Bob Braun’s controversial article about Pearson spying on students’ social media accounts is online again, after having disappeared last night for some hours in a “denial of service.”
I hope Bob Braun is able to get to the bottom of the matter and tell us why his website was “suspended” last night. Was he hacked? Did the site crash because of the number of users trying to access it at the same time? I hope we find out.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
We should ban or limit secrecy requirements on teachers, administrators, parents, and students, and the ability of corporations and government to bully people who disclose important information to the public.
The use of corporate providers for public services is destroying what
transparency we have, because the sorts of intellectual property protections
about disclosure are being brought in as part of standard corporate practice.
But what might be appropriate for private businesses is not right for public schools.
However, often these actions are used to unfairly limit the liability of a corporation or unfairly limit competition.
The idea would be to do the following:
1. Prohibit or limit when and what providers and the government can demand of
public employees to be kept secret.
2. Prohibit or limit what providers and the government can demand of the
public to be kept secret.
3. Provide exceptions to 1 and 2.
4. Provide severe penalties for violations of 1–3.
I wonder if this story became so popular that too many people wanted to read it at the same time that the hosting website became overwhelmed? Possibly because of readers from this site?
It was a Denial of Service attack. It was deliberate.
How do you know this? If you can provide proof, that would be awesome, another weapon provided to us by our adversaries paranoia and over reach.
The story Diane reported said that Braun claimed the attack was a denial of service. Such events don’t happen by chance.
It was up at 8:15 AM this morning (Sunday), but now it’s down again at 4:30 PM, which points to a site bandwidth issue rather than a denial of service attack.
Phyllis, the claimed attack (see Diane’s story) was yesterday. The fact that there is traffic congestion today proves nothing.
These things are sometimes hard to nail down, particularly when a DNS attack is carried out in a sophisticated manner in order to look like “innocent overload”, using coordinated simultaneous site access from many different IP addresses quite unbeknownst to the owners of the computers at those addresses.
It is certainly possible that Pearson (or some other organization or even individual) could have implanted malware on many student (or other external) computers for the very purpose of DNS, perhaps to be initiated whenever it was determined that a “threat” (Bob Braun’s article?) existed.
If it was deliberate, whoever did it could potentially be subject to criminal prosecution Though the likelihood that they would be in this case is admittedly pretty low. Pearson is a multi-billion dollar company and a multinational to boot.
It still will not load for me.
I opened it, and only the beginning loaded. It took about 15 minutes to get the entire post.
Try this link.
http://bigeducationape.blogspot.com/2015/03/pearson-streamlines-social-media.html
When I copied the Washington Post link to Valerie Strauss’ article, to send to a local education reporter, three invisible characters were added to the link: “%20” which made the link fail. (I always test my links before sending a message.) I have never seen this type of error before. If I’m the only person with this type of error, then the error is mine; however, if other readers are experiencing errors then we have an interesting situation.
http://www.w3schools.com/tags/ref_urlencode.asp
I must have arrived early because it loaded for me, and I had a chance to read it.
“We have an obligation to investigate any case where there is the suggestion that you’ve acted improperly. If you are found to have broken the rules, you could face one of the following penalties:
a warning
the loss of marks for a section, component or unit
disqualification from a unit, all units or qualifications
a ban from sitting exams for a set period of time.
We understand that sometimes you are going to talk about us and our assessments with your friends. During stressful periods, some comments may not be very flattering. However, we’d like to ask you to act responsibly when discussing us or your exams and coursework online.”
