Education Technology has spread into every field and discipline, with numerous applications in each. This creates a seeming invincible ubiquity, untangling the interconnected lines of data-tracing is nearly impossible. Meinke’s “Student Data Harvested by Education Publishers: They haz more than u think,” discusses the overlapping strategies used by social media platforms and educational platforms to collect user information and process it to ostensibly create better interactions for all involved.

Many of the articles in this week’s readings discuss Cambridge Analytics’ use of Facebook data to facilitate getting targeted outreach and content to users for political ends. This revelation had little true impact on Facebook: their stock value temporarily dipped, and Zuckerbot had to go before Congress. Otherwise, not much happened, people still regularly went on Facebook to add their own personal content and click preferences to the information they explicitly volunteered to the create their user profile. “But education is different,” says Meinke: we take classes to earn degrees and are entitled to a sense of safety and guardianship from our institutions. I agree that education is different but for very different reasons, unlike with social media- which has no proven role in education and is ostensibly “free” in the market sense of the word- interactive course content comes with a hefty price tag. Nowhere is it understood that the students’ data will be held, analyzed and disseminated in perpetuity in payment for access to said content/platform. Indeed, the price of textbooks (e-book or dead tree) has gone up by triple digit percentages in the last decade, even adjusting for dollar values. Students have paid enough upfront for their privacy to have it remain intact, and to have access to their course content beyond the semester. Program learning outcomes are based on the idea that students will enlarge upon skills learned in previous courses.

The rationale for granting access to learning management system data to publishers is posited as the facilitation of platform use by both faculty and student. However, in the nascence of online textbook augmentation students entered a long activation key and would create their profile by selecting the school and course in which they were enrolled. There was nothing wrong with this model, however, the trend towards single sign on (SSO) has created a myth that people cannot handle having multiple logins and also that unique logins will deter platform uses. We can all agree that having to create a new account instead of using an existing Facebook or Google account will probably give some users pause enough to reconsider their buying or comment-posting choices- but there is a critical distinction between the user of mass-published educational content and just about any other instance of use that online learning is frequently compare to: the end-user has already paid to access the platform. The enticement and marketing ships have long sailed. Also, the pursuit of credentialed education should not be trivialized as being tantamount to posting comments or other casual engagements.

I would add to some of the responses in the Davis and Bulger interview with a recommendation that social media not be used in a classroom setting.  “One of the things that excites faculty the most and what they want to learn more about is different ways to use social media in the classroom. An assumption I encounter frequently is that as students are already using social media, social media will be easy to adopt and adapt for learning both for the professor and the student….” We may argue that there is no such thing as true privacy online, but the latent, abstract and remote impact of Cambridge Analytics knowing bits of your professional, social and academic life versus the immediate, and potentially devastating impact of your teacher or boss seeing these overlaps are incomparable.

For the class:

Do you use social media as part of your course activities? If so how?

Can open educational resources combat the integration and slick marketing of the big publishers?

In the wake of Cambridge Analytics, repeated data-breaches across industries, and the lackadaisical responses they’ve garnered, along with the high usage and access provided by freemium platforms, is their room for social action to preserve privacy or is it a matter of personal choice?

In her 2013 article, Noble describes a Google search that she conducted in 2011 using the keywords “Black girls.” She observed that both the advertisements and top 10 search results were dominated by hypersexualized and pornographic portrayals of Black women. Noble argues that these results demonstrate how the Internet is far from a democratic utopia. Instead, search engine results reproduce and amplify misrepresentations of race and gender and reinforce the social, political, and economic disenfranchisement of women and people of color. Noble’s research demonstrates the inaccuracy of users’ perceptions of search engine results as being neutral or objective and reveals how the organization of results is heavily influenced by commercial interests.

In their 2017 article, Noble and Roberts critique higher education’s reliance on learning technologies which also monitor students by collecting their data. These “black-box technologies” are not transparent about their data collection practices and often use this data to improve their services and attract clients. The authors argue that IT professionals and technology scholars need to work together to think through the social implications of using these learning technologies before adopting them.

