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Tech making us less smart.

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In 2002, Maine became the first state to implement a statewide laptop program to some grade levels. Then-governor Angus King saw the program as a way to put the internet at the fingertips of more children, who would be able to immerse themselves in information.

By that fall, the Maine Learning Technology Initiative had distributed 17,000 Apple laptops to seventh graders across 243 middle schools. By 2016, those numbers had multiplied to 66,000 laptops and tablets distributed to Maine students.

King's initial efforts have been mirrored across the country. In 2024, the U.S. spent more than $30 billion putting laptops and tablets in schools. But more than a quarter-century and numerous evolving models of technology later, psychologists and learning experts see a different outcome than the one King intended. Rather than empowering the generation with access to more knowledge, the technology had the opposite effect.

Earlier this year, in written testimony before the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, neuroscientist Jared Cooney Horvath said that Gen Z is less cognitively capable than previous generations, despite its unprecedented access to technology. He said Gen Z is the first generation in modern history to score lower on standardized tests than the previous one.

While skills measured by these tests, like literacy and numeracy, aren't always indicative of intelligence, they are a reflection of cognitive capability, which Horvath said has been on the decline over the last decade or so.

Citing Program for International Student Assessment data taken from 15-year-olds around the world and other standardized tests, Horvath noted not only dipping test scores, but also a stark correlation in scores and time spent on computers in school, such that more screen time was related to worse scores. He blamed students having unfettered access to technology that atrophied rather than bolstered learning capabilities. The introduction of the iPhone in 2007 also didn't help.

"This is not a debate about rejecting technology," Horvath wrote. "It is a question of aligning educational tools with how human learning actually works. Evidence indicates that indiscriminate digital expansion has weakened learning environments rather than strengthened them."

The writing was perhaps already on the wall. Fortune reported in 2017 that Maine's public school test scores had not improved in the 15 years the state had implemented its technology initiative. Then-governor Paul LePage called the program a "massive failure," even as the state poured money into contracts with Apple.

Gen Z will now have to face the ramifications of eroding learning capabilities. The generation has already been hit hard by the transformations of the 21st century's other technological revolution: generative AI.

Early data from a first-of-its-kind Stanford University study published last year found AI advancements to have "significant and disproportionate impact on entry-level workers in the U.S. labor market." But a less capable population means more than just poorer job prospects and fewer promotions, Horvath warned; it endangers how humans are able to overcome existential challenges in the decades to come.

"We're facing challenges more complex and far-reaching than any in human history-from overpopulation to evolving diseases to moral drift," he told Fortune. "Now, more than ever, we need a generation able to grapple with nuance, hold multiple truths in tension, and creatively tackle problems that are stumping the greatest adult minds of today."

Technology's impact on learning

Classroom technology usage has ballooned in recent years. A 2021 EdWeek Research Center poll of 846 teachers found 55% said they are spending one to four hours per day with educational tech. Another quarter reported using the digital tools five hours per day.

While teachers may be intending for these tools to be strictly educational, students often have different ideas. According to a 2014 study, which surveyed and observed 3,000 university students, students engaged in off-task activities on their computers nearly two-thirds of the time.

Horvath blamed this tendency to get off-track as a key contributor to technology hindering learning. When one's attention is interrupted, it takes time to refocus. Task-switching also is associated with weaker memory formation and greater rates of error. Grappling with a challenging singular subject matter is hard, Horvath said. For the best learning to happen, it's supposed to be.

"Unfortunately, easehas never been a defining characteristic of learning," he said. "Learning is effortful, difficult, and oftentimes uncomfortable. But it's the friction that makes learning deep and transferable into the future."

Sustained attention to a singular subject is anathema to how technology today has been deployed, argues Jean Twenge, San Diego State University psychology professor studying generational differences and the author of 10 Rules for Raising Kids in a High-Tech World. More time on screens isn't just ineffective in facilitating learnings; it's counterproductive.

"Many apps, including social media and gaming apps, are designed to be addictive," Twenge told Fortune. "Their business model is based on users spending the most time possible on the apps, and checking back as frequently as possible."

A Baylor University-led study published in November 2025 uncovered why this is: TikTok required the least amount of effort to use, even less than Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts, by balancing relevant videos with surprising and unexpected content.

Concerns over social media addiction have become so dire that 1,600 plaintiffs, across 350 families and 250 school districts, filed a lawsuit alleging Meta, Snap, TikTok, and YouTube created addictive platforms leading to mental health challenges like depression and self-harm in children.

Solving the tech crisis

Horvath proposed a swath of solutions to Gen Z's tech problem, at least as it pertains to classroom use. Congress, he suggested, could impose efficacy standards to fund research on what digital tools are actually effective in the classroom. The legislature could also require strong limits on tracking behavior, building profiles, and collecting data on minors using tech.

Some schools have taken matters into their own hands. As of August 2025, 17 states have cracked down on cellphone use in school, banning the technology during instructional time, and 35 states have laws limiting the use of phones in the classroom. In fact, more than 75% of schools have said they have policies prohibiting cellphone use for nonacademic purposes, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, though enforcing those bans has been met with variable success.

Ultimately, Horvath said, the loss of critical thinking and learning skills is less of a personal failure and more of a policy one, calling the generation of Americans educated with gadgets victims of a failed pedagogical experiment.

"Whenever I work with teenagers I tell them, 'This is not your fault. None of you asked to be sat in front of a computer for your entire K-12 schooling,'" Horvath said. "That means we...screwed up-and I genuinely hope Gen Z quickly figures that out and gets mad."

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The U.S. spent $30 billion to ditch textbooks for laptops and tablets: The result is the first generation less cognitively capable than their parents | Fortune

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Neuroscientist Jared Cooney Horvath said older generations "screwed up" giving students access to so much technology: "I genuinely hope Gen Z quickly figures that out and gets mad."

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What's the point?

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What’s the Point of School When AI Can Do Your Homework?

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The creator of the AI agent “Einstein” wants to free humans from the burden of academic labor. Critics say that misses the point of education entirely.

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Google Guide

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Free Artificial Intelligence (AI) Course - Introduction to AI - Living with AI Course

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This Free Artificial Intelligence (AI) Course explores how AI is shaping industries, society, and your daily life. This self-paced AI course is perfect for anyone with little to no prior knowledge.

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A comprehensive supplement that builds upon the DigCompEdu framework from the European Union – AI Pioneers

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A comprehensive supplement that builds upon the DigCompEdu framework from the European Union – AI Pioneers

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A comprehensive supplement that builds upon the DigCompEdu framework from the European Union – AI Pioneers

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In the ever-evolving landscape of education, staying ahead of the curve is paramount. The rapid advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is not only transforming industries but also redefining the way we teach and learn. To prepare educators and trainers for this transformative journey, we are excited to introduce our comprehensive supplement that builds upon the DigCompEdu framework from the European Union.

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AI must be kept in check at school] | The UNESCO Courier

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AI must be kept in check at school] | The UNESCO Courier

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The use of artificial intelligence in education needs to be subject to supervision and independent evaluations. Only then, argues Ben Williamson, will schools be able to maintain their mission of developing critical thinking and shaping the citizens of tomorrow.

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Facial recognition technology: key issues and emerging concerns

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Facial recognition technology: key issues and emerging concerns

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This chapter provides an introductory overview of the recent emergence of facial recognition technologies (FRTs) into everyday societal contexts and settings. As such, the chapter provides valuable social, political and economic context to the legal, ethical and regulatory issues that surround this fast-growing area of technology development. In particular, the chapter considers a range of emerging 'pro-social' applications of FRT that have begun to be introduced across various societal domains - from the application of FRTs in retail, entertainment, leisure and domestic contexts, through to the growing prevalence of 1:1 ID matching for intimate practices such as unlocking smartphones and other personal devices. In contrast to this seemingly steady acceptance and practical take-up of FRT throughout everyday life, the chapter makes a case for continuing to pay renewed attention to the everyday harms of these technologies in situ - most notably the harms associated with misrecognition of people's presumed identities and/or mis-recognition of their inferred characteristics and attributes. All told, the chapter argues that FRT remains a technology that should not be considered as a benign addition to the current digital landscape. This remains technology that requires continued critical attention from scholars working in the social, cultural and legal domains.

Funding

ARC Discovery Program: DP200100189

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Facial recognition technology: key issues and emerging concerns

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This chapter provides an introductory overview of the recent emergence of facial recognition technologies (FRTs) into everyday societal contexts and settings. As such, the chapter provides valuable social, political and economic context to the legal, ethical and regulatory issues that surround this fast-growing area of technology development.

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ICO to step in after schools use facial recognition to speed up lunch queue | Facial recognition | The Guardian

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ICO to step in after schools use facial recognition to speed up lunch queue | Facial recognition | The Guardian

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Privacy campaigners have raised concerns about the use of facial recognition technology on pupils queueing for lunch in school canteens in the UK.

Nine schools in North Ayrshire began taking payments for school lunches this week by scanning the faces of their pupils, according to a report in the Financial Times. More schools are expected to follow.

The company supplying the technology claimed it was more Covid-secure than other systems, as it was cashless and contactless, and sped up the lunch queue, cutting the time spent on each transaction to five seconds.

With break times shortening, schools are under pressure to get large numbers of students through lunch more quickly.

The use of other types of biometric systems, principally fingerprint scanners, have been used in schools in the UK for years, but campaigners say the use of facial recognition technology is unnecessary.

Silkie Carlom, the director of the campaign group Big Brother Watch, told the FT: "It's normalising biometric identity checks for something that is mundane. You don't need to resort to airport style [technology] for children getting their lunch."

Fraser Sampson, the biometrics commissioner for England and Wales, was also quoted as saying that just because schools could use the technology it did not mean they should. "If there is a less intrusive way, that should be used," he said.

The technology is being installed in schools in the UK by a company called CRB Cunninghams. David Swanston, its managing director, told the FT: "It's the fastest way of recognising someone at the till - it's faster than card, it's faster than fingerprint.

"In a secondary school you have around about a 25-minute period to serve potentially 1,000 pupils. So we need fast throughput at the point of sale."

Live facial recognition, technology that scans through crowds to identify faces, has been challenged by civil rights campaigners because of concerns about consent. CRB Cunninghams said the system being installed in UK schools was different - parents had to give explicit consent and cameras check against encrypted faceprint templates stored on school servers.

Schools leaders keen to improve efficiency were not averse to new technology, but there remained concerns about privacy and data protection, said Hayley Dunn, a business leadership specialist at the Association of School and College Leaders.

"Schools and colleges are adept at harnessing new technology to solve logistical issues like taking payments from young people in their canteens and many are already using fingerprint readers to improve queueing times and provide increased security," she said.

"The use of face recognition software to do this could potentially interest schools and colleges, but there would need to be strict privacy and data protection controls on any companies offering this technology.

"Leaders would also have legitimate concerns about the potential for cyber ransomware attacks and the importance of storing information securely, which they would need reassurances around before implementing any new technology."

North Ayrshire council told the FT 97% of children or their parents had given consent for the new system.

"Pupils often forget their pin number and unfortunately some have also been the victim of pin fraud, so they are supportive of the planned developments and appreciate the benefits to them," the council added.

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Privacy fears as schools use facial recognition to speed up lunch queue

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Privacy campaigners have raised concerns about the use of facial recognition technology on pupils queueing for lunch in school canteens in the UK. Nine schools in North Ayrshire began taking payments for school lunches this week by scanning the faces of their pupils, according to a report in the Financial Times.

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The Guardian view on biometric technology in schools: watch closely | Editorial | The Guardian

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The Guardian view on biometric technology in schools: watch closely | Editorial | The Guardian

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he news that schools in North Ayrshire in Scotland have introduced facial recognition technology to support payments in their canteens prompts many questions. The company behind the scheme, CRB Cunninghams, says valuable time will be saved by speeding up the process whereby children queue up and pay. North Ayrshire council says that 97% of children or their parents have given their consent. Alternative ways to buy food will be provided for the rest.

But this deal between a local authority and a technology company, whose stated aim is to remove cash from UK schools, is not the no-brainer that its backers present it as. Facial recognition technology is still relatively new. Its various forms and applications are unfamiliar to most people and their use remains controversial. The Scottish meal payment system is said to differ from "live" facial recognition software, where computers scan through crowds to match faces. Encrypted templates of the children's faces will be stored on the schools' servers. But privacy campaigners and others are rightly concerned about the decision to make facial scanning a part of children's daily routines.

