Googlization of Education: What Happens When Google Appropriates a School System?

The World Wide Web is an amazing human creation with unlimited potential to advance the education of children and youth. In its first phase, it was exciting and wide open, stimulating innovative thinking, sparking incredible creativity, and fomenting a little anarchy.  Out of this creative chaos emerged a master integrator known as Google. 

With its global mission—“To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible”—and its much-quoted mantra, “Don’t be evil,” Google won converts worldwide. More recently, Google Apps for Education (GAFE) has taken K-12 education by storm. School systems have adopted and embraced GAFE with remarkable zeal and surprisingly little critical analysis of its impact upon the way we think,  the personal privacy of students, or the implications for professional development. Google now competes with Microsoft and a few smaller players for a large share of the $8-9 billion market for software for elementary and secondary schools.

Google Apps for Education, first introduced in 2006, attracted some 30 million users (students, teachers and administrators) by 2013-14 before it hit a bump in the road. While Google kept GAFE advertisement-free, they did scan the contents of students g-mail accounts, gathering information that could be used to target ads to those students elsewhere online.

In 2013, students and g-mail users in California banded together to sue Google, claiming that e-mail scanning violated wiretap laws. During the litigation, Google conceded that they were scanning emails sent and received by students using GAFE.  Faced with a wave of popular opposition and media criticism, Google announced, in April 2014, that it would no longer mine student email accounts for ad-targeting purposes. That followed a decision made two weeks earlier that a competitor, InBloom, partly financed by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, was shutting down its operations.

The Nova Scotia Department of Education and Early Childhood Development (DoEECD) is one of hundreds of school systems that have jumped on the latest 21st Century digital learning bandwagon. Three years ago, without much fanfare, provincial school authorities announced that they would be signing an agreement with Google to implement GAFE in the public schools.  After piloting the program in a number of schools in 2014-15, the DoEECD  decided to make GAFE available to every single child and teacher in the 400 schools across the province.

The Nova Scotia GAFE service, according to high school teacher Grant Frost, provides every student and teacher user with their own g-mail account, as well as several useful applications, including Google Docs, a leading edge word processing program, Google Sheets, which outperforms Excel, and Google Slides, which is a more integrated multi-platform version of PowerPoint. Users also have access to Google Classroom, where, with a click of mouse and a one time code entry, they can sign up for a class and receive notifications about upcoming events, class assignments and ask about homework questions with their teacher via his/her cell phone at all times of the week.

Twenty thousand out of Nova Scotia’s 118,000 students are now using free computer software from Google as part of their classroom activities. Provincial education officials expect Google Apps for Education to be nearly universal by the end of 2016-17.  The cloud-based suite of programs can be accessed on any electronic device with an internet connection and a web browser. It includes email, word processing and assignment management software. Some school boards have chosen to issue students $200 devices called Chromebooks to let them access Google products at school and at home.

Google Apps for Education is spreading quickly and teacher training summits have been held or are scheduled to be held in Ontario, Alberta, Quebec and BC as well as Nova Scotia.  In schools across the country, it is becoming increasingly essential for students to have access to the Internet in order to be successful. Homework, projects, even information and advice from teachers is now transmitted on-line, and more readily accessible if you have the electronic tools to access the information.

Google provides access to Apps for Education to schools for free, along with unlimited electronic storage on Google’s servers, with the expectation that students will be ‘inducted’ through education into the World of Google.  Dr. Mike Smit, a computer scientist and associate professor at Dalhousie’s School of Information Management, told CBC News Nova Scotia  that the cost per student, per year of the free access is negligible for a company as large as Google. Besides, he said, Google has all the training modules and infrastructure in place to minimize its costs of implementation.

Many educators like Grant Frost express grave concern about the “digital divide” and the inequities in terms of student access to computers and digital devices. In schools across the country, it is becoming increasingly essential for students to have access to the Internet in order to be successful. Homework, projects, even information and advice from teachers is available on-line, if one only has the means to access it. Its hard to expect full student participation when,  according to a 2014 Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives report, 1 out of every 5 children living in Nova Scotia in 2012 was living below the poverty line.

Canadian universities, like K-12 school systems, have embraced “cloud technologies,” turning either to Google or Microsoft as the favoured vendors for outsourcing of  their eCommunications services. Ontario’s Lakehead University was early out of the gate late in 2006 and became the legal test case for the legality of storing sensitive personal data outside the country.  After it was settled in a 2009 arbitration decision ruling in favour of outsourcing, most universities went that route. More recently, academics Heidi Bohaker and John M. Dirks, have raised serious questions about the impact of outsourcing on “digital archives” containing personal user accounts, organizational memory, external and internal online conversations.

Student privacy concerns have not gone away in the United States. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed a complaint on December 1, 2015 with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) against Google for collecting and data mining school children’s personal information, including their Internet searches. It also launched a “Spying on Students” campaign, which launched today. to raise awareness about the privacy risks of school-supplied electronic devices and software.

The EFF examined Google’s Chromebook and Google Apps for Education (GAFE), and found holes in the protection of student privacy and evidence of unfair trade practices.  While Google does not use student data for targeted advertising within a subset of Google sites, EFF found that Google’s “Sync” feature for the Chrome browser is enabled by default on the inexpensive brand of Chromebooks sold to schools.

The California-based advocacy group claims that the “Sync” feature allows Google to track, store on its servers, and data mine for non-advertising purposes, records of every Internet site students visit, every search term they use, the results they click on, videos they look for and watch on YouTube, and their saved passwords.  Since some schools require students to use Chromebooks, many parents are left unaware of the scanning of student data and unable to prevent Google’s data collection.

