I’ve been blogging about ClassDojo enough over the past few weeks that I think it’s time for a quick recap before sharing some of the latest developments. I heard about ClassDojo being used schoolwide back in late July and started wondering what approach I should take as both a student’s parent and an edtech researcher. On Monday of this week, I talked to kiddo’s teacher about it and wrote up some thoughts the next day about teachers’ diminished agency in the realm of edtech.

Such a bad idea. Normalizing Ring won’t make it any better—only worse.

I really will get back to blogging on other subjects sometime soon, but here’s an email I just sent to kiddo’s principal raising some concerns I have going into the school year. I’m not sure what will come of this—and I’m not at all sure this was the right email to write—but in the off-chance it’s helpful for someone, I thought I’d post about it here. Dear Principal [so-and-so], We are very excited to be joining the VPE community this year: Our daughter is excited to be starting kindergarten, and we are happy to see how supportive, welcoming, and organized everyone has been.

Compelling example of the need for digital privacy in a post-Row world.

Some really worrying privacy implications in this kind of edtech—and edtech as a discipline doesn’t care nearly enough about this kind of thing. Makes me worried as a scholar and a parent.

Who is allowed to watch the watchmen? This is why I’m grumpy about Lexington being hush hush about its new automated license plate readers—it sets a precedent for secretive use of even more invasive surveillance.

Opting out of location sharing is a good and important step, but there are no tech solutions to this horror—only political ones. We need good legislation, and we need it now.

The amount of data collected by TikTok is more concerning for the possibility that it could be fed to Chinese state officials, but it would be just as concerning if it could be fed to American state officials, and still pretty concerning if only fed to corporate officials.

It’s concerning to see private surveillance prop up public surveillance like this.

Gun control is good, but surveillance isn’t. I don’t think this is the answer.

I’ve seen a number of headlines about how a post-Dobbs world changes the game for online privacy, but this is the first one that I sat down to read. School surveillance software is scary enough without this possibility, so let’s not make it worse. I can’t believe that this software gives schools any benefits that outweigh the heavy cost to students’ privacy.

I’m not going to link to it, but I am fascinated by a recent post on the Gab blog where Andrew Torba announced some new features to help Gab users push back against research on the platform. Not only do I have two or three ongoing projects using Gab data (one is in the very, very early stages and—ironically—uses Gab blog posts), but some of what Torba wrote also aligned with some of the (fortunately mild) trolling my co-author, Amy Chapman, and I have experienced because of my work on the far-right-influenced DezNat hashtag in Mormon Twitter.

Gun violence can’t be solved with educational technology—and make no mistake, all of this is edtech.

Heard a kid crying in the background of a company’s help line and realized it used one of those often-exploitative work-from-home customer service networks. That made me more mad than issue I was calling about.

Good for the court, though the narrow majority is disappointing.

Well this is terrifying.

Yes please.

I’ve been plenty spooked by Ring’s video capabilities, but apparently I haven’t been worried enough about its audio surveillance.

Disappointing news, but glad for the fight that the EFF and others are waging.

The only thing worse than the already-bad reality of powerful, private data brokers is public agencies buying what they have to sell.

This kind of social media surveillance has been bothering me for years. I’m happy it’s getting some attention, even if the impetus for that attention is such a tragedy. This is edtech and our discipline needs to treat it as such. link to ‘Software to detect school threats online is costly but mostly ineffective.’

This article may make its way into a chapter I’m writing on how assumptions about education shape our understanding of what appropriate data collection looks like. As Audrey Watters has written, this kind of thing is very much edtech, and we need to be critical about how we deploy it. Even if it did work, I’m not sure the surveillance would be worth it. If it doesn’t work, all the more reason to be skeptical.

There are a few yellow flags in this article for me. Quick and efficient sounds good, but are those the most important values in policing? What values do they stand in tension with? It’s great that there are policies against using a ALPR database for personal reasons, but these policies regularly get violated. No, these aren’t videosurveillance cameras, but that doesn’t make them harmless.

Frustrating to see steps that feel like progress seem to shore up the tech giants I hoped were being kept in check.

The focus on student learning in this year’s AECT reviews is good, but I worry that it blinds us to other important ed tech questions. I’d struggle to describe how surveillance, ethics, privacy impact student learning, but we desperately need that research too-or more!

Do not be fooled by the headline, the article’s best contribution is its indictment of U.S. politicians and companies for their complicity in this sort of thing.

Remembering the time that the only person at church who understood my dissertation research was the one who worked for the state of Michigan doing social media surveillance of social justice movements.

Certainly not the worst news I’ve read this morning, but still tremendously worrying.

Lexington just installed plate readers on a trial basis, so this hits particularly hard right now. It’s scary and it needs to stop.

Let me get this straight: Invasive surveillance isn’t enough, now companies are creating opportunities to cheat just so they can ding them and take credit for stopping it?

Surveillance is a bigger problem than we think.

This is unjustifiable.

Surveillance is not going to help kids.

We should all be concerned about this. Describing this as “high tech” in the first line of the story fetishizes surveillance. It’s gross.

Contract tracing is good, but apps for it are scary. Ugh.

Helpful if worrying read.