The use of biometric fingerprints has been widespread in UK school canteens for years. Time pressures aside, it is easy to see why headteachers and other managers were keen to move away from cash, which has come to seem messy and labour-intensive in our electronic age. But just because pupils and their families have become accustomed to the use of some biometric data, it does not follow that these systems should be extended. Nor does the idea that facial recognition is a more Covid-secure technology than fingerprinting, as has been suggested with regard to North Ayrshire, provide sufficient justification for the decisions that have been taken. On the contrary, the deal with CRB Cunninghams should be seen as a significant step towards the normalisation of the use of facial recognition technology by public authorities.

What people think about this, and similar developments, depends on the importance that they place on privacy and personal data, and the extent to which they trust technology companies to handle them. There is no question that companies are eager to test out new capabilities, and work out how to make money out of them. In several countries, the use of such technology has been found to be illegal. Last year, the court of appeal ruled that the use of facial recognition technology by police in Wales breached privacy and equality laws. In the US and Sweden, schools have been stopped from using it to monitor attendance or security.

Typically, the buyers and sellers of these systems present them as useful tools and nothing more. But as Prof Kate Crawford, the author of a recent book about AI, and other critics have pointed out, the companies at this point are running ahead of democratic debate and decision-making. The challenges of how to regulate and secure consent for the kinds of information gathering that digital technology makes possible are a long way from being answered. And while this is the case it is ethically dubious, to put it mildly, to use children as guinea pigs.

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The Guardian view on biometric technology in schools: watch closely | Editorial

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he news that schools in North Ayrshire in Scotland have introduced facial recognition technology to support payments in their canteens prompts many questions. The company behind the scheme, CRB Cunninghams, says valuable time will be saved by speeding up the process whereby children queue up and pay.

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This school scans classrooms every 30 seconds through facial recognition technology

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This school scans classrooms every 30 seconds through facial recognition technology

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A high school in China has made a facial recognition technology system that scans the student's behavior in the classroom.

The facial recognition technology introduced in the school is recording facial expressions of all students while they are in their classrooms. The system scans the classroom every 30 seconds and recognizes seven different expressions such as neutral, happy, sad, disappointed, scared, angry and surprised.

The system is called as "Intelligent Classroom Behavior Management System" and it is being used at Hangzhou No. 11High School. With scanning facial expressions the system has the ability to even analysis six types of behaviors by the students such as standing up, reading, writing, hand raising, listening to the teacher, and leaning on the desk.

The information regarding how the students are reacting and behaving in the class when a teacher teaches is later sent to teachers to more efficiently analyze the behavior of students. The system is also used to monitor attendance.
Also Read: These are the world's 10 most valuable tech companies
The system challenges the student's privacy, however, the school thinks otherwise. Zhang Guanchao, the school's Vice Principal said that the system only collects and analyzes the results of the facial recognition analysis and stores them in a local database rather than uploading it in a cloud. The system does not save the images in order to prevent unauthorized access to the data at all, the vice principal added. A student studying in Hangzhou school says,

What else can surveillance cameras do in classroom other than exam supervision? High school in #Hangzhou uses camera to identify students facial expression for class performance analysis and improvement pic.twitter.com/bXolAE7Ev8

- People's Daily,China (@PDChina) May 16, 2018

"Previously when I had classes that I didn't like very much, I would be lazy and maybe take naps on the desk or flick through other textbooks. But now I don't dare be distracted after the cameras were installed in the classrooms. It's like a pair of mystery eyes are constantly watching me."
Looking at cameras being installed in schools in China, it is wake up call for schools in Pakistan. Since a system like thishelps teachers rethink their teaching style using statistical data and mark class attendance in only a few seconds.
What do you think about this facial recognition technology, is it beneficial for students or teachers at all? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.

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This school scans classrooms every 30 seconds through facial recognition technology

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A high school in China has made a facial recognition technology system that scans the student's behavior in the classroom. The facial recognition technology introduced in the school is recording facial expressions of all students while they are in their classrooms.

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Voice control: why AI must resist our bad habit of stereotyping human speech

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Voice control: why AI must resist our bad habit of stereotyping human speech

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Voice control gadgets - such as Amazon's Alexa, Google's Home or Apple's Homepod - are becoming increasingly popular, but people should pause for thought about advances in machine learning that could lead to applications understanding different emotions in speech.

The CEO of Google, Sundar Pichai, recently said that 20% of the company's searches are initiated by voice via mobile phones. And, at the end of 2017, analysis of the US market suggested that a total of 44m Amazon Alexa and Google Home devices had been sold.

The technology has increasingly impressive abilities to recognise words, but - as an expert on acoustics - it is clear to me that verbal communication is far more complex. How things are said can be just as important as the words themselves. When someone says "I'm alright", the tone of their voice might tell you their mood is the opposite to what they claim.

Voice control gadgets, also known as smart speakers or virtual assistants, can be frustrating to use because they only pay attention to the words, and mostly ignore how speech is expressed. Tech giants hope that the next frontier for devices, such as Amazon Echo, will be to detect how a person is feeling from their voice to make interactions more natural.

Read more: Tech firms want to detect your emotions and expressions, but people don't like it

The human voice can give away information about who that person is, where they come from and how they are feeling. When a stranger talks, people immediately pick up on their accent and intonation and make assumptions about their class, background and education.

If voice control gadgets pick up on such information, speech interfaces could be improved. But it's worth remaining wary of unintended consequences. The technology relies on machine learning - a branch of artificial intelligence that brings together algorithms and statistics learnt by a machine that has been fed reams of data - and so its behaviour is not entirely predictable.

Is the future smart or dumb?

Research shows that speech examples used to train the machine learning application is likely to lead to bias. Such problems with the technology have been evident in popular tools such as Google Translate.

When used, for example, to translate the Turkish phrases "o bir doktor" and "o bir hemşire" into English, Google's service returns the results "he is a doctor" and "she is a nurse". But "o" is a gender-neutral third-person pronoun in Turkish. The presumption that a doctor is male and a nurse is female reflects cultural prejudices and the skewed distribution of gender in the medical profession.

Google Translate picked up a human cultural bias that was in the data the algorithms were trained on and the end result is a sexist translation system.

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It is not an easy task to solve such problems because machine learning echoes human stereotypes. When humans listen to voices, they simplify the job of working out how to respond to someone by using rules of thumb.

Research shows that when people hear a woman ending lots of her sentences with an upward inflexion, known as uptalk, the typical assumption is that they are young. If a man speaks with a deep voice, there's an assumption that he is big and strong. Such simplified assumptions about speech can lead to prejudiced judgements.

Criminal suspects with a Birmingham accent, one study found, were more likely to be rated as guilty compared to those with a more neutral accent. Research has also revealed that a non-native accent was perceived to be more untruthful.

Working out whether a person is angry, happy or sad from their speech could be really useful for anyone who uses voice control devices. But the vocal cues people emit vary from person to person, and across languages and cultures. Humans don't always recognise emotions correctly, as anyone who has ever been in a relationship will testify, so why should it be expected that machines can do a better job?

Research into people's aural "gaydar" - a colloquial term used by some who claim they can intuitively tell if someone is gay, lesbian or bisexual - offers a good example of ambiguous and even bogus signals. Listeners make assumptions, for example, about how a gay male should sound, such as having a higher pitched voice, but these are often wrong. Actors playing up to incorrect stereotypes in apparent responses to audience expectations became something of a cultural norm on TV screens, research shows.

Read more: DeepMind: can we ever trust a machine to diagnose cancer?

The individualised, natural ambiguity of vocal signals is likely to lead to mistakes unless technology companies learn from their mishaps. Ingrained prejudices could be learned by applications that attempt to interpret human voices, given that the technology relies so heavily on learning from the data it is fed.

Technology firms developing voice control devices and services may already talk to acoustic experts. But they need to listen closely to the warnings to better understand the pitfalls to avoid, before applying machine learning to decoding the human voice.

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Voice control: why AI must resist our bad habit of stereotyping human speech

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Voice control gadgets - such as Amazon's Alexa, Google's Home or Apple's Homepod - are becoming increasingly popular, but people should pause for thought about advances in machine learning that could lead to applications understanding different emotions in speech. The CEO of Google, Sundar Pichai, recently said that 20% of the company's searches are initiated by voice via mobile phones.

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Mattel Cancels AI-Powered Smart Speaker for Kids Over Privacy Concerns

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Mattel Cancels AI-Powered Smart Speaker for Kids Over Privacy Concerns

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In Brief

Earlier this year, Mattel announced Aristotle, a voice-activated smart assistant designed for use by children. Now, the project has been cancelled amid backlash from government officials, childhood development experts, and others.

Aristotle Axed

In January 2017, Mattel announced Aristotle, a smart speaker created for use by children. Last week, the company confirmed that the device had been scrapped, amid concerns about children's privacy.

Aristotle was designed to use natural language processing technology to get a better grasp on how children pronounced words over time. This isn't too far removed from the way virtual assistant services learn about users' habits, but when young people are involved, the issue obviously becomes a lot thornier.

Lead by a team of child development, education, and privacy experts, more than 15,000 people signed a petition to stop Mattel from selling Aristotle, and last week, Sen. Edward J. Markey and Rep. Joe Barton sent Mattel a letter requesting details on how the company planned to store data collected by Aristotle and how long they would retain that data.

The toymaker had previously committed to encrypting the data and pledged to not sell it to advertisers in order to protect children's privacy. However, following the letter, Mattel released a statement declaring that their new chief technology officer, Sven Gerjets, had shuttered the project as part of a broad evaluation of all the company's upcoming products.

Under Surveillance

The ever-increasing amount of internet-connected hardware in our homes is something of a double-edged sword.

For every instance where an Internet of Things (IoT) device has reported a crime or otherwise done some good, we can find another example of a piece of technology that comes dangerously close to infringing upon our privacy.

As we become even more connected as a society, we must take all the necessary steps to ensure that the advantages of smart home and IoT devices don't come at the cost of our cybersecurity and general privacy.

Mattel claims that they had already made the decision to cancel Aristotle before receiving the letter from Sen. Markey and Rep. Barton, but elected officials certainly have cause to be proactive in monitoring products like this.

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Mattel cancels AI-powered smart speaker for kids over privacy concerns

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In Brief Earlier this year, Mattel announced Aristotle, a voice-activated smart assistant designed for use by children. Now, the project has been cancelled amid backlash from government officials, childhood development experts, and others. In January 2017, Mattel announced Aristotle, a smart speaker created for use by children.

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Education revolution: 'AI machines will replace teachers', claims academic

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Education revolution: 'AI machines will replace teachers', claims academic

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Technology will replace the best teachers of the future with intelligent machines, according to a leading university vice chancellor.

Sir Anthony Seldon, vice chancellor of the University of Buckingham and former master of Wellington College, predicts the change will happen within the next 10 years and will completely transform the education system.

Teachers will remain in classrooms to set up equipment and maintain discipline according to Sir Anthony, but they will simply be assistants while the real education is done by artificial intelligence.

"It certainly will change human life as we know it. It will open up the possibility of an Eton or Wellington education for all," said Sir Anthony.

"Everyone can have the very best teacher and it's completely personalised; the software you're working with will be with you throughout your education journey.

"It can move at the speed of the learner. This is beyond anything that we've seen in the industrial revolution or since
with any other new technology."

Sir Anthony explained his vision of the future in a talk at the British Science Festival, and will also cover the matter in his new book, The Fourth Education Revolution, which will be published next year.

The first revolution was about learning the basics of survival according he thinks, citing skills such as foraging, hunting, growing crops and building shelters.

The second involved the organised sharing of knowledge, the third he says was marked by the invention of printing.

In the fourth revolution, children will progress at their own pace and be chaperoned in their learning by artificial intelligence.

"I'm desperately sad about this but I'm afraid I am (suggesting machines would replace the inspirational role of teachers)," said Sir Anthony.

"The machines will be extraordinarily inspirational.

"You'll still have the humans there walking around during school time, but in fact the inspiration in terms of intellectual excitement will come from the lighting-up of the brain which the machines will be superbly well-geared for.

"The machines will know what it is that most excites you and gives you a natural level of challenge that is not too hard or too easy, but just right for you."

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Education revolution: 'AI machines will replace teachers', claims academic

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Technology will replace the best teachers of the future with intelligent machines, according to a leading university vice chancellor. Sir Anthony Seldon, vice chancellor of the University of Buckingham and former master of Wellington College, predicts the change will happen within the next 10 years and will completely transform the education system.

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THE human face is a remarkable piece of work. The astonishing variety of facial features helps people recognise each other and is crucial to the formation of complex societies. So is the face's ability to send emotional signals, whether through an involuntary blush or the artifice of a false smile. People spend much of their waking lives, in the office and the courtroom as well as the bar and the bedroom, reading faces, for signs of attraction, hostility, trust and deceit. They also spend plenty of time trying to dissimulate.

