work in a format that’s actually readable by humans and machines and that’s moveable, storable, and sharable as they or their parents deem fit?
Where Is the Digital Manila Envelope?
A couple of years ago, I met a young girl whose school was piloting a one-to-one iPad program. This girl’s family wasn’t particularly tech oriented, and they didn’t have a computer at home. At the beginning of the year when the school offered them a chance to buy the iPad, they declined. It was expensive. They didn’t see the point. But by the end of the school year, they had changed their minds—the iPad was easy to use, and their daughter loved it. She downloaded several applications and used them to create a multitude of drawings and write several stories. So, the family approached the school about buying the iPad. But it was too late, the school told them. The purchasing opportunity was limited to the beginning of the year. Therefore, the family was required to return the iPad with all of their daughter’s schoolwork, drawings, stories, and data on it. There was no manila envelope—physical or digital—for much of her sixth-grade schoolwork.
The family had no home iTunes account to sync with the girl’s iPad data—that’s what you’re supposed to do to get your data off of an iPad, school issued or otherwise. You sync the data to your personal computer at home. There are a lot of assumptions in this scenario—about access, equipment, and the home.
Even if students do have computers at home, schools often create “dummy” accounts for the devices they issue to students and for the software they require students to use. That means, even if students do have their own computers or iTunes accounts at home, it doesn’t matter. Their school-issued devices often are registered to “[email protected]” or some other fabricated email account. That means the data likely doesn’t sync. Perhaps the data can be exported, but it often cannot be accessed; it cannot be reconciled with preexisting accounts. There is no digital manila envelope.
This isn’t just about flaws in Apple devices, of course. It isn’t simply about how hardware and software are administered at school. We must ask a broader question: is there a safe digital place—any safe place—where learners can store their schoolwork and school records, not just for the duration of a course or for the length of school year, but for posterity?
Are we providing learners with those safe and secure digital places? If not, why not? And if they don’t exist, can we build them? Can we build a digital manila envelope? What would it look like? How would it function? These are questions worth considering, especially more than educators, administrators, parents, and students currently do as we compel and often require people to use technology in schools and in the workplace.
We must consider what student data are being created, what student data are being collected (and by whom), how to protect that data, and how to preserve it. Furthermore, we must put the control of that data into the hands of the students themselves, in no small part because learning now happens beyond school walls (and school software)—at home and on the go, thanks to mobile devices.
My mother wanted to preserve my schoolwork for posterity. Posterity—that word sounds a lot like Posterous. Posterous was a microblogging platform founded in 2008 and acquired by Twitter in 2012. Shortly afterward, it shut down. Users had the opportunity to download their data, and the Internet archive made a valiant attempt to preserve all the sites. Posterous was a free tool that many students, educators, librarians, and others used to share and store writing, photos, video, and other digital content. The closure of Posterous was hardly the first or the only time something like this happened to a digital tool—free or paid—that’s been popular for educational purposes. Schools often demand that students put their work into a learning management system (LMS), for example, where they lose access to it at the end of the semester or when they graduate. And for that flawed functionality, schools spend hundreds of thousands of dollars.
This is a reminder of how fragile our digital records might be. We’ve long been cautioned in school that “this will go down on your permanent record.” But now we exist at this strange juncture in which our school records are both much more permanent and much less so. We pour ourselves—our thoughts and ideas—into one application or another, and then these applications go offline. The company is sold or acquired, and our data are sold along with it.
Increasingly, we do not have the ability to look at our permanent records. We cannot access them or correct them. The data we’ve created in various digital learning environments is not ours to examine, let alone dictate who else might be able to view it. Can teachers access it? Administrators? Software engineers? Marketers?
So, when we demand a safe digital place to store student data, or their permanent records, it means a couple of things. The safety of data must include both permanence and privacy. That is, student data must preserved, and it must be under student control. (Students should have the option to hit the Delete button.)
Creating the Digital Manila Envelope
I want you to imagine what a digital manila envelope might contain. Grades? Test scores? Attendance records? That’s the stuff of traditional, analog education records. However, technologies are reshaping those records as we create massive amounts of data and metadata (or big data).
A digital manila envelope should be more than just storage for virtual report cards. What about the pictures a child draws in preschool and kindergarten? What about the poems, essays, and book reports he or she writes? Why not keep everything? After all, digital storage is cheap! This might include a list of every book checked out from the library, along with all the highlights from those books and notes in the margins. It might include titles of every educational video watched, along with the metadata from the viewing—all the pauses, rewinds, and fast forwards; all the comments on discussion forums and all the status updates; all that data a student might create thanks to computer technologies. This might include every single mouse click on every single piece of software, whether it’s school issued or required, whether it’s formally ed-tech or not. Suddenly, this digital manila envelope starts to sound a little invasive, particularly if someone other than the student has control over the data and the profile.
Daphne Koller, cofounder of the online education startup Coursera, explains that the benefits of this site go far beyond offering a myriad of interesting classes to the general public. “By collecting every click, homework submission, quiz, and forum note from tens of thousands of students,” online education sites like Coursera have become “a data mine that offers a new way to study learning” (May, 2012).
In Coursera, do students own their own data? Can they study it? Can they control with whom it’s shared? What are the risks of someone other than the student amassing all these data? Can a student export his or her data from Coursera, for example, into a personal digital manila envelope? In Coursera and almost all education software, the current answer to these questions is no. The data do not belong to students, and students can’t access them. Again, there is no digital manila envelope.
Claiming Education Technology
This book aims to tell a different story about students’ digital work, content, and data in an attempt to build a different future for education technologies. My goal is to identify ways to help preserve and protect student data and, just as importantly student identity—or at the very least, prompt you to ask questions about what kinds of technologies that would require.
Collecting student data shouldn’t merely consist of assessing students based on school goals and needs. Student data reflect student identity. As such, we must consider how we can put students in control of their schoolwork, content, and data. We must do more to support students’ control of their learning as well. That’s not simply a technological problem, of course.
