All posts by phaduong

Navigating Regulation and Data Sets (Big Data Team)

Dealing with the complexities of data in both programming and policy is an apt way of characterizing the last two months for the Big Data team. On the programming side, we’ve tackled a massive trove of information that is in need of organization and translation. Our product aims to resolve these discrepancies and provide a useful tool for educational researchers. On the policy side, we have dug even deeper into theFamily Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) and have found, to our surprise, that no one seems to have “the answer” on de-identifying student data in the MOOC (massive open online course) context.

The programming team of our group has been working on understanding the data we receive from EdX and HarvardX courses. We have started writing code to convert the data we receive into a more digestible form. We are also putting together basic sanity checks on the data. For example, if a student appears in the list of students considered for a certificate in a course, do they also appear in the list of users signed up for the course? After these basic checks, we will also continue interfacing with the policy side of the group to figure out exactly how this data can be made available to educational researchers. One interesting way to test the dataset is the concept of k-anonymity. For a user who has a certain set of attributes, are there at least k-1 other users that have the same set of attributes? This allows us to see how many users would be uniquely identifiable in a dataset and then work to make sure the attributes that are included give us a fully de-identified dataset.

On the user experience design branch of the team, we have created a plan for the design process and interviewed Justin and Sergiy, HarvardX Research Fellows, to get their insights on the existing user interface provided by edX. From their feedback, we have better defined the task at hand. The next goal is to meet with a few faculty members to develop use cases and continue the design process from there.

Our policy team has met with lawyers involved with EdX and other Harvard staff well-versed in FERPA and data privacy. These meetings have revealed how unclear FERPA is on online-only education. We have concluded, however, that FERPA applies to our project and thus that we need to identify levels of data for release to our different constituencies. The most challenging aspect of this is developing a de-identification process that will allow the release of student data to researchers without violating FERPA. Our next step is to complete a memorandum discussing our options and possible de-identification methods.

— Elise Young

Cap Watkins on user experience (Berkman Team)

This was an interesting piece about how user experience belongs to everybody.

“But lately, it has occurred to me that the user experience of a product actually doesn’t and shouldn’t belong solely to the designer.”

Educational institutions & social media (Social Team)

What’s the role of an educational institution in listening to, aggregating, or amplifying individual voices online? This is the question the new digital/social/mobile world serves up to all educational institutions — staffed primarily by digital immigrants — as they engage with digital native student populations. I think of it as the creepy/kosher divide — where is an institution inappropriately inserting itself into social media conversation, and where does it serve as a welcome connector/aggregator/amplifier? What do students appreciate, and what do they fear? What constitutes a student opting in for public participation, particularly when the institution commands a large audience?

Social media also raises questions of who should be paying attention, and where. Two recent articles highlight these challenges: should admissions offices be taking students’ social presences into account? And should schools, and secondary schools in particular, be watching current students on the internet?

We’re lucky to have a group of students interested in these and related topics joining the DPSI Social team. We have social media skeptics, like Lauren Taylor, who questions its ability to foster meaningful dialogue over soundbites. We have heavy social media users, like Zach Hamed, who work in the tech industry. We have insightful policy thinkers, like Chris Farley. And we have people interested in its applicability to both the university community and educational endeavor, like Andrew Reece.

As a first step, we’re pulling together a student survey to better understand current student social media usage and attitudes. After that, we’ll look at both a social media directory and constructive ways that social media can connect people around learning.

It’s early days for this group, with lots of questions and discussion. Many thanks to the team at the Berkman, and especially Sandra Cortesi, for helping propel us forward.

From the DPSI Launch Event –

Chris Bavitz, Colin Maclay, and Megan Larcom, mentors of the Innovation Labs team, share a bit about their vision for digging into questions of shared practices, good practices, trends, and more, related to innovation spaces.

A social media dystopia & new bogging platform (Team Berkman)

Team Berkman brings you snack-sized cerebral fodder to ease your afternoon doldrums.

Dave Eggers broods about social media

Dave Eggers, influential writer and mission-minded entrepreneur of the aughts, adds a new theme to the eclectic mix his books have covered. As a whole, his narratives and works have been deeply personal as well as socially relevant – they include a fictionalized story of a Sudanese refugee, a Syrian immigrant’s experience in the aftermath of Hurrican Katrina, and the stories of former prisoners who’d been sentenced to death and then exonerated. Now, the slice of social life that Eggers’ new book, The Circle, gazes into is our networked culture thoroughly mediated (and owned) by social media (companies). New Yorker Elements blogger Betsy Morais sees value in Eggers’ pessimism, but uses it as a basis on which to look more deeply into the likes of Facebook and Google as they are today rather than to contemplate the literary merits of the novel.

What’s cooler: Morais cites the published work of DPSI Pioneer Diana Tamir, a doctoral student in Psychology at Harvard on the Big Data team, which found that “humans so willingly self-disclose because doing so represents an event with intrinsic value, in the same way as with primary rewards such as food and sex.” ¡Go Diana!

New minimalist blogging platform Ghost

After much anticipation, Ghost is here. Design and technology site The Industryoverviews the product, highlights its most attractive features, and tells you how you can get started with it. The skinny is that Ghost is all about one thing: writing. According to The Industry’s Gannon Burgett: “No extra bells or whistles, Ghost brings content center stage, making sure no unnecessary frills get in the way.”

(Image from: https://ghost.org/)

-Nathaniel, Team Berkman

From the DPSI Launch Event –

Urs Gasser, Executive Director of the Berkman Center, outlines some guiding principles for the DPSI pilot: teamwork, multi-directional learning, interdisciplinarity, experimentation, and exchange.

From the DPSI Launch Event –

Dean Minow of Harvard Law School welcomes the inaugural class of DPSI pioneers and tell us how universities have much to learn from students’ digital savvy and how new ideas are needed to figure out ways for students to display their expertise in the digital realm.

From the DPSI Launch Event –

Erin Driver-Linn, Sam Moulton, Brooke Pulitzer, and Sarah Shaughnessy, mentors of the HILT’s Digital Identities team, discuss the challenge and opportunity of increasing and enriching exchange about innovative teaching and learning ideas across Harvard as a startup unit located centrally within the university.

From the DPSI Launch Event –

Jim Waldo, mentor of the Tools for Big Data Analysis team, explains why the time is ripe for the creation of powerful instruments to advance digital education. Tools for big data analysis can enable non-technologists to use, benefit from, and respond to data analysis in educational contexts.