Technology is rapidly catching up with the human ability to read faces. In America facial recognition is used by churches to track worshippers' attendance; in Britain, by retailers to spot past shoplifters. This year Welsh police used it to arrest a suspect outside a football game. In China it verifies the identities of ride-hailing drivers, permits tourists to enter attractions and lets people pay for things with a smile. Apple's new iPhone is expected to use it to unlock the homescreen (see article).

Set against human skills, such applications might seem incremental. Some breakthroughs, such as flight or the internet, obviously transform human abilities; facial recognition seems merely to encode them. Although faces are peculiar to individuals, they are also public, so technology does not, at first sight, intrude on something that is private. And yet the ability to record, store and analyse images of faces cheaply, quickly and on a vast scale promises one day to bring about fundamental changes to notions of privacy, fairness and trust.

The final frontier

Start with privacy. One big difference between faces and other biometric data, such as fingerprints, is that they work at a distance. Anyone with a phone can take a picture for facial-recognition programs to use. FindFace, an app in Russia, compares snaps of strangers with pictures on VKontakte, a social network, and can identify people with a 70% accuracy rate. Facebook's bank of facial images cannot be scraped by others, but the Silicon Valley giant could obtain pictures of visitors to a car showroom, say, and later use facial recognition to serve them ads for cars. Even if private firms are unable to join the dots between images and identity, the state often can. China's government keeps a record of its citizens' faces; photographs of half of America's adult population are stored in databases that can be used by the FBI. Law-enforcement agencies now have a powerful weapon in their ability to track criminals, but at enormous potential cost to citizens' privacy.

The face is not just a name-tag. It displays a lot of other information-and machines can read that, too. Again, that promises benefits. Some firms are analysing faces to provide automated diagnoses of rare genetic conditions, such as Hajdu-Cheney syndrome, far earlier than would otherwise be possible. Systems that measure emotion may give autistic people a grasp of social signals they find elusive. But the technology also threatens. Researchers at Stanford University have demonstrated that, when shown pictures of one gay man, and one straight man, the algorithm could attribute their sexuality correctly 81% of the time. Humans managed only 61% (see article). In countries where homosexuality is a crime, software which promises to infer sexuality from a face is an alarming prospect.

Keys, wallet, balaclava

Less violent forms of discrimination could also become common. Employers can already act on their prejudices to deny people a job. But facial recognition could make such bias routine, enabling firms to filter all job applications for ethnicity and signs of intelligence and sexuality. Nightclubs and sports grounds may face pressure to protect people by scanning entrants' faces for the threat of violence-even though, owing to the nature of machine-learning, all facial-recognition systems inevitably deal in probabilities. Moreover, such systems may be biased against those who do not have white skin, since algorithms trained on data sets of mostly white faces do not work well with different ethnicities. Such biases have cropped up in automated assessments used to inform courts' decisions about bail and sentencing.

Eventually, continuous facial recording and gadgets that paint computerised data onto the real world might change the texture of social interactions. Dissembling helps grease the wheels of daily life. If your partner can spot every suppressed yawn, and your boss every grimace of irritation, marriages and working relationships will be more truthful, but less harmonious. The basis of social interactions might change, too, from a set of commitments founded on trust to calculations of risk and reward derived from the information a computer attaches to someone's face. Relationships might become more rational, but also more transactional.

In democracies, at least, legislation can help alter the balance of good and bad outcomes. European regulators have embedded a set of principles in forthcoming data-protection regulation, decreeing that biometric information, which would include "faceprints", belongs to its owner and that its use requires consent-so that, in Europe, unlike America, Facebook could not just sell ads to those car-showroom visitors. Laws against discrimination can be applied to an employer screening candidates' images. Suppliers of commercial face-recognition systems might submit to audits, to demonstrate that their systems are not propagating bias unintentionally. Firms that use such technologies should be held accountable.

Such rules cannot alter the direction of travel, however. Cameras will only become more common with the spread of wearable devices. Efforts to bamboozle facial-recognition systems, from sunglasses to make-up, are already being overtaken; research from the University of Cambridge shows that artificial intelligence can reconstruct the facial structures of people in disguise. Google has explicitly turned its back on matching faces to identities, for fear of its misuse by undemocratic regimes. Other tech firms seem less picky. Amazon and Microsoft are both using their cloud services to offer face recognition; it is central to Facebook's plans. Governments will not want to forgo its benefits. Change is coming. Face up to it.

Dig deeper
Science and technology (1):
Advances in AI are used to spot signs of sexuality
Science and technology (2):
Researchers produce images of people's faces from their genomes
Business:
Ever better and cheaper, face-recognition technology is spreading

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THE human face is a remarkable piece of work. The astonishing variety of facial features helps people recognise each other and is crucial to the formation of complex societies. So is the face's ability to send emotional signals, whether through an involuntary blush or the artifice of a false smile.

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BBC Radio 4 - Thinking Allowed, Platform Capitalism

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BBC Radio 4 - Thinking Allowed, Platform Capitalism

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Platform Capitalism, Thinking Allowed - BBC Radio 4

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Laurie Taylor explores platform capitalism - its origins, meaning and future.

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Will “smart” cities lead to surveilled education and social control? – Wrench in the Gears

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Will “smart” cities lead to surveilled education and social control? – Wrench in the Gears

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"What is a Smart City?" is the third entry in my slide presentation series "Education in the Cloud." If you haven't yet seen them, prior posts include an introductory essay and " Digital Classrooms as Data Factories."

Part 3 of Education in the Cloud: What is a "Smart" City?

A growing number of metropolitan areas are being shaped by " Smart" City policies. Bloomberg Philanthropy's " What Works Cities " aims to bring these programs to mid-size cities as well. Even in communities without explicit "smart" initiatives, "innovation" or "empowerment" zones are being proposed, often around school districts, enabling outside interests to sidestep existing legal and contractual protections under the guise of "autonomy" and "flexibility." I hope the information I've pulled together will reveal how "smart city" and "learning ecosystem" interests often intersect and encourage others to think critically about similar programs in their communities. It is important to consider digital classrooms as nodes of smart cities. Classrooms touch the lives of many, and thus are logical places to begin normalizing the idea that as citizens it is our duty to generate and hand over massive quantities of personal data that will supposedly shape policy for the "public good" and manage our economy.

Smart Cities are defined by their reliance on digital technology across government functions and the use of sensor-transmitted data to regulate provision of public services. The high cost of installing such networks, monitoring data, and maintaining the systems, especially in our current climate of austerity, means municipalities will increasingly look to partner with private companies and outside investors to provide basic public services. I anticipate "smart city" policies will fuel social impact investing. There is a belief that investments in "efficient" technologies will yield future cost savings, and therefore such infrastructure projects could become significant profit centers for venture capital.

This video from Cisco discusses the role financiers are anticipated to play in the development of "Smart+Connected" cities. Social Impact Bonds are also mentioned on pages 94-97 of the " Handbook of Urban Infrastructure Finance" put out by the New Cities Foundation. In November 2015, Philadelphia mayor Michael Nutter and the Philadelphia branch of the Federal Reserve hosted an all-day conference on " Capital for Communities" where Pay for Success Finance and social impact bonds were discussed with representatives of Bloomberg Philanthropies, Goldman Sachs, and the White House Office of Social Innovation. After his term ended, Nutter joined the Economic and Community Advisory Council of the Philadelphia Federal Reserve.

Philadelphia has been on the Smart Cities' bandwagon since 2011 when it teamed up with IBM to develop Digital On Ramps, a supposedly " ground breaking" human capital management program. As part of this initiative Philadelphia Academies, led at the time by Lisa Nutter (wife of Democrats for Education Reform former mayor Michael Nutter), developed a system of badges for youth that promoted workforce-aligned "anywhere, any time learning." You can view a 2012 HASTAC conference presentation on the program starting at timestamp 50:00 of this video. Lisa Nutter now works as an advisor to Sidecar Social Finance, an impact investment firm, and Michael Nutter is, among other things, a senior fellow with Bloomberg's What Works Cities. This relationship map shows some of the interests surrounding the Digital On Ramps program. Use this link for an interactive version.

Digital On Ramps has since combined with Collective Shift's initiative City of LRNG operating with support from the MacArthur Foundation. Besides Philadelphia, ten other Cities of LRNG are spread across the country: Chicago, Columbus, Detroit, Kansas City, Orlando, San Diego, San Jose, Sacramento, Washington, DC and Springfield, OH. The premise is the "city is your classroom" where students "learn" through playlists of curated activities that are monitored via phone-based apps. Many of these cities are also "smart" cities. The Philadelphia program is presently housed at Drexel University, an institution that is involved in education technology research and development, that is a partner in Philadelphia's Promise Zone initiative (education is a major component), and whose president John Fry served a term on the board of the Philadelphia School Partnership, the city's ed-reform engine. Drexel's graduate school of education is currently the lead on an unrelated NSF-funded STEM educational app and badging program being piloted with Philadelphia teachers in the Mantua neighborhood within the Promise Zone. It is touted as "an immersive, mentor-guided biodiversity field experience and career awareness program." In April 2017, Drexel's School of Education hosted a lecture by DePaul University's Dr. Nichole Pinkard entitled "Educational Technologies in a Time of Change in Urban Communities," in which the MacArthur-funded 2013 Chicago Summer of Learning pilot was discussed. In this clip from the Q&A that followed the lecture, an audience member raised concerns about credit-bearing out-of-school time learning in the ecosystem model.

The 2011 IBM summary report for Digital On Ramps noted that among the four top priority recommendations was the creation of a "federated" view of the citizen in the cloud." Of course, 2011 predates developments like Sesame Credit, but looking at it now I can't help but conjure up an image of the "federated citizen in the cloud" as portrayed in Black Mirror's dystopian Nosedive episode. Digital On-Ramps appears to be a prototype for a career pathway, decentralized learning ecosystem model for public education. As the task-rabbit, gig economy becomes more entrenched with freelancers competing for the chance to provide precarious work at the lowest rate (see this short clip from Institute for the Future's video about Education and Blockchain), what will it mean to reduce education to a series of ephemeral micro-credentials? And what dangers are there in adding behavioral competencies from predictive HR gaming platforms like Knack into the mix? Tech and human capital management interests are counting on the fact that people are intrigued by new apps. We're predisposed to seek out pleasurable entertainment. Gamification is both appealing and distracting, consequently few people contemplate the downside right away, if ever.

I would argue that the LRNG approach to "appifying" education is something we should resist at all costs. Take for example the XPrize adult literacy apps being piloted in Philadelphia right now with support from the Barbara Bush Foundation. Certainly adult literacy is an issue of great importance, but do ICT interactions provide a way to meaningfully support adult learners in developing reading skills? Or are they an inexpensive means by which to compile data on individuals, one that could perhaps be used to establish baselines for future Pay for Success investments? Education should be a human-to-human activity, free of intrusive data-mining and tracking. Embracing micro-credentials, badges, and educational apps will hasten the transition to an era in which we, and our children and grandchildren, will be pushed into cut-throat competition with one another as we quantify ourselves and work to maintain up-to-date, online portfolios of skills supplemented by socially-acceptable " reputation scores."

This April Philadelphia joined a group of six cities chosen to explore use of connected everyday devices (Internet of Things) as part of a Knight Foundation grant. Two other programs related to the grant include the MetroLab Network and NetGain, sponsored by the MacArthur Foundation and Mozilla, both of whom are interested in decentralized, badge-based learning. Drexel University and the University of Pennsylvania, whose graduate school of education is designated a " Future Ready Schools Partner," are coordinating with Philadelphia's Office of Innovation and Technology as part of the MetroLab Network. The office, which manages the information and communications technology programs for the city, was established the same year as the IBM grant by executive order of Mayor Nutter. In a future post I will discuss the ways in which xAPI protocol will be used to track learning experiences outside of school settings. For the moment, however, simply note that IoT infrastructure is key to widespread adoption of "anywhere" learning.

In June, representatives of hundreds of "smart" city projects descended on Philadelphia for the annual " Smart Cities Summit," preceded by the LoRa Alliance Open House and Marketplace. The LoRa Alliance is a member-based non-profit established to promote adoption of the LoRa Protocol "as the open global standard for secure, carrier-grade IoT (Internet of Things)." James Kenney, our current mayor, addressed attendees of the Summit noting that the city's "ReBuild" program, funded in part by a newly approved soda tax, would endeavor to incorporate technology into renovations of Philadelphia's libraries and recreation centers. It should be noted that "Pay for Success" proponents John Arnold and Michael Bloomberg pitched in funds for an ad-campaign in support of the soda-tax last year. Philadelphia City Council recently approved ReBuild's $500 million investment in libraries, recreation centers and parks. Also worth mentioning is that a $100 million for ReBuild is coming from the William Penn Foundation, the powerful regional philanthropy that hired Boston Consulting Group to recommend closure of 23 Philadelphia schools in 2013. In January, the foundation launched a new initiative in support of community-based "informal" learning. The focus? Why it's early literacy, an area of particular interest to the social impact investing community. The Pritzkers and Goldman Sachs are funding a pre-k social impact bond with an early literacy component in Chicago right now. There has been considerable emphasis on grade-level reading programs in Philadelphia in recent years. I feel strongly that pay-for-success literacy pilots may be coming to Philadelphia very soon.

