Dr. Kyle Jones recently presented a webinar for the Indiana State Library and published a commentary in the Journal of Intellectual Freedom and Privacy. Dr. Jones’s researches focuses on the information policy and ethics issues associated with mining and analyzed student data in higher education.
From the webinar abstract:
Higher education institutions are increasingly looking to mine student data in order to gain new, actionable insights into student behaviors using learning analytics technologies. Purportedly, these insights can help institutions improve student learning outcomes, increase student engagement, decrease time-to-degree measures, and ameliorate graduation rates. …. there are serious serious threats to long-held values. Student privacy, academic and intellectual freedom, and the trustworthy relationships necessary for successful teaching and learning experiences are all affected by data mining practices that dig into and expose intellectual and social behaviors represented in a wide variety of data.
From the commentary abstract:
College and universities are actively developing capacity for learning analytics, which is a sociotechnical system supported by an assemblage of educational data mining technologies and related Big Data practices. Like many Big Data technologies, learning analytics implicates privacy by surveilling behaviors captured by data-based systems and aggregating and analyzing personal information. Issues of privacy are often linked to concerns about intellectual freedom. Consequently, librarians fervently argue for surveillance-free spaces and places to promote the conditions they believe are necessary to support intellectual freedom. In this commentary, I contrast this common view of intellectual freedom with a separate theory, “positive intellectual freedom,” to show how libraries may be able to participate in learning analytics practices while upholding intellectual freedom as a lodestar guiding practice and policy.
Leave a Reply