Two years ago, the ACLU filed suit against Minnewaska Area Schools for disciplining a student who had posted a negative comment about a staff member while in the privacy of her home. As part of the district’s response, they demanded the student’s login credentials to Facebook. The case raised free speech and privacy issues. This week, the ACLU…
Category: Youth & Schools
Snooping on students’ digital footprints won’t improve their experiences
Simon Renton writes: …. The inherent danger of learning analytics is that they reduce complex interactions to simple statistics, which risks distancing educators from the student experience and shifting the focus towards trends and predictions. Improving performance and reducing drop-out rates is obviously important for both students and institutions. But there are many factors which…
Drexel Discrimination Suit May Jeopardize Privacy Rights of Uninvolved Students
Eric Freedman writes: What might otherwise be a routine discrimination suit about one aggrieved ex-student’s dismissal for poor academic performance has implicated the privacy rights of more than 100 other students. The case being played out in a Philadelphia federal courthouse pits Le Ke’s discrimination claims against a university’s legal duty and the rights of…
LA: Student privacy bill advances to House for debate
AP reports that a compromise bill on student data privacy has made it out of the Education Committee in the Louisiana House. The bill is HB 946: The state education department would develop a new system that gives unique identifying numbers to students by mid-2015, rather than using social security numbers. New, detailed restrictions would…