The William Penn Foundation also gave $25 million to the Free Library's strategic plan "Building Inspiration: 21 st Century Libraries Initiative." The plan has a strong emphasis on "partnering" with local schools, which for the most part have no school libraries. The headline of a January 2017 Inquirer article describes Philadelphia school librarians as "a species nearly extinct." Despite the direness of the situation, the Free Library system has remained silent with regards to the plight of school district libraries. Libraries are a key part of the learning ecosystem model, and the Free Library System was designated a teen learning lab pilot with support from IMLS in 2014. There is some overlap between cities that received funding for library learning lab pilots and Cities of LRNG: Dallas, Columbus, Philadelphia, and Kansas City. Certainly we all appreciate the need for up-to-date, safe public amenities, especially those serving our children. It will, however, be interesting to see what the technology infrastructure looks like, given that the goal of learning eco-systems is to gradually shift public education into out-of-school settings like libraries.

Comcast, headquartered in Philadelphia, began to implement its new Internet of Things machineQ platform here in the fall of last year. Chicago, home of an IoT " array of things" program, and the Bay Area were also selected as early adopters. machineQ uses a system of LoRa (low range, low power radio frequency) chips to connect devices to the Internet of Things in Smart City applications. Comcast sponsored many events during the summit, including a hackathon. The second place winner of that competition was a team that developed a " noise sniffer " intended to be installed in parks and other public spaces. So it would seem we are on the threshold of an age where cointelpro meets invisible ubiquitous computing.

In the Smart City milieu there is pressure to aggregate data, automate processes, incentivize efficiencies, limit human oversight, and deliver metrics to justify the provision of meager public services or invite private-sector investment. It can be couched in the language of innovation and autonomy or flexibility and transparency, but ultimately it is about doing more with less and squeezing profit from public assets for private benefit. All aspects of society are affected, from water systems to the prison-industrial complex to public education. In some cases, like the predatory "Pay for Success"-ready, MacArthur-funded Edovo tablet-based online "education" and "behavioral therapy" program piloted in Philadelphia prisons in 2014, they actually overlap. As community leaders make decisions about software systems, sensor deployment and consulting contracts for "smart" services, we must hold them accountable. What does it mean to live within increasingly monitored environments that will become even more so as the Internet of Things takes hold? We owe it to our children to slow down and consider how the choices being made today will affect their futures and the future of both public education and employment.

If digital classrooms evolve as extensions of "Smart Cities," where big data rules and efficiency and control are prized, to what degree will students and educators be able to imagine, think and act independently? Will learning beyond the reach of devices and sensors be allowed? If a student learns something, and it isn't uploaded to their Learning Record Store (LRS) will it "count"? What is the impact of digitally mediated feedback loops on developing minds? How is the concept of public education changing in the age of the quantified self? How will a student's data define them? What if the data is wrong?

What does it mean for communities to outsource public education to cultural institutions and businesses offering "playlist" learning opportunities? What impact will credit flexibility have on school funding? Who funds the badge providers, and to whom are those providers accountable? Who would ultimately be responsible for the safety and well being of children navigating a brave new world of learning ecosystem education?

In a society that is increasingly unstable socially and economically, does it make sense to delegate public education to private entities working at the behest of global finance, telecommunications giants, Silicon Valley, Big Energy/Petro-Chemicals, Big Pharma, or the military industrial complex? Is it prudent to amass vast amounts of personally identifiable data on children and upload it to cloud-based servers that are vulnerable to hacking and ongoing surveillance? Will we have to train up future generations steeped in coding just to control the Internet of Things nightmare that our government and their corporate solutionist consultants are so busy creating? And if the world ends up revolving around code, will we remember all we have lost? Who will be left to write the novels and tell our stories?

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Will "smart" cities lead to surveilled education and social control?

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"What is a Smart City?" is the third entry in my slide presentation series "Education in the Cloud." If you haven't yet seen them, prior posts include an introductory essay and "Digital Classrooms as Data Factories." Part 3 of Education in the Cloud: What is a "Smart" City?

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Where Silicon Valley meets education – 'Learning Design with Technology'

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Where Silicon Valley meets education – 'Learning Design with Technology'

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It was that time of year when I pack my bags and fly to Silicon Valley to be a reviewer for the Stanford Graduate School of Education Masters Degree course "Learning Design with Technology". On either side of highway 101 from San Francisco to San Jose you can find the homes of many of the household technology names - like Google and Apple - that support our busy and digitally connected lives.

Stanford is in esteemed company, and it makes the most of it with its Learning design with Technology course. It's a unique blend of blue skies, venture capital and the intellectual property and innovative ideas that gush out of the growing Stanford Campus in Palo Alto.

Stanford University was founded by Leland J Stanford Jr, the railroad magnate, and is one of the most prestigious private universities in the world. With an international reputation and tuition fees around the $50,000 mark it is also regarded as an intellectual engine room for Silicon Valley.

I usually drop in to see my old friend Professor Larry Cuban and share views about the latest developments involving technology and learning and teaching (see " Flight of a butterfly or a bullet? Cuban's quest"). He was particularly keen to learn about England's computing curriculum this year but, alas, our paths couldn't cross. However being able to mooch around the campus for a few days did give me the opportunity to discover another Stanford gem, The Schwab Learning Centre, and spend some time with director Nicole Ofiesh.

Solving education problems using technology - the projects

It provided the opportunity to learn more about an exciting approach to the use of technology in learning environments that is rapidly gaining traction - "Universal Design for Learning". But first let's take a look at the student projects from the Learning Design with Technology programme that I had been invited to review.

I joined some distinguished names in the educational technology world, like Professor Roy Pea, John Seeley-Brown, Professor Brigid Barron, Paul Kim, Carrisa Carter (director of Stanford's D School) as well as representatives from the corporate and tech startup communities.

The projects are all predicated on a carefully defined and researched educational challenge, and over the course of the programme students have to work collaboratively to design a technological solution. All of the project videos can be seen here. The background to some of the projects also is an interesting read (see "Stanford education students invent new tools to support learning at all ages").

I always find spending time with students who are passionate about the potential of technology to improve and enhance learning refreshing and inspiring. It also leads me to hope that some universities here in the UK might launch a similar masters degree in the near future.

The Schwab Learning Center and Universal Design for Learning

The Stanford Campus has always been a hotbed for innovative ideas and the Schwab Learning Center is the Office for Accessible Education. The SLC offers students with learning disabilities and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder a wide array of state-of-the-art services and resources to enrich the learning and research opportunities at Stanford.

Although the starting point has been technology and learning disability, the latest thinking to emerge is relevant and applicable for all learning environments and all learners. Universal Design for Learning was explained to me by Nicole Ofiesh, director of Schwab and the senior research director of CAST and an ambassador for Universal Design for Learning (UDL). This is a research-based set of principles to guide the design of learning environments that are accessible and effective for all, and Nicole Ofiesh ( pictured right) is clear about its potential. "UDL is based on the very best research in neuroscience and its premise is access to learning for everyone," she explains.

"It is not about differentiated learning with assistive technology but applying what we know from the 'spectrum of variability'.It is about designing for the margins and creating learning environments for everyone. When you design for the margins everyone wins."

And of course there's a useful website-come-app for educators wanting to engage with UDL. Goalbook has produced a very useful toolkit for anyone designing learning environments who may wish to consider the design principles of UDL. I am sure the DfE Priority Schools Building Programme and those responsible for the design of new schools would benefit from a dose of UDL.

So I return from Stanford University once again inspired and enthusiastic about the potential for technology to enhance and improve learning, and I sincerely hope that recent interest from the DfE (see "Government finally promises policy on ICT for learning") will not be a false dawn for learning with technology in our country. Perhaps we could learn something from the Stanford innovations.
Bob Harrison is chair of governors at Northern College, vice-chair of governors at a Trafford secondary school and a trustee of the UfI trust and YMCA Training and Assessment. He was Toshiba's Education Adviser from 2000 to 2016 and was a leading member of FELTAG and ETAG.You can follow him on Twitter: @bobharrisonset

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Where Silicon Valley meets education - 'Learning Design with Technology'

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It was that time of year when I pack my bags and fly to Silicon Valley to be a reviewer for the Stanford Graduate School of Education Masters Degree course "Learning Design with Technology".

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Trust, Technology and The Young » IAI TV

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Trust, Technology and The Young » IAI TV

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IAI TV - Philosophy for our times: cutting edge debates and talks from the world's leading thinkers

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Two concepts have recently emerged that invite us to rethink the relationship between children and digital technology: the datafied child ( Lupton & Williamson, 2017) and children's digital rights ( Livingstone & Third, 2017). The datafied child highlights the amount of data that is being harvested about children during their daily lives and the children's rights agenda includes a response to ethical and legal challenges the datafied child presents. Children have never been afforded the full sovereignty of adulthood ( Cunningham, 2009) but both these concepts suggest children have become the points of application for new forms of power that have emerged from the digitisation of society. The most dominant form of this power is called platform capitalism ( Srnicek, 2016). As a result of platform capitalism's success, there has never been a stronger association between data, young people's private lives, their relationships with friends and family, their life at school, and the broader political economy. In this article I will define platform capitalism, outline why it has come to dominate children's relationship to the internet and suggest two reasons in particular why this problematic.

'At the most general level, platforms are digital infrastructures that enable two or more groups to interact. They therefore position themselves as intermediaries that bring together different users: customers, advertisers, service providers, producers, suppliers, and even physical objects' (ibid, p43). Examples of platform capitalism include the technology superpowers - Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon. There are, however, many relevant instances of platforms that children and young people use. This includes platforms for socialising, platforms for audio-visual content, platforms that communicate with smart devices and toys, and platforms for games and sports franchises and platforms that provide services (including within in the public sector) that children or their parents use. Young people choose to use platforms for play, socialising and expressing their identity. Adults have also introduced platforms into children's lives: for example Capita SIMS is a platform used by over 80% of schools in the UK for assessment and monitoring. Platforms for personal use have been facilitated by the popularity of tablets and smartphones. Amongst the young, there has been a sharp uptake in tablet and smart phone usage at the expense of PC or laptop use. Sixteen per cent of 3-4s have their own tablet, with this incidence doubling for 5-7 year olds. By the age of 12, smartphone ownership begins to outstrip tablet ownership ( Ofcom, 2016). For our research at the OII, even when we included low-income families in our sample, 93% of teenagers owned a smartphone. This has brought forth the 'appification' of the web that Zittrain predicted in 2008. This means that children and young people predominately experience the internet via platforms that we can think of as controlled gateways to the open web.

In public discourse some of these platforms are called social media. This term distracts us from the reason many of these publicly floated companies exist: to make money for their investors. It is only logical for all these companies to pursue the WeChat model that is becoming so popular in China. WeChat is a closed circuit platform, in that it keeps all engagements with the internet including shopping, betting, and video calls within its corporate compound. This brings WeChat closer to monopoly on data extraction.

Platforms have consolidated their success by buying-out their competitors. Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft have made 436 acquisitions worth $131 billion over the last decade ( Bloomberg, 2017). Alternatively, they just mimic the features of their competitors. For example, when Facebook acquired Instagram it introduced Stories, a feature use by Snap chat, which lets its users upload photos and videos as a 'story' (that automatically expires after 24 hours). The more data these companies capture that their competitors are unable to capture, the more value they can extract from it and the better their business model works. It is unsurprising therefore that during our research we asked groups of teenagers to draw a visual representation of what they thought the world wide web and internet looked like - almost all of them just drew corporate logos (they also told us they had no idea that platforms such as Facebook own WhatsApp and Instagram, or that Google owns YouTube). Platform capitalism dominates and controls their digital experiences but what provisions do these platforms make for children?

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) (set to be implemented in all EU states including the UK in 2018) says platforms that can collect data about children below the age of 13 years shall only be lawful if and to the extent that consent is given or authorised by the child's parent or custodian. Because most of platforms are American-owned, they tend to apply a piece of Federal legislation known as COPPA; the age of consent for using Snapchat, WhatsApp, Facebook, and Twitter, for example, is therefore set at 13. Yet, the BBC found last year 78% of children aged 10 to 12 had signed up to a platform including Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and WhatsApp.