Discussion Questions:

To what extent did Noble’s 2013 article change your views about search engines? Have you observed biases or misrepresentations in your search engine results?

Noble and Roberts ask: “Will the future of knowledge reside with powerful information systems, unknowable algorithms, and privatized islands of data? If so, at what cost? Further, what role do we, as information technologists and educators, play in identifying and discussing these nuances with our students, staff, faculty, and campus administrators?”

In interviews with faculty, Head et al. (2020) observed that faculty rarely discussed these issues with their students. What would you say to your students about search engine algorithms and black-box technologies? How could you integrate an assignment related to these issues into your course?

Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia, created almost 20 years ago, that allows for nearly anyone to edit.  The three articles that I focused on for this week’s discussion address the community and environment within Wikipedia.  Wikipedia has been criticized for exhibiting systemic bias, by presenting a mixture of “truth, half-truth, and some falsehoods.” 

In Wikipedia Isn’t Officially a Social Network. But the Harassment Can Get Ugly, by Julia Jacobs, there was discussion about the narrative that can potentially form a ‘barrier’ to gender equity.  The article gives a few examples of stories where editors who were feminist or L.G.B.T. were subject to harassment from other Wikipedia editors.  The article also describes different tools (for example, “partial block”) developed by Wikipedia to monitor and restrict users from editing specific pages on which they have proved to be a problem.

In Chapter 1 of Good Faith Collaboration, by Joseph Reagle, Reagle discusses the overall environment of Wikipedia and some of the related “accounting processes” established by Wikipedia.  The three core policies discussed are “Neutral Point Of View”, “No Original Research,” and “Verifiability.”  These core policies are essential to the functionality of Wikipedia to perform as an online encyclopedia that anyone can edit.

Lastly, in Meet The Climate Change Denier Who Became The Voice Of Hurricane Sandy On Wikipedia, by Dan Nosowitz, Nosowitz interviews a Wikipedia contributor, named Ken Mampel.  Mampel is an unemployed, 56-year-old Floridian who was recognized as the most active contributor to the Wikipedia page on Hurricane Sandy.  The article discusses Mampel’s resistance towards acknowledging “global warming” or “climate change” and any related edits to these topics on the Hurricane Sandy Wikipedia page.  Throughout the article there is discussion of edits that are made in “good faith” versus “bad faith.”

These articles led me to think about how they may relate to our current uncertain circumstances as CUNY community members within the COVID era and how these circumstances may affect us as professionals in our respective disciplines moving forward.

Some questions/prompts that I would propose for us to discuss through the aforementioned perspective would be:

• Who decides that a group of individuals is “qualified” to implement restrictions/policies on a larger collection of “non-qualified” individuals?
• As social media continues to be a source of instantaneous information transfer, how do social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook converge/diverge from online platforms like Wikipedia? Where and how do “fact-checks” originate on these platforms?
• With one of Wikipedia’s core content policies (“No Original Research”) and other social media platforms in mind, when does “original research” no longer become “original”?  How might this impact you as you continue to do research? How might this impact your pedagogical approaches toward your students (especially those from underrepresented groups) as they seek to do research? 

Wikipedia is an encyclopedia and one of the many digital tools that exist in the internet. It is a global collaborative effort, that is rooted in providing access to information to peoples across the world, in a variety of languages.

These two articles address an issue that is prevalent in Wikipedia: the gender disparity among “Wikipedians” and Wikipedia Editors. Khanna points out that during a survey conducted on December 2011, it was reported that 90% of the editors in Wikipedia are male, 9% are female, and 1% are transexual/transgender (N=6503). But, at the same time, the article points out that “Among editors who had joined in 2011, 14 percent were female compared to 10 percent for 2010, 9 percent for 2009 and 8 percent for editors who had joined in 2008 and participated in this survey. Possible explanations include that Wikipedia has been attracting a higher ratio of women recently, or that female editors leave the project sooner.” Meaning that there was a small increase of women that were joining Wikipedia as new editors, compared to previous years.

