Is collecting data about my 'own' learning without my knowledge by someone else ethical? If so, to what extent in relation to both the quality and quantity of data thus collected? This is a problem in data analytics because so often data can be collected without intention to use and / or store it, especially in a digital age. Once collected unintentionally, value can be perceived in it after the event? Does this raise moral obligation then in the owner of that information to declare that it is being used for reporting purposes, stored, and analysed / interpreted?

Once analysed and interpreted secondary data, that might also be considered to be about the person, is formed but to whom does this data belong? And who is responsible for its validity and reliability?

I was delighted that all of those issues were considered by the Student representatives reported on in Slade & Prinsloo (2014) and even more to see the evidence that this consultation found its way, in an intelligent and principled manner, into the Policy on Learning Analytics Ethics.

Tasked now with producing a shorter and more linguistically accessible for students, I feel out of my comfort zone and perhaps my depth. But one point needs making before I try.

In the instructions to Activity 21 I read;

Can you make your summary interesting enough and short enough to feel confident that students would be likely to read it?’

Next to that comment I want to place a point from the policy itself:

            We should guard against stereotyping. (From 4.2.1).

What is it in academic institutions that they need to assume that students potentially possess per se a limited attention span and a need to be stimulated by additional elements in a text than its what is there? This is in itself stereotyping.

The prejudice to brevity in writing in particular does not, I believe, derive from learners but from a peculiar turn in thought about discourse in public life made after the mid twentieth century and that gathered pace in the digital revolution as an increasing stress on brevity (of text, paragraph, sentence) and even the conceptual demands we  make on each other. Twitter tells you off and asks you to be ‘more clever’ if you go over its word limit. It is sometimes justified by reference to democracy and the working class, to which I say: ‘we should guard against stereotyping.’

The same assumption that drives the Activity instructions also doubts whether it is appropriate to ask young people now to read Milton. Thankfully some areas of life and academic endeavour still guard against stereotyping. Working people in E.P. Thompson’s History of the English working Class knew Milton ‘by heart’.

But that is by the by. What I wanted to say is thank you, OU for this wonderful policy and for the transparent brilliance of the process of its formation.

Sometimes policy and procedure appears merely as paper to prove some process occurred – allowing the really dirty unethical nature of some practices to remain in situ. The institution can at least say; ‘But look we have a policy’. This policy does not seem like that.

But I don’t think I have to simplify it for other students, Instead I want to celebrate one lovely complex sentence with an even more complex meaning. This sentence is linguistically and semantically complex because it has to be. So are the processes in life that necessitate it being said. It is:

Principle 3: Students should not be wholly defined by their visible data or our interpretation of that data.

That principle catches a danger in principle 2 that the OU asserts its right and duty to use 'meaning' it extracts from student data; that is it or its employee’s interpretations of data. Principle 3 makes it clear that nothing in that or the primary data from which it derives can be used as a means of summarising comprehensively any person who becomes a learner in the OU.

This necessitates Principle 6 – about the necessity (‘should be’) - of engaging and involving learners in every aspect of the use of data. Good old OU. I knew you would not fail us in the end.

I hope I’ve said enough to wriggle out of doing as I’m told – never a comfortable thing for me at any time.

All the best

Steve

Slade, S. & Prinsloo, P. (2014) ‘Student Perspectives on the use of their data: between intrusion, surveillance and care’ in Challenges for Research into open & Distance Learning: Doing Things Better – doing better Things Oxford, EDENRW8 Conference Proceedings 291 - 300.