"Children would allow their parents to be their friends on Facebook but do all their personal communication on other platform their parents knew nothing about..."
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Why is this a problem? Firstly, because platform capitalism offloads any responsibility onto problematically normative constructs of childhood, parenting, and paternal relations. The owners of platforms assume children will always consult their parents before using their services and that parents will read and understand their terms and conditions, which, research confirms, in reality few users, children or adults, even look at. Moreover, we found that many parents don't have the knowledge, expertise, or time to monitor what their children are doing online. Some parents, for instance, worked night shifts or had more than one job. We talked to children who regularly moved between homes and whose estranged parents didn't communicate with each other to supervise their children online. We found parents who are in financial difficulties or affected by mental and physical illness are often unable to keep on top of their children's digital lives. We also interviewed children who use strategies to manage their parent's anxieties so they would leave them alone. They would, for example, allow their parents to be their friends on Facebook but do all their personal communication on other platforms their parents knew nothing about. Often, then, the most vulnerable children offline - children in care, for example - are the most vulnerable children online. My colleagues at the OII found 9 out of 10 of the teenagers who are bullied online also face regular 'traditional' bullying. Helping these children requires extra investment from their families, teachers, charities and social services. The burden is aldo on schools to address the problem of fake news and extremism such as Holocaust denialism that children can read on platforms.

This is typical of platform capitalism. It monetises what are called social graphs: i.e. the networks of users that use its platforms that it then makes available to advertisers. Social graphs are more than just nodes and edges representing our social lives: they are embodiments of often intimate or very sensitive data (that can often be de-anonymised by linking, matching and combining digital profiles). When graphs become dysfunctional and manifest social problems such as abuse, doxxing, stalking, and grooming, local social systems and institutions, that are usually publicly funded, have to deal with the fall-out. These institutions are often either under-resourced and ill-equipped to solve such problems, or they are already overburdened.

The second problem is the ecosystems of dependency that emerge within, where smaller companies or other corporations try to monetise their associations with successful platforms: they seek to get in on the monopolies of data extraction that the big platforms are creating. Many of these companies are not wealthy corporations and therefore don't have the infrastructure or expertise to develop their own robust security measures. They can cut costs by neglecting security or they subcontract out services to yet more companies that are added to the network of data sharers. Again, the platforms offload any responsibility onto the user. For example, WhatsApp tells its users; "Please note that when you use third-party services, their own terms and privacy policies will govern your use of those services". These ecosystems are networks that are only as strong as their weakest link. There are many infamous examples that illustrate this including the so-called ' Snappening' where sexually explicit pictures harvested from Snapchat - a platform that is popular with teenagers - were released on to the open web. There is also a growing industry in fake apps that enable illegal data capture and fraud by leveraging the implicit trust users have for corporate walled gardens.

What can we do about these problems? Platform capitalism is restructuring labour markets and social relations in such as ways that opting out from it is becoming an option available only to a privileged few. Moreover, we found teenagers whose parents prohibited them from using social platforms often felt socially isolated and stigmatised. In the real world of messy social reality, platforms can't continue offload their responsibilities to parents and schools. We need some solutions fast because, by tacitly accepting the terms and conditions of platform capitalism - particularly when it tells us it is not responsible for the harms its business model facilitates - we may be now passing an event horizon where these companies are becoming too powerful, unaccountable, and distant from our local reality.

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Two concepts have recently emerged that invite us to rethink the relationship between children and digital technology: the datafied child ( Lupton & Williamson, 2017 ) and children's digital rights ( Livingstone & Third, 2017 ).

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Fast psycho-policy & the datafication of social-emotional learning | code acts in education

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Fast psycho-policy & the datafication of social-emotional learning | code acts in education

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Ben Williamson

[Paper prepared for the Annual Ethnography Symposium, University of Manchester, 30 August-1 September 2017, with the full title 'The infrastructure of fast psycho-policy: psychological governance & the datafication of social-emotional learning']

Mojo is a small, green alien student with the appearance of an extra from the animated movie Monsters University. Many researchers of education and technology may not know Mojo, but over 3 million teachers and 35 million students do, because Mojo is the cute brand mascot of the successful educational technology application ClassDojo used in primary schools worldwide to promote students' 'character' development and 'social-emotional learning'. Mojo is also, though, the friendly, visible face of an emerging infrastructure of interlocking technologies, organizations and policy discourses focused on the application of psychological expertise and techniques to measure and manage students' behaviours and feelings in the classroom.

Launched with Silicon Valley venture capital support in 2011, ClassDojo started life as a simple behaviour management app available for free download to teachers. Designed for use on smartphones so it can be used in real-time in the classroom, ClassDojo encourages teachers to award 'positive points' for specific observable behaviours, gathers these points as data about student behaviour, and then allows teachers and school leaders to identify behavioural trends using its TrendSpotter visualization tool and automated report generator. Visualizations and reports are also available to parents. Its website claims ClassDojo builds 'happier classrooms.'

However, in the last two years ClassDojo has extended its functionality to become a social media platform for schools, with real-time messaging, photo and video communication between schools and home, user-generated content, online video content hosting, and 'school-wide' functionality. Its founders and funders have likened it to Netflix, Spotify, LinkedIn and Facebook, and have claimed it can replace cumbersome school websites, group email threads, newsletters and paper flyers. It also has an online ClassDojo store targeted at teachers where they can purchase ClassDojo posters, resources and clothing.

In this paper I examine how ClassDojo has evolved into an educational social media platform and a key sociotechnical actor in the diffusion and enactment of a policy discourse of 'social-emotional learning' (SEL) worldwide. ClassDojo is just one app in a fast-growing industry of software tools designed to shape students' social-emotional learning in the classroom-an industry which enjoys significant support from political centres of authority, international policy influencers, think tanks and philanthropic foundations. The paper draws on material published in two articles (' Decoding ClassDojo' and ' Learning in the platform society') where you can find full references to sources cited below.

Psycho-policy platforms
The evolution of ClassDojo needs to be understood as exemplifying within the educational field a trend that Jose van Dijck and Thomas Poell have described as the penetration of social media platforms into all kinds of everyday interactions, institutional practices and professional routines. Platforms are, argues Tarleton Gillespie, digital intermediaries that allow users to interact, host and share content, and buy or sell. But, he adds, platforms are also 'curators of public discourse'-the result of choices about what can appear, how it is organized and monetized, and what its technical architecture permits or forbids. As such, technical, social and economic concerns determine platforms' structure, function and use, note Jean-Christophe Plantin and coauthors. Moreover, they note, many social media platforms are now undergoing 'infrastructuralization' as 'media environments essential to our daily lives (infrastructures) are dominated by corporate entities (platforms).'

In other words, platform operators are not mere 'owners of information' but 'becoming owners of the infrastructures of society,' as Nick Srnicek argues. In his view, platforms are characterized by acting as intermediaries to enable interaction between customers, advertisers, service providers, producers, suppliers, and even physical objects; thriving on network effects, whereby they accumulate users from whom they can gather data and generate value; offering free products and services; and deploying a strategy of constant user engagement through attractive presentations of themselves and their offerings. As emerging infrastructures, these platforms are increasingly acting as substrates to society.

As an educational intermediary, a curator of educational discourse, and a provider of free services that deploys strategies of user engagement to gain users through network effects, ClassDojo needs therefore to be studied and understood as the assembled product of a complex web of people and organizations that designed and maintain it; technical components; business plans; expert discourses, and the technical, social and economic concerns that frame them. By disassembling it into its component parts and examining it as contextually framed and produced, it becomes possible to see how it has evolved from a classroom app to a platform for schools to part of an infrastructure for social-emotional education across public education.

My methodological strategy is to approach ClassDojo as assembling and evolving in the context of a shift to 'fast policy' processes in education. By 'fast policy' I'm drawing on Jamie Peck and Nik Theodore's argument that while contemporary policymaking may still be primarily government-centred, it also involves 'sources, channels, & sites of policy advice' that 'encompass sprawling networks of human & nonhuman actors'. This means digital technologies, infrastructures, platforms, websites, social media activities, database devices and so on can all be considered as policy actors which may be followed as they are assembled, evolve, mutate and 'become real'. Methodologically, an attention to fast policy processes demands 'network ethnography' approaches which seek to 'follow policies' as they are developed and realized. In my research, I am specifically following ClassDojo as a fast policy actor, both seeking to 'disassemble' it into the various parts it has been assembled from, and 'reassembling' the wider infrastructure of people, technologies and policy discourses that are seeking to 'make real' and enact the 'social-emotional learning' agenda in schools.

The term social-emotional learning (SEL) encompasses concepts such as character education, growth mindset, grit and perseverance, and other so-called 'non-cognitive' or 'non-academic' 'personal qualities' and competences. In the last couple of years, social-emotional learning has emerged as a key policy priority from the work of international policy influencers such as the OECD and World Economic Forum; psychological entrepreneurs such as Angela Duckworth's ' Character Lab' and Carol Dweck's 'growth mindset' work; venture capital-backed philanthropic advocates (e.g. Edutopia); powerful lobbying coalitions ( CASEL) and institutions ( Aspen Institute) and government agencies and partners, especially in the US (for example, the US Department of Education 'grit' report of 2013) and UK (in 2014 an all-party parliamentary committee produced a ' Character and Resilience Manifesto' in partnership with the Centre Forum think tank, with the Department for Education following up with funding for schools to develop character education programs).

In sum, social-emotional learning is the product of a fast policy network of 'psy' entrepreneurs, global policy advice, media advocacy, philanthropy, think tanks, tech R&D and venture capital investment. Together, this loose alliance of actors has produced shared vocabularies, aspirations, and practical techniques of measurement of the 'behavioural indicators' of classroom conduct that correlate to psychologically-defined categories of character, mindset, grit, and other personal qualities of social-emotional learning. As Agnieszka Bates has argued, psychological advocates of SEL have conceptualized character as malleable and measurable, and defined the character skills that are most valuable to the labour market. As such, she describes SEL as a psycho-economic fusion of economic goals and psychological discourse in a corporatized education system. Specific algorithms and metrics have already been devised by prominent psycho-economic centres of expertise to measure the economic value of social-emotional learning.

In these ways, social-emotional learning exemplifies the emergence of what has been termed psycho-policy and psychological governance in relation to public policy more widely-that is, the application of psychological expertise, interventions and explanations to public policy problems, specifically the application of practical techniques and 'know-how' for quantifying and then 'nudging' individuals to perform the 'correct' behaviours and affects. If character is malleable, it can be moulded.

ClassDojo as a psycho-policy platform
So, ClassDojo can be viewed as a platform diffuser of SEL psycho-policy and practice. The rest of this paper examines how it is being assembled to perform this task.

Shaping shared vocabularies
ClassDojo's popular, and publicly charismatic founders have become spokespeople for social-emotional learning. They are regularly interviewed in the education technology and business media, and use these as venues for diffusing social-emotional learning discourses. They name-check psychological entrepreneurs such as Angela Duckworth and Carol Dweck to relay into classroom practices their psychological theories for classifying and measuring the correct behaviours of students. In a sense, they are governing educational language at a distance, working by making governmental and commercial aspirations around SEL into the shared concerns and aspirations of classroom practitioners and school leaders, and thereby penetrating into institutional practices and professional routines.

Rewarding character
ClassDojo's most well-known feature is its rewards app for teachers to award 'feedback points' to individuals or groups, in real-time during classroom activities. This allows teachers to produce report cards on each student and whole classes, and also school leaders to take a view of behavioural trends across the whole school.

At the core of its rewards system is the psychological assumption that observable behavioural indicators transmitted from the embodied conduct of students in classrooms can be correlated with character skills and other aspects of SEL. By rewarding students who perform the correct behavioural indicators of SEL and character, ClassDojo is also designed to actively promote specific kinds of preferred behaviours. As one of ClassDojo's founders has noted, it collects 'millions of behaviour observations every day' to enable 'real-time information from the classroom,' while one of its research partners says, 'We want teachers to think about the kind of norms they want to set in the classroom, so growth mindset is integrated in it.'

Partner networks
As ClassDojo has sought income, it has successfully won venture capital funding to support new features and platform development. In 2016 it was awarded $21million US dollars to develop as a platform for school communication and distribution of in-house educational video content.

In particular, it has developed a number of 'Big Ideas' serials of animated videos as classroom resources for teachers to use to teach children the language of social-emotional learning, including video series on growth mindset, perseverance or 'grit' and mindfulness. These have been created through partnerships with major psychological centres of expertise. Carol Dweck's mindset centre, PERTS at Stanford, was ClassDojo's first academic partner on its mindset series, followed by Harvard's Making Caring Common for the empathy series, and most recently Yale's Center for Emotional Intelligence co-produced the mindfulness series.