• How can we, as community members and scholars in training, continue to diversify and expand our contributions to educational platforms like Wikipedia?

FemTechNet offers one approach: Using Wikipedia as a pedagogical tool and as as a medium for teaching about Feminism and technology. The article by FemTechNet offers us an opportunity to reflect on how educators can use Wikipedia to engage students in democratizing knowledge production, editing articles, and to work in a collaborative environment that fosters research and writing. The “magic” of Wikipedia is that you can find literally any article on any subject matter, and you have the opportunity to create new content. It can be used in multiple subjects, from the Bench Sciences, to the Humanities. The major contribution of this piece is to provide an opportunity to address gender bias in Wikipedia, and to think about strategies and pedagogical approaches that can be incorporated in the classroom and in community spaces to edit and contribute to the platform.

One project that uses Wikipedia to address these gender biases is Art+Feminism (https://www.artandfeminism.org), specifically in the arts. This initiative is now expanding to other demographic groups, such as inviting and promoting organizing among new Latinx editors in Wikipedia.

• What projects or initiatives do you know are doing similar efforts with Wikipedia or in other platforms to address these issues?
• What other approaches can we as educators use in our classrooms and in our communities that can help address gender, racial, ethnic biases in technology?

In “Quantify Everything: A Dream of a Feminist Data Future”, Amelia Abreu discusses the Quantified Self movement, emphasizing “self-knowledge through numbers”, and how it ignores the context in which data are collected while also excluding populations, including caregivers. Caregivers are “human data trackers”, responsible for monitoring their charges’ needs and behaviors, though this facet of life is largely ignored and unquantified in the QS movement. Data, instead, is largely considered and interpreted from a white, middle- to upper-class male point of view.

• One quote from the article that really struck me is “For a movement that promises ‘self knowledge through numbers’, there’s little emphasis placed on what those numbers might reflect outside of their immediate circumstances.” Do you feel that the QS movement, and society at large, fails to appropriately consider and interpret measurements and data from students and instructors? What do we make of students’ grades—we place emphasis on grades for grad school and financial aid, purposes, but do we take into account everything in a student’s life that contributes to the grade that they earn? How much do we interpret grades as a reflection of the instructor’s teaching style, and less so as an indication of the student’s abilities? Do we quantify all the work that students do, or do we allow work to go ungraded? Have instructors structured classes in such a way that those points that are quantified will reflect better on the instructor? How do students interpret their grades in relation to themselves—what do they actually learn about themselves, and how do they apply this new “knowledge”? What purpose do grades serve outside of the classroom setting?
• Similar to caregivers, is all of the effort that instructors put into teaching (especially adjuncts and graduate student instructors) quantified? What aspects of teaching are ignored? How do the wages given to lower-ranked instructors fail to consider their efforts and work, as well as circumstances outside the classroom? What kinds of data do we as instructors use to gain knowledge about our teaching practices and how well we help our students?

Francesca Tripodi discusses how engagement with Yik Yak, a once-popular social media app, affects students’ interactions and sense of belonging within college campus communities in “Yakking about college life: Examining the role of anonymous forums on community identity formation”. While the anonymity of the app and the ease of usage made it appealing to many, the pervasiveness of the app across the campus focused on in Tripodi’s study made it simultaneously appealing and a must-have to some while enhancing feelings of exclusion for marginalized individuals. Yik Yak got its start in the Greek system on campus, and thus was available to those in a place of privilege (and not to those in such a place) from its conception.

Those Tripodi interviewed mentioned hesitation to post a Yak when they first downloaded the app, and they spent large amounts of time drafting Yaks they hoped would garner positive attention from others in the community; indeed, a specific formula for a “successful” Yak (as determined by upvotes) was often adhered to by app users. Some were able to find support from other students in Yaks posting about mental health struggles and feelings of burnout (and made use of the anonymous posting to feel more comfortable sharing such Yaks in the first place). However, those who did not feel a sense of belonging or inclusion on the physical campus were less inclined to use Yik Yak because of this lack of belonging; the app belongs to only a subset of the campus population to which these marginalized users do not belong, and thus further excludes students from the campus community.