Okay, so do public schools have an obligation to cooperate with or enforce the contractor’s rules when the rules are applied to students? What if there’s a disagreement on what constitutes a violation? What if the contractor determines the 5th grader didn’t “act responsibly” and notifies the school but the school says “that comment she tweeted is within our school rules or code-no violation”? What if the school goes further and says “enforce your own rules, contractor- we don’t want any part of a dispute between contractor and student?”
children are under no obligation to not talk about the tests…. IF they have had to sign confidentiality forms, THEN there’s the legal issue of whether or not the law would agree that minors are competent to sign them and if they haven’t signed anything, then Pearsons and the various school administrations have no right to harass them about what they do and do not talk about in any forum – kids’ work is their own intellectual property and they have freedom of speech rights…
What if there’s a conflict between the school’s duty to the student and contractor’s duty to monitor/enforce the interests of the contractor? The contractor is just providing a service but the public school has a much broader duty to the student, and schools have their own set of rules, all of which were designed to comply/align with state and federal law. Which interest trumps there? Do they just go to the testing contract and let the terms of that govern everything?
I follow several blogs, using netvibes, and it is so weird how so many of them are covering stories that are starting to overlap and ALL of them have to do with over reach by either the government and/or corporations or more often than not both together! This is out of hand, it is starting to seem like McCarthyism all over again. I don’t worry about what petitions or blogs I’ve signed but should I be? It’s starting to seem like it.
I think they really get into treacherous waters with testing, for three reasons. The first is the school’s role re: the student and the fact that public schools are state entities, and the second is that students aren’t adults and students are mandated to take these tests. Arguably the student didn’t agree to anything. They had no choice.
One can say “well, they chose to go on social media so they agreed to the terms of those services, even by default” but that’s not true of a state-mandated test. That’s even true of the tests older students take. If one is taking the ACT/SAT voluntarily that’s a very different situation than if the state says “no HS diploma unless you take this test!”
Too, the CC question is only half the issue. The CC tests require students to submit longer responses-essays. Does the student own that work or does Pearson?
Say the student really likes the response they wrote to a reading/test selection and displays the response publicly, word for word what they submitted as an answer. Obviously the essay reveals the question that was asked. Is that a violation? They’re not using any Pearson content. They’re not even mentioning the test question at all. They just say “here’s this great little essay I wrote at school about a poem- please read and share” and every student reading it says “that was a test question!” Do Level Three security alarm bells go off, or whatever?
I believe that student responses become the property of Pearson.
If someone has other information, please correct me.
pearsonschool.com
Terms of Use:
“You hereby forever authorize Pearson to use and/or authorize others to use and modify all or part of your Postings in any manner, format, or medium that Pearson or such other parties see fit. You shall have no claim or other recourse against Pearson or any authorized third parties for infringement of any proprietary right in Postings.”
You have just shown that Pearson considers students to be nothing more than commodities to be exploited for profit. This is what’s made clear in their terms of use.They are an extractive industry, nothing more.
Students are exploited as well as teachers. There are other online companies which have some interesting information in their terms of use. Not many people read these terms but they should.
TeachScape.com is an online company that allows teachers and administrators to upload data and documents for teacher evaluations.
Here is but a small excerpt from their terms of use.
(Most teachers have no idea what they are agreeing to when they use this site.)
“All comments, feedback, postcards, suggestions, ideas, and other submissions disclosed, submitted or offered to Teachscape on or by this Site or otherwise disclosed, submitted or offered in connection with your use of this Site (collectively, “Comments”) shall be and remain Teachscape’s property. Such disclosure, submission or offer of any Comments shall constitute an assignment to Teachscape of all worldwide rights, titles and interests in all copyrights and other intellectual properties in the Comments. Thus, Teachscape will own exclusively all such rights, titles and interests and shall not be limited in any way in its use, commercial or otherwise, of any Comments. Teachscape is and shall be under no obligation to (i) maintain any Comments in confidence; (ii) to pay any compensation for any Comments; or (iii) respond to any Comments.”
This story is now on the Washington Post at
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2015/03/14/pearson-monitoring-social-media-for-security-breaches-during-parcc-testing/
and my favorite blogger, after Diane, Fred Klonsky has a great cartoon
I wonder how all of that legal nomenclature claiming to give Pearson ownership of a student’s work balances against the student indicating a copyright on their work on the exam?