Does the spread of Google Apps for Education raise unresolved student privacy issues and the spectre of major corporations mining metadata to shape their messaging? Is student and teacher data stored with “cloud technologies” safe, secure and free from domestic spying operations? What’s the impact on education when whole school systems outsource to one supplier whether it be Google or a competitor? Is it possible for Google to virtually subsume professional development through system-wide online training and the enlisting of Google certified teacher-trainers?

 

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Education Forecast 2015: Will the Lofty ‘Ed Tech’ Babble Make a Difference in the Classroom?

North American educational technology futurists see great things ahead in 2015.  After marveling at the amazing technological advances of 2014, the Ed Tech promoters at Getting Smart.com are even more bullish about the year ahead. What excites them? The new problems to be solved, the innovative power of technology, the promise of edu-resolutions, and the infinite possibilities ahead for students and teachers.

Optimism is fine, but heralding the coming of Ed Tech “Heaven” is indicative of what might be termed a 21st century “New Light” technological futurism.  How individuals, institutions, and school culture respond to technological change is fast emerging as the critical issue in today’s education world.  What now passes for educational forecasting, pitting the “Heaven” of the optimists versus the “Hell” of the pessimists,  is actually more akin to what Joel Garreau (2005) aptly labelled the “Prevail” or “Muddling Through” scenario.  With technology advancing, the idealism of the movement has given way to the “Prevail” option testifying to “the power of humans to muddle through extraordinary circumstances.”

Getting Smart sounds positively overflowing with optimism .  “What’s a new year without optimism?,” the lead blogger asks in rhetorical fashion. “Without a positive outlook on all things capable? What’s a new year without gathering to peer at the horizon of where we could be headed if we’re all in this together?” In its first post of 2015, Getting Smart, buoyed by fellow Ed Tech enthusiasts at Digital Promise, not only took time to celebrate the launch of Smart Parents, GenDIY, and the new year by examining how 2015 will be different for parents and students.

The Getting Smart 2015 predictions are lofty and perhaps typical of the rather pollyannish thinking of ed tech futurists:

1. With increased access to anytime, anywhere learning, students will have more options than ever to personalize their education in 2015.

2. Lots of schools and districts will move from planning mode to implementation mode on efforts related to personalized and blended learning.

3.  Parents will become more knowledgeable about the opportunities available to their students thanks to personalized, blended learning, ultimately resulting in more smart parents.

4. 2015 will provide even better student experiences for quality online and blended higher education through the personalization of virtual learning, including more cohorts and webinars, allowing them to tailor their degree program.

5.  The millennial generation will show us the way as Generation Do-It-Yourself (GenDIY), educators and EdLeaders will now shape instruction, strategies, and practices to best fit the jobs of today and tomorrow.

6. Solutions to a handful of EdTech issues will emerge in 2015 making it easier to combine formative data, compare student growth rates, and acknowledge progress, and hopefully improving guidance and counseling systems.

Taking a closer look at the Getting Smart prognostications, the initial over-the-top optimism seems to be rooted in a firm belief in a technology-driven society.  They also reflect the pragmatic optimism of the so-called “Prevail” camp.  As American education technology researcher Adam Therier puts it in The Technology Liberation Front,  today’s ed tech promoters focus not so much on its transformative powers as on how we can adapt and learn to cope with technological disruption and prosper in the process.

Modern thinking on the impact of technological change on societies continues to be largely dominated by skeptics and critics. From the French philosopher Jacques Ellul (The Technological Society) to Neil Postman (Technopoly) and Nicholas Carr (The Shallows), social critics have alerted us to the potential for the subjugation of humans to “technique” or “technics” and feared that technology and technological processes would come to control us before we learned how to control them.

Postman, perhaps best known as co-author of the 1968 classic, Teaching as a Subversive Activity, had a way of capturing your attention. The rise of a “technopoly”, he wrote, would mean “the submission of all forms of cultural life to the sovereignty of technique and technology” — that would destroy “the vital sources of our humanity” and lead to “a culture without a moral foundation” by undermining “certain mental processes and social relations that make human life worth living.”

National education technology lobby groups like C21 Canada simply brush aside any such concerns in their overall pursuit of the so-called “Mind Shift” to “21st century learning.” Most of the C21 Canada initiative is focused on mobilizing education CEOs and tapping into corporate funding from the leading technology providers, most notably Pearson Canada. This top-down educational leadership strategy was exemplified in the C21 Canada partnership with the Council of Ministers of Education (CMEC) under past Chair Jeff Johnson and most recently in the announcement of a C21 CEO Academy composed of West Vancouver ed tech champion Chris Kennedy and 21 other school superintendents.

School-level examples of the “Mind Shift” ushered in by prophets of the new technology are still hard to find here in Canadian provincial school systems. Well- funded ICT projects initiated by Mind Share Learning produce rather uninspiring “Let’s Play with IT” student activity videos like Foggs Science Classes and How to Integrate ICT.  So far, it’s doubtful if such small-scale, teacher-led activities are making much of a difference in the classroom.

We can move forward with education technology without ignoring the more sobering prophecies and succumbing to the allure of “technics.”  What Adam Therier calls “permissionless innovation” is definitely needed in the education sector. Creating the spaces to experiment with new technologies and pedagodgies is critical if we are to take fuller advantage of the success of the Internet and the digital economy.  In doing so, however, let’s not lose our heads and succumb to the technopoly in all its insidious forms.  It’s also fair to ask whether the current C21 Canada approach led by the CEOs will ever lead to true bottom-up ‘disruptive innovation’ in the schools.

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