With the history and usage of Yik Yak in mind:

• Tripodi discusses the notion that the anonymity of Yik Yak would allows users to more freely post content that they would not state in public. Considering that students spent significant amounts of time drafting Yaks to gain positive feedback, and content was often recycled, how much do you agree with this notion? Do you think that without the ability to upvote Yaks, content would be less formulaic?
• Do you feel students engage with the discussion board and other platforms in a similar way to the Yik Yak users Tripodi discussed, in that students tend to conform to the pattern and content of what others have already shared in order to gain approval from instructors and peers, and limit the thoughts and opinions they share if they deviate too far from the majority? Now that we have moved our classes online, do you feel that new teaching practices are marginalizing students’ voices more? For those of you who use the discussion board, are the posts you see more varied, or are your students simply agreeing with what others have said? What steps are you taking to keep all of your students engaged with your course?
• Do you think there would be differences in engagement and content on Yik Yak between residential campuses and commuter schools like CUNY? What forms of communication or social media to students rely on today to form online communities with other students, especially now that all interactions are off-campus?  

The readings I focused on this week were about feminism, marginalization, and discrimination in online spaces. Bailey’s All the Digital Humanists Are White, All the Nerds Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave introduces the argument that digital humanities conversations focus on white males. Typical topics of digital humanities are inevitably white, masculine, and able-bodied, leaving people of color, women, and disabled people on the margins. Bailey explores works that address minorities within digital humanities, looking for those that are inclusive and accessible. There is both the issue of marginalized people being left out of the digital humanities as well as the exclusion of digital society from typical humanities studies. Bailey describes the solution as “add and stir”. As academic groups diversify, they must be dispersed evenly, but there are structural issues which prevent minorities from entering certain institutions.

• How might we accommodate the inclusion of women, people of color, and disabled people in the digital humanities conversation?
• Given that our society is becoming increasingly technological, how do we convert traditional humanities studies to address digital humanities without losing marginalized groups?

In Hashtag Feminism, #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen, and the Other #FemFuture Loza recounts how mainstream and digital feminism has largely benefited white women and excluded minorities. There are many movements and hashtags orchestrated by women of color to have their voices heard among the needs of white feminists. Additionally, shocking tags like #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen are used to broadcast to white feminists that not everyone’s voices are being heard. Loza also addresses that many white women feel threatened by such bold statements and here is backlash that pits women against each other. Furthermore, women outside of the black-white binary may struggle even more to be included over the clash between these two sides, as they cannot place themselves on either side.

• In what ways can we make sure our attempts to be inclusive are not simultaneously marginalizing women, people of color, disabled people, and etc?
• How do you practice feminism or equality in your own classrooms? Is marginalization something you ever encounter as an instructor or student?

                Fillapacchi notices a startling categorization in Wikipedia’s Sexism Toward Female Novelists. There is an “American Novelists” section and an “American Women Novelists” section, but no section called “American Male Novelists”. This article was written in 2013, and I checked, there is indeed now an “American Male Novelists” category, so the argument does not currently apply. However, Fillapacchi uses her connections to spread the word. Wikipedia users quickly began adding female authors to the “American Novelists” page so it was no longer just presumed to be male. Wikipedia is certainly not the only institution to give a “female” qualifier for women while allowing men to hold the standard/general title.

• I invite anyone to discuss issues they may have relating to sexism or racism here at CUNY (or elsewhere) if they have any topics they want to bring up.
• I also think it would be okay for this to be a place to voice general concerns we have in these stressful times that we might want to discuss during class, considering sexism and racism may not be on the top of anyone’s mind right now.

