Sakai recently debated the addition of a Beacon to each distribution so we could track usage in real time around the world. It was a great discussion – look at the Sakai dev list archives for the great fun.
But part way through the follows was a small part of a response:
On Aug 11, 2006, at 11:03 AM, Luke FERNANDEZ wrote:
In sakai-dev I’ll hazard that most most everyone recognizes the
possibility that software isn’t just a physical artifact but is also
about a community and (even further) that this community implicitly
forwards a certain idea of what is ‘good’ for a university. People get
excited about the beacon because it has the potential (in a small way)
to strenghten this sense of community identity and to forward this good.
This triggered in me a long-simmering set of thoughts. So I figured I would write them down this Sunday morning.

This is a really important point and one I think that needs a lot of thought over the next 10 years. We come from a very “tight” perspective on privacy and many have been habituated to react strongly to the slightest thing that might invade privacy. Draconian laws like the US FERPA law and over zealous Human Subjects Committees have left many academics so fearful that even thinking about looking at the data surrounding educational activity produces an almost Pavlovian jolt of fear.
For example, this is one reason why Sakai to date has ZERO tracking software and that the first cool tracking software is coming from Portugal with needs coming from the distance education and community college spaces. These areas are (a) less fearful and (b) have a burning need for tracking. My feeling is that the farther away from US R1 Universities and FERPA you get – the more you are likely to contemplate using tracking as a tool.
But my stock anti FERPA rant was not the intent of this message.
If we are to truly revolutionize teaching and learning going forward – we must find ways to begin to exchange usage data on artifacts. We need folks to be able to see how popular an artifact is, how many hours students looked at the artifact, and if exam scores later in the course for those students could be correlated to the number of hours spent looking at that artifact. (i.e. did students who spent 10 hours with the artifact score higher than those that ignored the artifact).
For us to all benefit from understanding the learning process – we will need to find ways to make this data available across time and across institutions.
This is *not* trivial and will take *many* years. Publishing rich data is a very complex and touchy problem. I just want to make sure that we think lofty thoughts over the next decade together and realize that sharing highly anonmized usage data is a critical pre-requisite to taking the “next step” in truly making education better.
I am continuously frustrated that because we do not yet have suitable teaching and learning software that delightlfuly covers the “basics” – we never get to attack these truly revolutionary problems. Ah well. 2012 will be here soon enough.
Wow – Coffee and a Sunday morning, and no crisis to work on is a scary combination.