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| Jeb with his Big Brother. WaPo photo credit, read the item |
And when cyber-teaching, the equivalent of robotics on the auto assembly line, is entrenched, who may be watching the directions of evolution of the practice? Those in charge. And what with centralized data collection and data mining capability, expect the best video gamers to be recruited into the Drone Pilot Corps.
Pure paranoid science fiction, or possible whether or not a likelihood?
Would you want one of your children designated "goat" in somebody's centralized database run out of NSA computers in Utah? If not, where do you take your first stand?
But they are our corporate benefactors, leaders in pushing the envelope. MinnPost interestingly reports on a designated goat, from one of our winter-frigid-too but prosperous TC 'burbs. This link, this excerpting:
Right before the holidays, a Twin Cities teen by the name of Nathan Ringo authored a first-person account of an ongoing digital privacy tussle with his school that was published in the popular online magazine BoingBoing.
Co-edited by writer and prominent copyright reform advocate Cory Doctorow, BoingBoing is a pretty big deal. In a very few minutes, Ringo went viral in a particular international community.
The school district administrators he left in the hot seat? It’s not hard to imagine that it’s something of a relief that student privacy laws prevent them from discussing Ringo’s claims. The young man has quite clearly received an excellent education.
Ringo’s story neatly illustrates a raging national debate about the implications — ranging from commercial retention and use of student data to overreach in censorship — of increased use of technology in the classroom.
Ringo’s BoingBoing commentary was especially pertinent because of a case in the news at the time concerning tablets distributed by a Pennsylvania school district. The cameras in the devices were turned on remotely, capturing female students undressing.
In the fall, Ringo reported to Wayzata High School to start his junior year. Eleventh-graders showed up on the third of four “back-to-business days” to have their photos taken for IDs and to pick up their schedules and — new this year — an iPad.
Only one actually reading the contract
[...] “I was the only person reading it and I just realized, Hey, we’re supposed to have the right to privacy,” Ringo recalls. “Under the [U.S.] Supreme Court case Katz vs. United States, which we actually learned about in school, in civics and government — we just call it civics.”
In the 1967 decision, the jurists held that the government could not use evidence obtained from the warrantless wiretapping of a public phone booth.
“That court case gave citizens the right to privacy,” Ringo explains. “And then the school is asking us like two years after we are learning about this in class and being tested on it to give away that right.”
[...] Not only would students have to agree to waive rights in school, they would have to agree to an impenetrable series of conditions and licensing arrangements imposed by Apple.
At the same time, Los Angeles schools’ 2-year-old, $1.3 billion plan to provide all of its students with iPads loaded with software from the testing concern Pearson has unleashed a tsunami of controversy, including an FBI investigation into the underlying dealings.
Few people understand the thorny web as well as Ringo, and fewer still have crafted solutions. Minnesota was not among the 22 states to attempt to legislate the issues last year. Congress has made even less progress and appears on the verge of accepting a controversial proposal that the industry police itself.
[...] A couple of days later, Ringo says he got an e-mail from the district’s tech department revoking his Internet privileges for “hacker talk.” His school account was closed.
Which was no trivial matter, given that the school’s curriculum was structured so that without access to a tablet and the Internet a student would be shut out of a lot of in-class activities, homework and other things necessary to keep up academically.
To Ringo’s way of thinking, this made the supposedly voluntary privacy waiver in the iPad contract coercive. [...]
Digital limbo for months
[...]
[links in original, red highlight added]
Read it all at MinnPost. Franz Kafka is alive and well and living in Wayzata.
In harsh sunshine terms - this ain't science fiction; it's Wayazeta. Where Skull and Bones ritual and commitment is a distant thing. Yet if you fret about the intrusiveness of "the Chinese," or "North Korea," save some fret juice for the Boners. They are real. They are close-knit cohesive. They are secretive. They have money. They have agendas.
Like ALEC.
And -- If that young Ringo individual does not score high on fast twitch v-game coordination he's not going to be let into Drone Pilot Corps, where because of attitude he might wash out anyway. Our nation and our future. Or one possible scenario of many.
In closing, readers should in their minds answer:
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| Sheep? |
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| Goat? |
Once having a minds-eye pair of answers; with implications - what's next? Where and how do you go from now to a future? How can you bend the direction your nation takes in its future in ways you think better than other possibilities?