Personal Blogs

‘Big Data’, Ethics, the OU and Me: H817 Block 4 Activity 2

There is something predictably uncomfortable about this material but it isn’t that the material shocks me, because to some extent I feel already habituated to it and the classic arguments about it. I suppose, given Duhigg’s (2012) exposition of the role of harnessing ‘habit’ and its sustaining behavioural mechanism (‘cue – routine – reward’), it is that one effect of this process of re-reading these arguments is that they themselves have become disempowered as cognitive stimulants to action. Habit deactivates any though from the behavioural loop (which once ‘chunked’, is no longer in itself forceful or stimulating): just like the rat’s experiences in the maze.

A secondary reaction is that, in the context of this course I do not want to waste thought on Amazon (use of which I treat as a guilty open secret). Is this because:

1. 1.       I have found the allure of its methods, to every possible extent imaginable, irresistible. I think it is. The benefits to me of the Amazon method (as a book-buyer and reader) is that its ‘control of serendipity’ (now there’s a paradox I hadn’t cottoned onto till reading Mangalindan 2012) is experienced, at some level very positively by me. I feel rewarded by the discovery of novels and academic approaches that I hadn’t before known I might be attracted towards. This feels as though it fits into a need to ‘learn more’ and ‘more widely’.
   

At the other extreme it has cued immense changes in me as a reader and learner. A literature search process yielding no serendipitous discovery feels to me now a very limiting experience – but another offshoot of this cued behaviour is that I spend much more than my income supports, on books at least, and use library ‘book searches’ much less – for hard books. I also feel I have developed the equivalent of FOMO (Crook 2016) as a reader – especially with regard to current literary fiction.

Yet these disadvantages continue to reward as well. Hence I can’t respond simply to the request to apportion positivity and negativity, loss or gain in the simple binary way demanded by Activity 2. The issue is so complex, the relationship between positive and negative more multi-dimensional and nuanced than this course appears to require – and certainly its short report-like assignments can easily accommodate.

1. 2.       I’m more exercised about how these issues are being played out in the OU’s LMS on ME at this very minute. It goes without saying that, at the most basic level of analysis (which is not necessarily the sum of all analyses that can be made), Amazon is driven by ‘self-interest’, what seems more obscure is what interests might drive learning analytics and how they might be operating on me at the minute of writing this. These issues need ‘parking’ however until later, when I hope our experience on H817 and its acknowledged (and potentially unacknowledged) motivating factors in different stakeholders will itself be the object of our reflection.
   

What comes out of that digression then is that it is the issue of stealth in the operative application and use of ‘big data’ collection that really exercises me. I note, in particular Duhigg’s (2012) discovery that the more he got to know about the work of Andrew Pole and Target, the more reticent to share information they became. My concerns come from reflection on this issue. As usual the base enemy is behaviourism, its assumptions and its ‘parentist’ self-justifications.

Just to elaborate on that. Duhigg (2012:5) shows that behavioural learning is closely associated with the operations of the ‘cognitive miser’ mechanism in learning. We automatically (and perhaps voluntarily) resent expense of energy on cognition in a learning situation, yearning for the moment when the learning processes are ‘chunked’ as routine procedures and stored in the cerebellar brain and the meaning of what we are doing lost from consciousness in routine procedures. For me the problem lies here, only cognition (and meta-cognition more so) can allow us to process our behaviour ethically. 

Hence Target’s ‘pregnancy-prediction-model’ appears to not only benefit them (in allowing a window of opportunity to lay down buying habits in their favour in new parents) but even the father of a young daughter who learns earlier than he might have done of his daughter’s pregnancy. His apology to Target nauseates me. 

After all, the true ethical issue here is that the daughter has been put into a position where she must share that news at a time NOT CHOSEN by her but (incidentally) by Target. This robs her of the autonomy of moral decision making, and in some cases might endanger her or her baby’s life (what for instance if the father had been a moral or even physically violent bully). This taking away of moral ownership around decisions is particularly important in education. Hence, my concern about H817.

For instance, using means to engage me in good study habits (for my own ‘benefit’) could be taken and implemented using similar methods – clues to the cues and rewards I get from learning being legion in the data traces left on the OU LMS’s H817 data banks. But have I empowered anyone to make such decisions or even the ‘assessments’ (openly acknowledged as stealth assessments) upon which decisions could be made. The answer is, of course, NO.

However, I cannot know whether this is happening or not. Maybe this ethical issue worries me more than any other. I have to say that the worry is not for myself – if anything I’m happy to share with people more information about myself than they need (or even want) to receive. It is for OU learners, whom I know from experience as colleague learner or tutor, use the OU precisely because they are undergoing life transitions (unemployment, divorce, sudden loss of income etc.) that open them up to behavioural change (Duhigg 2012:12f) because of the threat those life-changes make to their prior ‘assumptive world’.  

Hence, my reaction here is to a corporation that pays me as part-time employee and serves me as a learning provider – the OU. My concerns are characteristically ethical. I can’t begin to talk about ‘benefits’ and their opposite really until I have a handle on this. For me, education is about responding to limitations in a prior value system and some challenge to that value system by learning how to re-evaluate important features of one's life. It matters that this can be done by stealth and justified as ‘in my own benefit’ without me being at least involved in both of these decisions. I need to work on this issue and, in doing so it may become the beginning of preoccupations in TMA04.

All the best

Steve