“…we are gesturing toward a future that involves a deeper understanding of the role surveillance has played and continues to play in universities and tactics and strategies for interrupting and perhaps reducing or reconfiguring its impacts…”
Collier, A., Ross, J. Higher Education After Surveillance?. Postdigit Sci Educ 2, 275–279 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-019-00098-z
Some possible elements of the Higher Education Surveillance Observatory:
- A crowdsourced database of things that are happening in different institutions, countries, systems. This might include troubling developments, successful strategies for resisting surveillance, examples of good institutional or community practice.
- Forms/surveys that people can fill out to add information to the database.
- Reports on trends or activities, successful interventions.
- Data visualisations of key information from the database.
- Resources to support local initiatives to gather and use information.
With a process for gathering data, and the help of higher education and edtech communities, we could learn useful things about:
- The extent to which higher education institutions have implemented different forms of surveillance.
- The extent to which higher education institutions have put in place guidelines / policies in this area (and mismatches in 1 and 2).
- The extent to which commercial companies (edtech and beyond, eg student record providers) are collecting student data.
- An understanding of where financial and other support for projects/work in this space is coming from.
- Examples of good practice. Collections of constructive responses to surveillance.
discussion
- Would this kind of resource be helpful to you in your context or practice?
- In what ways?
Outline the aims and ambitions of this observatory, seeking feedback from participants (15 minutes).