As ClassDojo's head product designer has claimed, through these videos, the ClassDojo 'characters model for the kids the behaviour you are trying to instil.' So what we see is how classroom norms of behaviour are being defined, via ClassDojo, through suturing together venture capital aspirations and psychological entrepreneurship. And it is doing so directly through reaching out to teachers, currently for free, to distribute and instil in students the 'model' behaviours defined by psy experts of SEL and character.

Network effects
Significantly, if we think of ClassDojo as a technology of fast psycho-policy, it has enjoyed spectacularly accelerated success in finding its way into pedagogic practice. One of its founders has claimed that 'watching the graph of the user numbers has been incredible' as 'millions of teachers and students' have begun 'using this every day.' Its growth has been fuelled through highly effective word-of-mouth marketing campaign on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, which has allowed it to grow via network effects 'faster than any other ed tech company.'

These network effects also exert material effects. Its product designer has claimed that 'We look for an idea that can be powerful and high-impact and is working in pockets, and work to bring it to scale more quickly ... incorporated into the habits of classrooms.' We can understand this in two ways-'working in pockets' refers to taking a small-scale idea up to scale through network effects. But 'working in pockets' also well describes ClassDojo's strategy-its platform sits on the smart phone of millions of teachers, sitting in their pockets, and never far away from their eyes and hands where it might be incorporated into the habits of classrooms. ClassDojo is in this sense a kind of pocket instructor that enacts psychological expertise through teachers' own fingertips.

ClassDojo is, in other words, ambitiously attempting to 'shift what happens inside and around classrooms' as a way of changing 'education at huge scale' as its chief executive has claimed. However, these network effects are also generating value for the ClassDojo company and its investors as it amasses a huge global user base.

Monetizing behaviour
ClassDojo is also seeking to monetize student behaviour data. Although it has received over $30million dollars in venture capital investment, it has to date generated no revenue whatsoever, and is fairly opaque about its monetization plans. One of its investors has said that 'This company has a greater market share than Coke in the U.S. Let's get all the stakeholders on the platform ... and scale before we think about monetization.'

However, its founders have given some clues. They have spoken of ClassDojo as a 'huge distribution platform' to parents, who might be willing to pay for additional content-such as additional Big Ideas videos-to take the ClassDojo platform and its preferred habits of character into the family home. Its ClassDojo store is already active for the sale of merchandise.

But also, its founders have noted 'There's a macro-trend happening where schools want to collect more data about behaviour.' In fact, with the new federal law, Every Student Succeeds, that governs US schooling, states are now required to record at least one measure of 'non-academic learning.' So when ClassDojo's founders have suggested that they will 'build new, premium features that parents or school districts may be interested in paying for,' it seems likely they are referring to the production of detailed behavioural reports of the kind that might support schools in their delivery of data recording their progress in supporting students' non-academic learning targets.

Infrastructuralizing
Not only has ClassDojo extended through network effects to huge numbers of users. It has also developed 'school-wide' functionality to enable entire institutions to be signed in to the system in order to orchestrate institutional communication, data-sharing between classes, and establish 'school values' consistent with SEL across the school. Through its ongoing function creep, it is becoming an integral and embedded sociotechnical substrate to schooling practices. A teacher in a ClassDojo press release stated, 'We can now create a school community that includes all of us: teachers, parents, students, principals, vice principals and other school staff. None of us can imagine teaching without it!'

Furthermore, one of its founders has said: 'Looking back in 5-10 years, I hope to see that this other half of education-going beyond test scores to focus on building students as people-has become really important and that we helped to make that happen by connecting teachers, parents and students.' This aspiration registers the emergence of a global effort to develop student character and SEL rather than to reduce them to test scores, which ClassDojo is seeking to support through mobilizing itself as an infrastructural underlay to connect teachers, parents and students around shared psychological vocabularies, normative values and aims. In other words, ClassDojo is becoming more infrastructural for schools, but it is also nested in a global infrastructure of educational measurement.

From test-based infrastructure to infrastructuralized psycho-policy platforms
In recent years, schools have been locked-in to data infrastructures of test-based performance measurement. As Dorothea Anagnostopoulos and colleagues have argued, the existing test-based data infrastructure is an assemblage of people, technologies and policies that stretches across and beyond formal education systems. It has produced 'objective measures' of students', teachers' and schools' performance based on test results data and thereby defined 'who counts' as 'good' teachers, students and schools.

However, with the emergence of new kinds of technical platforms, such as ClassDojo, that emphasize SEL and character education, the data infrastructure of test-based performance measurement may be evolving. Jean-Christophe Plantin and coauthors have argued that 'The rise of ubiquitous, networked computing' twinned with 'changing political sentiment have created an environment in which platforms can achieve enormous scales, co-exist with infrastructures, and in some cases compete with or even supplant them. ... Rapidly "infrastructuralized platforms" have arisen in the digital age.'

ClassDojo is evidence of how a platform now integrated into and integral to many schools and classrooms worldwide is now co-existing alongside, and potentially even competing with or threatening to supplant the existing data infrastructure of test-based performance metrics. The ClassDojo platform operators are mobilizing networked computing to curate and diffuse the psy vocabulary of SEL and character into public education, reflecting changing political sentiment which has begun to focus on alleviating student anxiety and high stakes testing resulting from test-based performance measurement. In so doing, they are continually assembling and engaging users through attractive presentations and new features, generating network effects of valuable users all the time. The results is that ClassDojo has become an 'infrastructuralizing platform' for the measurement of behavioural indicators of social-emotional skills-and for nudging and compelling students to perform the 'correct' behavioural indicators that correlate with the affects of 'good students' in 'happier classrooms'

Conclusion
In conclusion, we can see how ClassDojo is participating as an actor in current fast psycho-policy development and enactment. It is curating and diffusing SEL discourses into practice through teachers' pockets and fingertips. In so doing, ClassDojo treats students as embodied behavioural indicators whose affects are rendered traceable through psychological categories of character, mindset and grit; it treats teachers as data entry clerks responsible for amassing ClassDojo's global database, attracting their own social networks as new users, and as consumers at the online store; treats school leaders as data demanders, who require staff to enter the feedback points in order to generate school-wide behavioural trend insights; and treats parents as data consumers, who receive the data visualizations and report cards. ClassDojo also treats classrooms as little data markets where psycho-economically defined 'valuable' character skills and the performance of 'correct' behavioural indicators can be incentivized, nudged and exchanged for rewards. All the while, ClassDojo is thriving on the network effects of these activities to generate value for the company and its investors-driving up its user graph, its reach, and the value of its global datasets on student behaviour.

Finally, ClassDojo is nested in an emerging global infrastructure of measurement & intervention in social-emotional education. In its report on 'The Power of Social and Emotional Skills,' the OECD has claimed that 'While everyone acknowledges the importance of social and emotional skills, there is insufficient awareness of "what works" to enhance these skills and efforts to measure and foster them.' ClassDojo is currently positioning itself as a fast psycho-policy exemplar of 'what works' in social-emotional learning practice. In contrast to the existing infrastructure of test-based performance measurement, ClassDojo is a platform for translating psychological theories into the habits of classrooms, teachers and students, which is also nested in an expanding global infrastructure dedicated to the measurement and management of the social and emotional lives of young people. In these ways, if policy trends shift toward the performance measurement of schools, teachers and students based on data recorded about the behavioural indicators of social-emotional learning, then ClassDojo will itself become integrated into existing metric practices of school evaluation, judgment and ranking.

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Fast psycho-policy & the datafication of social-emotional learning

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Ben Williamson [Paper prepared for the Annual Ethnography Symposium, University of Manchester, 30 August-1 September 2017, with the full title 'The infrastructure of fast psycho-policy: psychological governance & the datafication of social-emotional learning'] Mojo is a small, green alien student with the appearance of an extra from the animated movie Monsters University.

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User or student: constructing the subject in Edtech incubator: Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education: Vol 0, No 0

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User or student: constructing the subject in Edtech incubator: Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education: Vol 0, No 0

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This research focuses on 'sociotechnical imaginaries' about education and learning emanating from the Edtech research and development sector. MindCet, the first Edtech incubator in Israel, aims to bring 'disruptive innovation' to the educational field, mainly by bringing in tech start-ups with their problem solving culture and practices. This centre acts as an intermediary between techno-business and education. Based on Biesta's notion of 'the new language of learning,' my research shows how the learning imagined and constructed in techno-business production casts the student as a 'user.' I will argue that the construction of learners as 'users,' not 'students,' is crucial to understanding education technology production and discourse. This user-focused understanding of learning has implications for the commodification and depoliticization of education, and is an important factor in neo-liberal educational reforms and venture philanthropy interventions, both globally and locally.

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User or student: constructing the subject in Edtech incubator

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This research focuses on 'sociotechnical imaginaries' about education and learning emanating from the Edtech research and development sector. MindCet, the first Edtech incubator in Israel, aims to bring 'disruptive innovation' to the educational field, mainly by bringing in tech start-ups with their problem solving culture and practices.

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DeVos Invested in Company Under Investigation for Misleading Claims - Digital Education - Education Week

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DeVos Invested in Company Under Investigation for Misleading Claims - Digital Education - Education Week

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When U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos increased her family's financial stake in Neurocore this spring, the controversial "neurofeedback" company was under investigation by an advertising-industry self-regulatory group for making questionable claims about its treatments for such conditions as autism, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, and memory loss.

Following a months-long review of the evidence behind Neurocore's assertions, the National Advertising Division formally recommended in July that the company stop making a wide range of advertising claims and stop promoting many of its user testimonials.

"NAD concluded that the advertiser's evidence was insufficiently reliable to substantiate [its] strong health-related claims," according to the group's 17-page decision. "As a result, NAD recommended that all of the challenged claims be discontinued."

Neurocore is appealing the decision.

"We stand behind the outcomes we deliver to improve people's lives," company CEO Mark Murrison wrote in an email. "From the beginning, we have fully and voluntarily cooperated with the NAD to provide extensive support for the statements we make. We have great respect for the NAD, but we disagree with their decision."

Betsy DeVos and Neurocore

On February 10, the National Advertising Division alerted Neurocore that it was opening an investigation into the company's advertising claims.

That was nearly two months before DeVos or one of her immediate family members invested between $1,000,001 and $5,000,000 in the company, according to financial disclosure forms filed with the federal Office of Government Ethics.

DeVos or an immediate family member invested an additional $250,001 to $500,000 in the company in June.

Neither the U.S. Department of Education nor the Windquest Group, a private-equity investment firm that DeVos previously chaired and that her husband still heads, responded to requests for comment.

The National Advertising Division is an investigative unit of the Advertising Self-Regulatory Council, an ad-industry group formed in 1971. The organization aims to promote truth and accuracy in advertising, settle disputes between competing advertisers, and keep government regulators at bay. The ASRC is administered by the Council of Better Business Bureaus.

The NAD typically investigates about 150 cases per year, most of which are prompted by one company complaining about claims made by a competitor. In most years, only a handful of the group's decisions are appealed.

Neurocore was officially launched in 2006. The company currently operates six "brain-performance centers" in Michigan and Florida. It purports to treat both adults and children by analyzing their brainwaves and other biological signs, then providing "neurofeedback sessions" through which they can train their brains to function better. Neurocore charges as much as $2,200 for a 30-session cycle.

DeVos sat on Neurocore's board from 2009 until last November. In January, when she was President Donald Trump's nominee for education secretary, she reported a financial stake in the company worth between $5 million and $25 million. Federal ethics officials signed off on DeVos maintaining that stake. They also signed off on the subsequent investments she made in the company this spring.

A number of neuroscientists and researchers consulted by Education Week, however, have questioned what DeVos's growing investment in the company says about her commitment to rigorous scientific research.

Targeting 'Uniquely Vulnerable' Audiences

A spokeswoman for the National Advertising Division said its lawyers initiated their investigation of Neurocore, in part, because the company's claims appear to target two "uniquely vulnerable" audiences: families with children suffering from conditions such as ADHD and autism, and seniors suffering from memory loss.

Among the claims made by Neurocore that NAD lawyers reviewed, according to the group's July decision:

"81% of children who come to us on ADHD meds and complete our program are able to reduce or eliminate their use of medications upon program completion."

"Control your anxiety without medication."

"25% reduction in reported symptoms on the autism evaluation checklists."

"Strengthen your brain to fight depression without medication."

"You'll experience improved memory, as well as better sleep, focus, mood, mental clarity, and overall cognitive performance."

"A natural remedy for migraines."

As part of its investigation, NAD requested that Neurocore provide evidence substantiating each of its challenged claims, as well as numerous user testimonials promoted on the company's website.

That information consisted of the company's analysis of its own internal data and third-party studies of neurofeedback's use in treating ADHD, anxiety, depression, autism, memory loss, sleep problems, and migraines.

The NAD determined that Neurocore's internal evidence, which resulted from observational studies rather than clinical trials, "does not provide competent and reliable scientific evidence in support of health-related advertising claims."