The link to the episode on the syllabus isn’t working, but here’s the correct link if anyone is interested in doing this particular optional, suggested “reading” this week. (I do recommend listening to the full episode!) Otherwise, my summary is below, and I believe the content of the episode itself makes for interesting discussion regardless.

Summary

This podcast episode is hosted by Alex Goldman and covers Yik Yak, an app that allows users to communicate with and see posts (called “yaks”) from other users within a 10-mile radius.¹ The episode also focuses specifically on Colgate University and a string of racist incidents—that took place on the app—

In the episode, the main subject that Goldman speaks with is Melissa Melendez, who was a senior at Colgate in January 2015 (when the episode aired). Ever since arriving on campus, Melendez knew she was a bit of a “novelty”—as the child of first-generation Puerto Rican parents, she had grown up poor and was attending Colgate on scholarship. As a private college on the East Coast, Colgate stands out as having a predominantly white student body; it has half as many black and Latino students as the average university.

Melendez often found herself needing to address stereotypes when other students asked her questions (“Have you ever been shot before?”, “How many baby daddies does your mom have?”) and sometimes couldn’t distinguish between whether students were genuinely curious or bigoted. Some instances, however, were clearer. In some of her classes, students would talk about welfare and bring up that students like her, who are on scholarship, are “not deserving” of being at Colgate. So, Melendez decided she wanted to do something about it—she found other students at Colgate who were in a similar situation as her, and she and this group of students ended up forming “The Association of Critical Collegians” (ACC).

On September 22, 2014, the ACC staged a sit-in at Colgate’s admissions building that lasted five days. During the sit-in, individual Colgate students would share emotional stories for about six to seven hours. The ACC had a specific list of 21 demands for Colgate administration, such as diversity training for the staff of the financial aid office, hiring more diverse faculty, and building a discussion of privilege and systemic power dynamics into the core curriculum.²

At first, the ACC’s sit-in seemed like a massive success: Goldman stated that there were some estimates that a quarter of the school was there. However, on Yik Yak, the sentiment was quite different—and especially disturbing. Students were posting about the sit-in, and in a way, on Yik Yak were protesting the very existence of it. Below are some of the more disturbing posts that Goldman quoted in the episode:

• “In honor of today, I will only hook up with a minority tonight.”
• “I love black people, my maid was always nice to me.”
• “White people won at life; Africa lost. Sorry we were so much better than you that we were literally able to enslave you to our will.”

After the sit-in, the ACC continued to organize politically on campus, and racist chatter on Yik Yak also continued. It particularly exploded on December 2, 2014, when the ACC coordinated a “die-in” on campus to express solidarity with the Ferguson protests. During the die-in, the ACC hung an American flag upside down and wrote “Black Lives Matter” on it, as well as the names of Michael Brown and Eric Garner.

Following the die-in, the racist sentiment on Yik Yak targeted one particular member of the ACC: Melissa Melendez. This was, of course, terrifying for her and the ACC because they were minority students on a predominantly white campus protesting the targeting and murder of minorities, and now they were the ones who were being targeted anonymously. They started traveling groups and felt unsafe, making it difficult to focus on their schoolwork.

That weekend, Melendez and the ACC had a meeting with Colgate’s dean. To address their concerns, the dean presented the ACC with these options:

• The students could stay at her home, or she could stay at the house the ACC members were staying at.
• Campus safety could check up on the students.
• The students could leave and finish the semester off-campus.

Although the college claimed they took the students’ concerns as seriously as possible, Melendez felt the college’s response was inadequate. She was particularly insulted by the college’s option of having the students leave, because she thought that meant someone at the college had brought up that they wanted the ACC gone, and the college was simply obliging. Still, while the school didn’t give Goldman a specific number, he heard from multiple sources that over a dozen students ended up leaving Colgate—after the option was made available—that semester. Melendez herself and some other members of the ACC ended up moving to a different town.

