Voice Assistants Not Ready for Classrooms

Representatives of Amazon and Google made it clear at the recent International Society for Technology in Education conference that voice-assistant devices should not be used in K-12 classrooms because of compliance and privacy issues. While privacy issues is still a concern, the devices are finding their way into campus dorms and classrooms.

Amazon donated 1,600 Echo Dots to engineering students at Arizona State University, Tempe, and is providing grants to institutions that create class curriculum using Alexa-enabled devices and mentorship. Additionally, Northeastern University, Boston, MA, will give some students the option to connect an Echo Dot device to their university accounts this fall.

Jason Hong, associate professor at Carnegie Mellon’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute, has studied the home use of Alexa and said the device isn’t quite ready for educational use. He noted they could be handy in specific college situations, such as a lab where students need hands-free interaction but added there are risks, such as demands to view the dialogue history stored in the device.

“These things are not geared for schools and for lots of people at the same time,” Hong said, adding that could change as the technology improves. “I think it could be really exciting, but also rather thorny.”

Privacy Group Complains about Google

Google has become a dominant player in educational technology, with its Chromebook making up 51% of device sales to schools in the third quarter of 2015. Part of the reason for this rise is that Chromebooks are available to school districts at a fraction of the cost of other devices and come complete with free software used by more than 50 million students and teachers worldwide.

That’s an issue for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a nonprofit privacy organization, which filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission accusing Google of collecting and data-mining Internet searches by children. The group claimed Google is using some of the collected information to sell targeted ads.

In addition, the EFF said Google is tracking user activity through the Chrome Sync feature, which automatically is turned on in Chromebooks. That tracking function is being used without parental consent, the group argued.

“In some of the schools we’ve talked to parents about, there’s literally no ability to say, ‘No,’” Nate Cardozzo, staff attorney for the EFF, told The Washington Post.

Google countered with a blog post claiming its educational apps comply with the law, while admitting that it does collect data of student activities to improve its products. In addition, both the Future of Privacy Forum, which authored the student privacy pledge that was signed by Google, and the Software and Information Industry Association sided with Google.

“We have reviewed the EFF complaint but do not believe it has merit,” said Jules Polonetsky, executive director of the Future of Privacy Forum.

Along with lack of parental consent, school districts are also not informing parents of online service policies. A 2013 study of found that 95% of the surveyed school districts relied on an online cloud service, but only 25% informed parents.

“Despite publicly promising not to, Google mines students’ browsing data and other information, and uses it for the company’s own purposes,” Cardozo said in a statement to CBS News. “Making such promises and failing to live up to them is a violation of FTC rules against unfair and deceptive business practices. Minors shouldn’t be tracked or used as guinea pigs, with their data treated as a profit center. If Google wants to use students’ data to ‘improve Google products,’ then it needs to get express consent from parents.”

E-Reading Tracking Not as Invasive

After some slightly scary reports that Adobe was monitoring the reading habits of those using its e-reader application, it turns out the reality is not so Big Brother after all.

A TechWorld article reported the Electronic Frontier Foundation investigated Adobe’s actions and found the application only tracked e-book titles with digital rights management (DRM). Even then, Adobe only checked the first time the e-book was opened to make sure the copy was legitimate and not pirated. For books being used under a metered pricing model, Adobe was also measuring the length of time or number of pages consumed.

Readers of Fifty Shades of Grey can rest assured Adobe wasn’t looking to see how long they lingered over the juicy bits. In response to the reports, though, Adobe did make changes in how the application reported information, switching from easily hacked plain text to an encrypted file.

However, an app that follows e-reading patterns would actually yield a lot of useful data for publishers and would probably result in better books. For instance, publishers would be able to determine how many readers finished the book, where they tended to abandon it, whether they flipped back to previous pages, or if they seemed to skim through some parts.

Faculty Use of Social Media Studied

A new study reported that faculty members are much more at ease with using social media, but remain suspicious of it in their classrooms. A survey of 8,000 faculty members, conducted by Babson Research Group and Pearson, found more than half of the respondents used social media sites in their professional lives, a 10% increase over 2012, and more than 70% used it for personal purposes.

At the same time, 60% said online and mobile technologies can enhance learning and more than 75% said communications with their students have increased through the use of social media. However, just 41% said they use it in their classroom.

The report also found that privacy and integrity of student submissions have been the top concerns since 2011, yet an increasing number of educators report they are finding more ways to use social technologies to engage their students.

“The concern with the barriers remains fairly high, but the faculty are figuring out ways they can get around those barriers,” Jeff Seaman, co-director of Babson Survey Research Group, said in a report in eCampus News. “Perhaps they are not using it as widely or universally as they might be without those concerns, but they are finding ways in which they can adapt it in particular slivers.”

E-Books Are Getting into Your Head

Companies selling electronic readers and e-books are tracking the reading and spending habits of users with an eye to helping authors and publishers better understand what readers want, according to an article in The Wall Street Journal. Books for the Kindle and Nook, as well as tablets such as the iPad, can record the number of times a reader opens a book app and how much time they spend using the app, and then provide that information to retailers and publishers.

“The bigger trend we’re trying to unearth is where are those drop-offs in certain kinds of books, and what can we do with publishers to prevent that,” said Jim Hilt, vice president of e-books at Barnes & Noble, in the WSJ article. “If we can help authors create even better books than they create today, it’s a win for everybody.”

The article details how e-book social networking site Copia, which has 50,000 subscribers, collects information including age, gender, and school affiliation, as well as how many times a book was downloaded, opened, and read, and shares that data with publishers that request it. Kobo, with a stock of 2.5 million books and more than eight million users of its devices and services, tracks the hours users spend reading a title, while Scholastic uses online feedback from message boards and interactive games to shape its 39 Clues series.

Sourcebooks is also incorporating reader feedback into print versions of some of its online serial titles.

“You very rarely get a glimpse into the reader’s mind,” said David Levithan, publisher and editorial director at Scholastic. “With a printed book, there’s no such thing as an analytic. You can’t tell which pages are dog-eared.”

But there are those who disagree with such data gathering. Privacy groups would like to see e-book users protected from having their reading habits recorded. California passed a “reader privacy act” making it more difficult for law-enforcement groups to access consumers’ digital reading records, legislation that the American Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EEF), Google, and other organizations are also promoting.

“There’s a societal ideal that what you read is nobody else’s business,” said Cindy Cohn, legal director for the EEF. “Right now, there’s no way for you to tell Amazon, ‘I want to buy your books, but I don’t want you to track what I’m reading.’”