The group also determined that the third-party studies submitted by Neurocore either were not relevant to the specific form of neurofeedback the company uses, or did not provide clear evidence in support of that form of neurofeedback.

And the NAD issued a sharp warning to Neurocore over its use of testimonials that suggest clients "have reduced or eliminated the need for medication for ADHD, anxiety, depression, memory problems, migraines, or sleep disorders."

What happens next

The nonprofit group Truth in Advertising Inc. has compiled its own database of what it says are more than 100 examples of Neurocore making questionable advertising claims.

The group's executive director, Bonnie Patten, said the National Advertising Division's "strong case" against the company makes Education Secretary DeVos's financial stake in Neurocore particularly troubling.

"She is giving credibility to a company that may not deserve it," Patten said.

Neurocore's appeal of the NAD's decision will be heard by a five-member panel convened by the National Advertising Review Board, which is also a unit of the Advertising Self-Regulatory Council.

If the panel sides with NAD, Neurocore will again be asked to stop making the advertising claims and using the testimonials that were deemed unsubstantiated.

If the company does not comply, the case will be referred to the Federal Trade Commission.
Photo: Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is interviewed in her office at the Education Department in Washington, Wednesday, Aug. 9, 2017. -- Jacquelyn Martin/AP Follow @BenjaminBHerold for the latest news on ed-tech policies, practices, and trends.

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DeVos Invested in Company Under Investigation for Misleading Claims

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When U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos increased her family's financial stake in Neurocore this spring, the controversial "neurofeedback" company was under investigation by an advertising-industry self-regulatory group for making questionable claims about its treatments for such conditions as autism, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, and memory loss.

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It is a mistake to expect children to be happy, worse still to insist on it. Childhood is navigated via rage and disappointment as much as by joy and pleasure, often in quick succession. Nevertheless, a five-year-old knows about as much as there is to know about happiness. In their love of the outdoors, their easy physicality and fascination with everyday objects, young children already understand the very things that adults struggle to learn.

It must register as a pretty damning indictment on Anglo-American society that 'happiness' is now something that has entered many school curricula. Imagine a society where children have to be taught how to be happy. It sounds almost dystopian, yet just such an agenda has gathered momentum since the early 1990s.

The idea of teaching children 'happiness' on the basis of psychological science (as opposed to some broader ethical idea of what counts as a good life) starts with the Penn Resiliency Program, founded in 1990 by Martin Seligman, the leading light of positive psychology. Within the Program, children between 9-14 years old receive tuition in cognitive-behavioural techniques and social problem-solving skills, which are deemed to be valuable for them in warding off depression and anxiety.

The positive psychology campaign, Action for Happiness, has explored possibilities for similar projects in the UK. The idea has been advocated widely by Anthony Seldon, one of Action for Happiness's founders and former Head Master of Wellington College, where he famously introduced 'wellbeing' classes into the curriculum. Seldon was also involved in setting up a chain of academy schools, led by British Prime Minister David Cameron's former advisor Lord James O'Shaughnessy, which builds directly on the research and education schemes of Seligman. Lessons in 'character' are viewed as central to the restoration of children's wellbeing.

'Character' itself has been a steadily growing concern amongst educators in the United States and Britain. Influenced especially by the Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck, schools have begun to focus on developing a 'growth mindset' and 'grit' amongst children, which encourages them to change their understanding of themselves so as to see obstacles as surmountable.

Then there is the movement to introduce mindfulness into the classroom, as advocated by the Mindfulness in Schools Project. Meditation is believed to help children become more resilient in the face of depression and better able to concentrate in class.

The desired outcome of such techniques is often ambiguous. Dr Sophie Sansom, who manages a school mindfulness project, argues that it is "the best way to help kids to flourish". A teacher whose school has adopted it offers a somewhat different justification: "on occasions when we do have that wobbliness, after playtimes, after PE, after lunchtimes, we're able to practice this mindfulness and it calms the whole situation down." Hmmm.

Few would deny the evidence that mental health is an escalating problem for children, especially in the English-speaking world. In 2007, UNICEF reported that children in the UK experienced the worst levels of 'wellbeing' of any European or North American nation, with the United States second worst.

Much of the interest in 'character', 'resilience' and mindfulness at school stems from the troubling evidence that depression and anxiety have risen rapidly amongst young people over the past decade, resulting in heightened rates of self-harm. It seems obvious that teachers and health policy-makers would look around for therapies and training that might offset some of this damage.

A pragmatic defence of these programmes might be that the triggers of stress are randomly distributed, culturally endemic or beyond anyone's control; hence it is only sensible to focus on the symptoms. In the age of social media, ubiquitous advertising and a turbulent global economy, children cannot be protected from the sources of depression and anxiety. The only solution is to help them build more durable psychological defences.

This somewhat grim picture is open to debate, especially given what is known about the impact of class and inequality on children's wellbeing. But even leaving that evidence aside, it appears curiously blind to the manifold ways in which all schools are already integral to how human beings flourish (or don't), both as children and as adults.

If we can park all the friendly-sounding rhetoric of 'happiness', 'character' and 'mindfulness' for a moment, it's possible to see schools as spaces in which the possibilities for happiness might either grow or shrink. And in the UK, government policy seems hell-bent on crushing the spirit and optimism that children are otherwise perfectly able to discover and develop.

Since last year, thousands of children entering primary school in the UK for the first time (some as young as four) have been subject to a ' Baseline Assessment', introduced by the government to attain a standardised gauge of their progress leading up to their moving on to secondary school at the age of 11. Funded by the Gates, Walton and other private foundations and encouraged by the Obama Administration, school 'reformers' in the United States have embarked on a similar programme of standardized testing and teacher evaluation.

Policy-makers claim that such interventions offer crucial 'comparability' between pupils so as to identify those that are falling behind-an argument straight out of the annals of new public management, though one that the UK government has since had to retract.

Teachers argue, on the contrary, that such testing interferes with the crucial period when a child is starting school for the first time, when everything should be about building a relationship with them and making them feel safe. Some teachers have reported that the tests make children cry and damage their self-esteem. If, for example, a five-year-old has English as a second language, a technocratic evaluation of their linguistic ability may represent them very badly and show nothing of their longer-term possibilities.

Teachers believe that the negative impact of tests and exams on the mental health of children in English schools begins when they are as young as six, and gets worse from there. The World Health Organisation found that 11 and 16-year-old pupils in England feel more pressured by their school work than is the case in the vast majority of other developed countries. Childline reports that the number of children seeking counselling for exam-related stress doubled between 2012 and 2014.

In protest against this culture, a campaign entitled Let Our Kids Be Kids organised a 'pupil strike' across schools in the UK. In resistance to new tests for seven and eleven-year-olds to be taken later this month, thousands of children were kept out of school on May 3 2016. Parents involved in the campaign have reported their children having nightmares about the impending tests.

Children are not the only victims here. A survey undertaken in 2015 discovered that nearly half of all teachers in the UK had visited a doctor for reasons to do with stress, with five per cent being hospitalised. The main reasons cited by teachers were workload, pay, school inspections and constant curriculum reform by central government.

The regime of audit, testing and ranking eats into the wellbeing of the teacher as much as that of the pupil. The news that some schools are making children sit mock exams within the first month of the autumn term (thereby potentially invading the psychology of the pupil on summer holiday) is a reflection of the pressure that schools are under to produce 'results.'

Many teachers simply wish to get out of the profession altogether. How children are expected to learn 'character' from adults who would rather be elsewhere is anyone's guess. But this is the paradoxical scenario that is arising, thanks to an ideology that welds together pre-modern ideas of 'flourishing' with an uber-modern obsession with metrics and performance ranking.

The irony of turning schools into therapeutic institutions when they generate so much stress and anxiety seems lost on policy-makers who express concern about children's mental health. One doesn't have to subscribe to a belief in 'neoliberalism' or 'individualism' in order to understand the source of much that makes schoolchildren unhappy-one simply has to look at the relentless exam and inspection schedule they have to follow.

In fairness, some proponents of happiness education do speak out against excessive performance-testing. Lord Layard, probably the most prominent advocate of happiness science and positive psychology in the UK, regularly denounces the consequences of 'materialism' and 'inequality' for mental wellbeing. Positive psychologists tell us we should avoid 'comparing' ourselves to others, which-one might presume-would include avoiding enforced comparisons between children who are only a couple of years out of their nappies.

But there remains a serious blind-spot. Economists assume that competition is something that occurs spontaneously in the market, a natural force that public policy can prepare us for but not alleviate or shape. Positive psychologists reduce anxiety and depression to defects of behaviour or cognitive biases. But what if people are being socially compelled to compete, perform and prove themselves? And what if that compulsion, far from being 'natural' or even a diffuse cultural effect of 'late capitalism' or 'modernity', is in fact deliberately designed by policy-makers who seek to bolster their power with more and more data?

What if it is really the anxieties and fears of those such as Nicky Morgan, an Education Secretary in the UK Government who knows nothing about teaching, or the Department of Education wonks who are wrestling to make the world conform to their numerical understandings, that are really responsible for placing more and more stress on children?

In other words, what if it's those in love with control fantasies and the stupid rhetoric of a 'global race' against China who would benefit most from a touch of mindfulness-not the children who know perfectly well how to enjoy themselves before they ever walk through the gates of a school?

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It is a mistake to expect children to be happy, worse still to insist on it. Childhood is navigated via rage and disappointment as much as by joy and pleasure, often in quick succession. Nevertheless, a five-year-old knows about as much as there is to know about happiness.

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https://twitter.com/andrewmurphie/status/901934742861340672

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Decoding ClassDojo: psycho-policy, social-emotional learning and persuasive educational technologies: Learning, Media and Technology: Vol 0, No 0

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Decoding ClassDojo: psycho-policy, social-emotional learning and persuasive educational technologies: Learning, Media and Technology: Vol 0, No 0

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ClassDojo is one of the world's most successful educational technologies, currently used by over 3 million teachers and 35 million children globally. It reinforces and enacts emerging governmental 'psycho-policies' around the measurement and modification of children's social and emotional learning in schools. This article focuses specifically on the ways ClassDojo facilitates psychological surveillance through gamification techniques, its links to new psychological concepts of 'character development,' 'growth mindsets' and 'personal qualities,' and its connections to the psychological techniques of Silicon Valley designers. Methodologically, the research mobilizes network analysis to trace the organizational, technical, governmental and scientific relations that are translated together and encoded in the ClassDojo app. Through its alignment with emerging education psycho-policy agendas around the measurement of non-cognitive learning, ClassDojo is a key technology of 'fast policy' that functions as a 'persuasive technology' of 'psycho-compulsion' to reinforce and reward student behaviours that are aligned with governmental strategies around social-emotional learning.

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ClassDojo is one of the world's most successful educational technologies, currently used by over 3 million teachers and 35 million children globally. It reinforces and enacts emerging governmental 'psycho-policies' around the measurement and modification of children's social and emotional learning in schools.

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Parenting for a Digital Future – ClassDojo poses data protection concerns for parents

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Parenting for a Digital Future – ClassDojo poses data protection concerns for parents

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Ben Williamson and Alasdair Rutherford raise a series of concerns about the globally popular classroom management app ClassDojo. They argue that as ClassDojo has grown into a new social media site for schools, it poses a number of risks in relation to data protection and child privacy, and to how children, teachers and parents interact. Ben and Alasdair are both based in the Cause for concern Faculty of Social Sciences Informed consent at the University of Stirling, UK. Ben is a Lecturer in Education, and led the ESRC funded project Persistent behavioural records Code Acts in Education Teacher-pupil contact to explore the implications of digital data technologies in education. Alasdair is a Senior Lecturer in Social Statistics. [Header image credit: ClassDojo] Individualising the problem
Millions of parents will be familiar with the free mobile app, ClassDojo. It allows teachers to award or deduct points to children for their classroom behaviour, and has become a worldwide educational success story, with claims it is being used by over 3 million teachers and 35 million children from 180 countries globally.
Purchasing the data
Despite its popularity, ClassDojo raises significant concerns many parents may not have considered. As our ongoing research shows, in 2016 its Silicon Valley team received over US$20 million to extend into a 'school-wide' platform, quickly making it into an indispensable tool for connecting schools with parents, enabling a constant flow of dojo points, classroom pictures, messages, videos and digital portfolios of children's work to be sent from schools to homes.
Return on investment
Meanwhile, teachers are involved in producing a huge database about children's behaviour. It's no longer just a cute app for promoting positive behaviour; it's becoming more like a social media site.
Transparent aims
ClassDojo's rapid spread is running ahead of teachers and parents' awareness of its risks. We raise a number of concerns here to ignite a constructive conversation between parents and schools, particularly about what ClassDojo is doing with children's sensitive behavioural information, and any risks associated with its service.