The students’ departures had a significant impact on faculty. Some chose to fight back—specifically on Yik Yak. Associate Professor of Biology Jeff Holm came up with something called the “Yik Yak Takeback,” which was essentially faculty attacking the bigotry by posting on Yik Yak with “relentless utterly mundane cheeriness and civility.” The only requirement Holm had for faculty participating in the “takeback” was for them to sign their names on their posts. (That would send the message: “We’re here, and we see you.” Another biology professor, Eddie Watkins, talked about one of his Yik Yak posts that received a significant amount of “upvotes” (237), which was just him congratulating a student for getting into medical school.

This might’ve seemed like a silly way to counteract racism, but it had a rather positive effect on students’ spirits and morale. Melendez was especially excited when reflecting on the “takeback”:

“I love it! I love it. I thought it was so cute. ‘Cause I knew why they were doing it. like, they were making a statement. and I liked how a lot of them sign their names. I thought that was powerful.”

Of course, while it helped, the simple “Yik Yak Takeback” didn’t make the problem go away. Goldman himself traveled to Colgate on the last day of the semester and tried out Yik Yak. He saw how some users were posting about how they hoped the ACC would dissolve and how happy they were that the ACC was driven off campus.

Notes

1. Prior to listening to this episode, I’ve vaguely heard of Yik Yak before but didn’t know much about the app. Obviously, the idea of communicating “anonymously” on the internet isn’t new, as we constantly see on discussion boards and social media platforms. What I found particularly notable about Yik Yak, however, is the ability for users to communicate with people within a 10-mile radius. That’s the specific characteristic that makes Yik Yak unique, in my view, and probably why it’d be so popular for very tight-knit communities like students on college campuses.

2. These were only 3 of the 21 demands that Goldman described in the episode. Goldman also doesn’t expand or dwell on it for too long in his episode, but Colgate administration actually published a response to the ACC’s 21 demands on Colgate’s website. The administration addresses the demands, point-by-point, in this response, so you’re also able to see each individual demand there.

Discussion Questions

1. As instructors teaching classes right now, how would you handle racist incidents and remarks that you see and hear happening in your own classroom?
2. In the time of coronavirus, racist sentiment is now especially aimed at East Asian Americans—and some racist incidents have already occurred on college campuses in the United States. What can college faculty and administration be doing to support East Asian American students during this time?
3. Was the dean’s response to the ACC students’ concerns adequate, and why or why not? If not, what more could she have done? How should universities respond when racist incidents occur on campus?
4. Read through Colgate administration’s response to the ACC’s 21 demands, (which actually notes the status of meeting each demand as “complete”). Are the ACC’s demands a good model for other colleges to establish a more diverse and inclusive community on campus, and should other colleges also establish plans to meet the same or similar demands?
5. Through the “Yik Yak Takeback,” Colgate faculty had some (but limited) success at countering the bigotry that persisted on Yik Yak. What else could they have paired with their “positive approach” to be more successful?
6. In the episode, Goldman talks about how Colgate contacted both the local and state police and asked the Madison district attorney’s office to determine whether a grand jury subpoena can be used to force Yik Yak to disclose information about some of its worst posts. Independent of the police investigation, the school and its lawyers sent separate requests for identifying information to Yik Yak, but both the request to the district attorney and Yik Yak were denied. Should Yik Yak and other platforms be obligated to disclose this information when these kinds of incidents arise, and where do we draw the line for how these platforms (and the users on them) are protected under the First Amendment?
7. In the episode, Goldman briefly mentions how some high schools have worked with Yik Yak to establish “geofences,” where the app just won’t function within a certain radius of the school. However, Yik Yak doesn’t honor these requests from colleges. Some colleges have even tried banning Yik Yak, in terms of banning usage of the app under the college’s network, but students could then simply switch to their wireless provider and continue to use the app. Is limiting usage of the app—assuming there’s a more successful approach that can ban usage of the app entirely for college students in particular—an actual solution for colleges, and why or why not? I’m also interested to hear your thoughts on whether this “more successful approach” could raise especially alarming concerns for surveillance of students on college campuses.

https://voicethread.com/share/14060222/