From the DPSI Launch Event –
Perry Hewitt, mentor of team Social, invites us to explore what individual and institutional identity signify in the context of social media, and how we can begin to think about what’s right and what’s fair with regards to communication between institutions and individuals through social media.
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.
From the DPSI Launch Event –
Jeffrey Schnapp and Matthew Battles, mentors of the Lightbox at Harvard Art Museums team, outline the suite of possibilities and potential for designing a programmable space in the Harvard Art Museums when they reopen in Fall 2014.
Education researchers are excited about the potential to improve teaching methods and enhance student learning by analyzing data from massive open online courses (MOOCs). The DPSI Big Data Team is creating a platform to normalize and distributeedX data to researchers. The Big Data Team is also evaluating student privacy concerns and researching whether the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA)applies to edX data.In brief, FERPA protects student data by prohibiting third-party access to “education records” that contain personally identifiable information without student consent. FERPA only applies to schools that receive funds under any applicable program of the U.S. Department of Education; this may include direct funding or application of federal funds to student tuition (i.e. FAFSA).
The Big Data Team’s initial research indicates that FERPA does not provide a private cause of action – there will be no FERPA-based lawsuits. However, a policy or practice of confidentiality violations may result in the discontinuation of federal funding – a significant blow to any institution such as Harvard that receives significant federal funds.
The Big Data Team is currently researching several questions including:
1. Is edX data subject to FERPA and if so how should the team anonymize the data so that personally identifiable information is removed?
2. Who is a “student” within the context of FERPA? Is an online-only user in Germany considered a student, same as a Harvard-enrolled student who is required to use edX?
3. Who within a school may access personally identifiable information? Are school software engineers, data analytics professionals, or Big Data Team members eligible “third party researchers” who may be permitted to access personally identifiable information? If so, what additional requirements must be met, and how should the team comply?
In the upcoming weeks the Big Data Team will meet with Harvard and MIT administrators to research edX’s organizational structure, funding sources, and relationship with federally funded institutions.
David Gobaud (JD ‘15), Lindsay Lin (JD ‘15), Sharon Stovezky (College ‘15), and Elise Young (JD ‘14)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6HAixnTeRWg
Museum Team – Data Experience
The Museum team met on Monday night to start brainstorming for the “lightbox gallery” in the Harvard Art Museum’s new Renzo Piano-designed wing connected to the Fogg building. We were joined by Jeff Steward, the museum’s director of emerging technology, who shared with us visualizations of page-view data for object-record pages at the museums’ web site. This fly-through shows the forests and deserts of page-views, offering an intuitive sense of the degrees of interest people take in objects in the museum. It’s an example of one kind of evocative data experience we want to experiment with in the lightbox gallery.