Not all schools seek 'informed consent' from parents to enter their children's data into the ClassDojo system. Although parents are not forced to participate, this doesn't mean their child is automatically removed, which places a massive responsibility on parents, and assumes their expertise to make sense of lengthy privacy documents. It is also not clear whether schools and local authorities are issuing consistent guidance or risk assessments on the use of ClassDojo.

ClassDojo's new school-wide and class-linking features mean it can be used to create a persistent behavioural record of each individual child across the duration of their schooling, and school leaders can use these records to identify children by their behavioural profile. Vast collections of records are likely to be very attractive to a variety of organisations, for research or otherwise. ClassDojo is already in partnership with Stanford University, which is using ClassDojo data to evaluate how well its content promotes children's psychological development.

The use of ClassDojo in classrooms impacts on teacher-pupil contact time - with points awarded by clicking on the mobile app, teachers become responsible for data entry rather than interacting with pupils. Even 10 minutes of ClassDojo use a day could add up to over a week per school year of teaching time. Many parents may welcome how ClassDojo opens up a communication channel with teachers, but for teachers, this ' digital work ' fills important classroom time.

At a time when children's mental health has become the subject of serious concern, ClassDojo reinforces the idea that it is the behavioural mindset of the individual that needs to be addressed. Many ClassDojo resources refer to ideas such as 'character development' and 'growth mindset' that emphasise developing individuals' resilience in the face of difficulties, but this doesn't address the social causes of many difficulties children encounter, such as stress about tests. Competitive ranking of children, according to their accumulated dojo points, could easily become a further source of stress and anxiety.

ClassDojo is proposing ' premium features' for parents and school districts, and one way it is seeking to ' monetise ' its service is by selling video content to schools, although its vast databank also has potential for monetisation. Parents, for example, could purchase ClassDojo reports to make inferences about their children and their peer groups. School leaders might purchase ready-made reports to single out children for specific classes or special behaviour programmes. Local government departments could buy the data to compare schools' performance, much as schools are already judged in terms of test scores. In this business model, ClassDojo treats teachers as unpaid data entry clerks contributing to a huge database that can be analysed from far away to generate insights that parents, school leaders and local authorities might then purchase.

ClassDojo's business model leaves it open to a potential 'change of control' that could see millions of children's behavioural data transferred to a different organisation. As a free service, it has so far made no revenue, funded entirely by entrepreneurial investors from Silicon Valley. One way of securing a return on investment might be to sell the company, which would mean all ClassDojo data coming under its new owner's privacy policy, with worried parents responsible for deleting their child's data within 30 days. With other global technology companies already performing unsanctioned data mining on children's personal information without seeking consent from either children or their parents, due to its extensive global reach into schools and homes, and its potential for monetisation, ClassDojo would make an attractive acquisition.

As a globally successful social media site for schools, ClassDojo is becoming as integral to the relationships between children, teachers and parents as mainstream social media is to the everyday lives of millions around the world. It is making teachers into data collectors and data entry clerks, encouraging children to see themselves in terms of their behavioural points, and inviting parents to become users of ClassDojo's services. School leaders can now use ClassDojo data and local government authorities may also be able to access it in future, potentially making it into a key tool of whole-school management and performance measurement.

It is time to support parents and teachers to ask critical questions about ClassDojo. As the owners and controllers of a vast global database of children's behavioural information and a global social media site for schools, its entrepreneurial founders need to be more transparent about what they intend to do with that data, how they intend to generate income from it, and how they want ClassDojo to play a part in interactions between children.

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ClassDojo poses data protection concerns for parents

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Ben Williamson and Alasdair Rutherford raise a series of concerns about the globally popular classroom management app ClassDojo. They argue that as ClassDojo has grown into a new social media site for schools, it poses a number of risks in relation to data protection and child privacy, and to how children, teachers and parents interact.

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Learning in the ‘platform society’: Disassembling an educational data assemblageResearch in Education - Ben Williamson, 2017

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Learning in the ‘platform society’: Disassembling an educational data assemblageResearch in Education - Ben Williamson, 2017

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Subscription and open access journals from SAGE Publishing, the world's leading independent academic publisher.

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kristian hammerstad

When it comes to digital assistants like Amazon's Alexa, my four-year-old niece Hannah Metz is an early adopter. Her family has four puck-like Amazon Echo Dot devices plugged in around her house-including one in her bedroom-that she can use to call on Alexa at any moment.

"Alexa, play 'It's Raining Tacos,'" she commanded on a recent sunny afternoon, and the voice-controlled helper immediately complied, blasting through its speaker a confection of a song with lines like "It's raining tacos from out of the sky" and "Yum, yum, yum, yum, yumidy yum."

Giggling and clapping, Hannah danced around the room. I think this ability to get music on demand is neat, too, and I didn't want to be rude, so I danced with her. But at the same time I was wondering what it's going to mean for her to grow up with computers as servants.

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The research firm eMarketer estimates that 60.5 million people in the U.S.-a little less than a fifth of the population-will use a digital assistant at least once a month this year, and about 36 million will do so on a speaker-based device like Amazon Echo or Google Home. These things are most popular among people age 25 to 34, which includes a ton of parents of young children and parents-to-be.

And these techno-helpers are not just going to get more popular; they will also get better at responding to queries and orders, and they'll sound more humanlike, too. At the same time, young users like Hannah will become more comfortable and sophisticated with the technology, going beyond telling Alexa to play a song. They'll request help with homework or control devices around their home.

It's a little worrisome. Leaving aside the privacy implications of kids telling an Internet-connected computer all kinds of things, we don't know much about how this kind of interaction with artificial intelligence and automation will affect how children behave and what they think about computers. Will they become lazy because it's so easy to ask Alexa and its peers to do and buy things? Or jerks because many of these interactions compel you to order the technology around? (Or both?)

Children in the MIT Media Lab study using a Google Home device. The researchers hope to eventually design such digital agents so that kids will be able to tinker with them.

Some of that may happen. It seems more likely, though, that as with many technologies before this, the utility of digital assistants will outweigh their drawbacks. Already they're making an incredible amount of data and computer-aided capabilities available directly to children-even those not yet in kindergarten-for learning, playing, and communicating. With Alexa, kids can get answers to all kinds of questions (both serious and silly), hear stories, play games, control apps, and turn on the lights even if they can't yet reach a wall switch. And this is just the beginning of the kiddie AI revolution.

Does Alexa have feelings?

I wasn't sure if Hannah knew whether Alexa is human. So I asked, and this is what she told me: Alexa is "a kind of robot" who lives in her house, and robots, she reasoned, aren't people. But she does think Alexa has feelings, happy and sad. And Hannah says she would feel bad if Alexa went away. Does that mean she has to be nice to Alexa? Yes, she says, but she's not sure why.

Her interest in her digital assistant jibes with some findings in a recent MIT study, where researchers looked at how children ages three to 10 interacted with Alexa, Google Home, a tiny game-playing robot called Cozmo, and a smartphone app called Julie Chatbot. The kids in the study determined that the devices were generally friendly and trustworthy, and they asked a range of questions to get to know the technologies ("Hey Alexa, how old are you?") and figure out how they worked ("Do you have a phone inside you?").

Cynthia Breazeal, one of the researchers and director of the Personal Robots Group at MIT's Media Lab (as well as cofounder and chief scientist of the company developing an AI robot called Jibo), says that it's not new for children to anthropomorphize technology. But now it's happening a little differently.

For young kids like Hannah who can't yet read, write, or type but can talk a mile a minute, voice-operated assistants could help build social skills and push boundaries-two things that are key to a child's development. If nuances in the user's tone can affect how the digital servants respond-which is not that unlikely in the near future-it's possible that kids who use them will become more adept at communicating with others (be the others humans or robots).

That would be a change from what Breazeal sees today: a lot of bad behavior when we interact with each other using technology. She thinks that arises from the abstract context of, say, tweeting, where we may not fully appreciate the consequences of our interactions. She sees a huge opportunity for virtual assistants like Alexa, Google Home, and others to be designed in ways that push us to treat others the way we want to be treated.

Even though that isn't the way Alexa works yet, it is teaching Hannah some things about how to treat machines, at least. Her mom, Susan Metz, tells me that she's learning there's a special pattern you have to use when asking Alexa things (you have to say a keyword like "Alexa" first), so she is figuring out that this voice assistant isn't something you can speak to the way you would a person. Hannah has also learned that she has to be quiet when her mom is talking to Alexa (I can confirm this isn't carrying over to times that Susan is talking with people). It is possible that simple, routine interactions with this kind of AI will help kids learn even without much advancement in the technology or its design.

Thing reviewed

Alexa "Hey Google is it OK if I eat you?': Initial Explorations in Child-Agent Interaction"
Stefania Druga, Randi Williams, Cynthia Breazeal, and Mitchel Resnick
Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Interaction Design and Children
June 2017

Hannah uses Alexa to find out the time and date. That makes Elizabeth Vandewater, director of data science and research services at the University of Texas at Austin's Population Research Center, wonder if easy access to these assistants will help some kids develop a sense for things like calendar days and minutes sooner than they would have previously. In a way that's helpful-it's one less question peppering parents from a talkative kid. And in fact, Susan says she's happy that Alexa entertains Hannah. But it also brings a sense of robotic precision to life that most of us don't really have to deal with until we're older and more independent, entrusted with doing things like getting to school or work on time. Who knows if that's a good thing?

Say what?

No matter how you're using these digital butlers, the limits of the technology quickly become apparent. Voice-led interactions can still be difficult even for the clearest-speaking adults, and young kids don't often enunciate that well.

Hannah had this problem a few times when she asked Alexa to play music from the Disney movie Moana and Alexa had no idea what she was trying to say. Hannah responded by doing what a lot of us would do when speaking to someone who can't understand us: she spoke a lot louder, and slower. It still didn't work, and Hannah got frustrated.

How to fix it? Breazeal and the other MIT researchers suggest that Alexa and similar "agents" could be designed to tell you why they don't understand what you're asking or commanding, so you can better determine how to get what you want. This makes a lot of sense, as we're innately social (and like feedback), and it's important to learn how to communicate with others in a way that takes their capabilities and levels of understanding into account.

What about older children? Will they get bossy and bratty from the habit of ordering Alexa around? Probably not, says Kaveri Subrahmanyam, a developmental psychologist and chair of child and family studies at California State University, Los Angeles. But she does wonder whether having digital butlers will reduce kids' ability to do things for themselves. "I don't think we have to be worried about it or paranoid about it, but I do think it's something to be watchful for," she says.

The other researchers I spoke to aren't too worried either. "There's this notion that if all this technology was turned off, everything would be great. We'd be interacting all the time, we'd be reading all the time," Vandewater says. "I just don't believe that."

In fact, maybe the opposite can be true. Perhaps growing up with Alexa will actually make technology less distracting, enabling it to, in a sense, fade into the background; we'll get what we need from it, and then move on with our lives until we come back with another request.

For Hannah, at least, this seems to be the case for now. She didn't want to spend much time inside playing with Alexa, and so shortly after we finished dancing to "It's Raining Tacos," she ran outside to chase her little brother around the yard.

Tagged

Siri, MIT, Robots, digital assistants, AI, artificial intelligence, Alexa, Google Home, Amazon Echo, Amazon Echo Dot, voice interaction, MIT Technology Review Events, EmTech MIT 2017

Credit

Illustration by Kristian Hammerstad; Image courtesy of MIT Media Lab; Data from "Hey google is it OK if I eat you?"

Rachel Metz Senior Editor, Mobile

As ... arriving at MIT Technology Review's senior editor for mobile, I cover a wide variety of startups and write gadget reviews out of our San Francisco office. I'm curious about tech innovation, and I'm always on the lookout for the next big thing. Before More MIT Technology Review in early 2012, I spent five years as a technology reporter at the Associated Press, covering companies including Apple, Amazon, and eBay, and penning reviews. I've also worked as a freelancer, covering both technology and crime for the New York Times.

I grew up mostly in Palo Alto, California, where companies like Hewlett-Packard and Google were simply a part of everyday life. But I didn't discover my love for tech coverage until 2003. That's when I accidentally discovered a major security lapse in Palo Alto Unified School District's wireless network, which allowed anyone with Wi-Fi to view sensitive student information, including psychological profiles identified with full names. When not hard at work on a MIT Technology Review story, I can be found cycling around the Bay Area.

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Alexa, are you turning the kids into spoiled brats?

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kristian hammerstad When it comes to digital assistants like Amazon's Alexa, my four-year-old niece Hannah Metz is an early adopter. Her family has four puck-like Amazon Echo Dot devices plugged in around her house-including one in her bedroom-that she can use to call on Alexa at any moment.