the first fully distributed organizations.
About: queer, vegetarian, autistic, bipolar, hyperlexic, power wheelchair user, neuromuscular disease
Location: Dripping Springs, Texas, USA, named after the springs at the Milk House Branch of the Edwards Aquifer, a gathering place for the Tonkawa people, who were here before us. We’re a little west of Austin in Texas Hill Country.
Current SpIns: pens and paper, everyday carry/coping, punk rock, queercore, Ezra Furman, The Linda Lindas, food anime, Thai fisherman pants, Tokyo street fashion, solarpunk, solar energy, heat pumps, electrification, library economies, third places, epistemic injustice, scrollytelling
“Give the world the best you have, and you’ll be kicked in the teeth. Give the world the best you have, anyway.”
“If Donald Trump has his way, autistic people will become increasingly stigmatized, again, by a 20-year-old damaging, fraudulent sleight-of-hand that has haunted many of them for their entire lives.”
In our tech regrets blameless post-mortem for breaking democracy, don’t forget helping oligarchs and Christofascists destroy public education.
Channel tech regrets into building an indie ed-tech that confronts injustice instead of amplifying it.
“If a direct confrontation of injustice is missing from our strategies or initiatives or movements, that means we are recreating the conditions we’re pretending to want to destroy.”
“So then, I have to wonder: why should we trust these revelations (or revelators) to guide us moving forward? Why not trust those of us who knew it was bullshit all along and who can tell you the whole history of a bad idea?”
“Let’s get structural and social instead of repeatedly, endlessly bikeshedding the deficit model with new coats of mindset marketing and behaviorism.”
“It essentially boils down to whether one chooses to do damage to the system or to the student”, and mainstream ed-tech has chosen to damage students.
Turning inwards to psychology, rather outwards to the political context, is precisely what gives us ‘lone wolf’ analyses of white supremacy.
Source: www.longviewoneducation.org
