Anthony Cody recently read Simon Head’s Mindless: Why Smarter Machines Are Making Dumber Humans. This book, Cody says, shows how society is organized to benefit corporations, not people. He then includes a video clip from the CEO of Knewton, who claims that education is ripe for data mining.
He says:
“Education happens to be the world’s most data minable industry by far. And its not even close…. The name of the game is data per user. So one of the things that fakes us out about data in education is because it is so big – like the fourth biggest industry in the world – it produces incredible quantities of data. But data that just produces one or two data points per user per day is not really all that valuable to an individual user. It might be valuable to like a school district administrator, but maybe not even then. So let’s just compare. Netflix and Amazon get in the ones of data points per user per day. Google and Facebook get in the tens of data points per user per day. So you do ten minutes of messing around in Google and you produce about a dozen data points for Google. So Knewton today gets five to ten million actionable data points per student per day. Now we do that, because we get people, if you can believe it, to tag every single sentence of their content – we have a large publishing partnership with Pearson, and they’ve tagged all of their content. And we’re an open standard, so anyone can tag to us. If you tag all of your content, and you do it down to the atomic concept level, down to the sentence, down to the clause, you unlock an incredible amount of trapped, hidden data.
“We literally know everything about you and how you learn best. Everything. Because we have five orders of magnitude more data about you than Google has. We literally have more data about our students than any company has about anybody else, about anything, and it’s not even close. That’s how we do it.”
The day of Big Data grows closer. Arne Duncan sees it. David Coleman sees it. Do you see it?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Data should have a purpose, and that should be to help make us better at being human, which means more helpful, courteous, thoughtful, loving, charitable, etc.
If the new technologies only help us to be more self-centered, selfish, hedonistic and narcissistic (all of which are useless and unproductive [in the real/absolute sense] to economies) then the data colleted and used in these industries is vain, futile and will lead to unsustainable GDP “value” because the good or service is really useless and optional (in contrast to growing food or making useful things that meet real human needs).
We have invented the “cult of the golden hammer” where we believe “cutting edge” ed-tech will produce a better product when there is no data for this assertion. An overhead and acetates is just as an effective delivery-tool as powerpoints via computer and proxima. In fact, overheads and acetates are more cost-effective and sustainable in the long-term because they are cheaper to maintain and replace.
Therefore, why do we believe we need to purchase the new shiny “golden hammer”, when the old “iron hammer” of devices from the past are just as good in education (and maybe even better, or at least more cost effective). Only the manufacturers of the “golden hammers” want to try to convince the consumer of their “better” results, but the data is absent!!!!!!!!!
LikeLike
I was working on this kind of thing — specifications for “tagging” bits of the educational process — over a decade ago, back when it was apparently not the kind of thing the Gates Foundation was interested in funding (or else I might have been assimilated).
Whether or not this approach will work in theory, the Common Core is simply not a rich or consistent enough description of the problem domain to work. Nor is there any reason to think that the accuracy of the “tagging,” even to the Common Core, is going to be done well enough to make this useful.
Let me put it this way, I’ve looked at three questions in detail on the PARCC practice tests so far, and one of them is mis-coded.
http://www.tuttlesvc.org/2014/05/my-government-spent-350-million-dollars.html
LikeLike
Well said, Tom!
LikeLike
“. . . you unlock an incredible amount of trapped, hidden data”
I don’t have to lift the cow’s tail to know where bullshit comes from.”
LikeLike
https://scixchange.missouri.edu/blog-post/data-from-dung/
LikeLike
How did you manage to find that study???
LikeLike
I think I just googled “data in hidden in dung.” The internet is getting increasingly, terrifyingly powerful.
LikeLike
Now too often forgotten. Data: who collects it, why, what are the credentials for those collecting it, how in depth has the research been done, etc? There are statistics and statistics, data and data.
LikeLike
The Education Deformers’ practice of numerology–their Philistine abuse and misuse of numerical information–has made “data”–always in the past one of my favorite words–into an obscenity, another in the long list of four-letter vulgarities.
There are many people, as a result of the deforms, who have had repeatedly confirmed for them the old saw that “it’s easy to lie with statistics.” Well, that’s not exactly so. It’s easy to lie with BAD statistics of the kind that Ed Deformers specialize in (e.g., results from their invalid summative standardized tests; student, teachers, and school evaluations based on those).
From the Rheeformish lexicon:
data-driven decision making. Rheeformish numerology.
LikeLike
“When the right thing can only be measured poorly, it tends to cause the wrong thing to be measured, only because it can be measured well. And it is often much worse to have a good measurement of the wrong thing—especially when, as is so often the case, the wrong thing will in fact be used as an indicator of the right thing—than to have poor measurements of the right things. —statistician John Tukey
LikeLike
The CEO of Knownothing says what? Everyone believes a theory. Not sure if he has experimental data to back up his wild claims of braggadochio.
If it were all true, surely the good private schools would have their children under his awesome data tutelage, instead of having real people judge how they “learn best”.
LikeLike