Is Silicon Valley Standardizing ‘Personalized’ Learning? – Education Week

Is Silicon Valley Standardizing ‘Personalized’ Learning? – Education Week

by | May 31, 2018 | California, Education Week, Facebook, K12 Education, National

Education Week logoWith more than 2 billion monthly active users worldwide, Facebook has an effective monopoly on digital news and information distribution. Any troubling behavior on the site has the power to affect many lives. The recent case of Cambridge Analytica’s mining of Facebook data for political means is an invasion of personal privacy on a whole new level. But Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s seemingly helpful support of technology-driven personalized education represents a different kind of monopolizing threat that we shouldn’t overlook.

Personalized learning, or tailoring curricula and instruction to students’ academic needs and personal interests, seems to mean a lot to Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan—at least according to their investment moves. More than two years ago, they announced plans to invest hundreds of millions annually in whole-child personalized learning through their limited-liability company, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. Just this month, they gave $14 million to support schools in Chicago, both public and private. And they recently teamed up with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to fund and develop a host of “state of the art” education initiatives, including personalizing math instruction.

Read full article here, may require subscription to ED Week

School Officials Urge Congress to Update Student-Data Privacy Law

School Officials Urge Congress to Update Student-Data Privacy Law

by | May 19, 2018 | Betsy DeVos, Education Week, Facebook, K12 Education, National, US Department of Education

Education Week logoSchool officials urged federal lawmakers to update the law governing the handling and disclosure of student data, saying that it must provide more clarity to education leaders and reflect challenges educators face in the digital learning environment.

In a hearing at the House education committee Thursday, school leaders and advocates also discussed how they try to safeguard important data on children, from faculty training to limiting the type of data that’s collected.

Data privacy issues in general have become more prominent this year following revelations about the mishandling of Facebook users’ data, for example. It’s unclear to how changes to how Facebook handles data might impact K-12. But altering how federal law deals with these complicated data-privacy issues has proven to be a challenge on Capitol Hill.

Practices that rely on students’ data can “greatly enrich the student experience” and inform teachers’ work, said Rep. Virginia Foxx, R-N.C., the committee chairwoman. However, she also said in opening remarks, “Questions of privacy will always accompany any discussion of student data collection, as well they should.”

She stressed that more must be done to protect student data, including updating the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), first enacted in 1974…

Read the full article here: May require an Education Week subscription.