
California school district hires firm to monitor students' social media - codezero
http://www.cnn.com/2013/09/14/us/california-schools-monitor-social-media/index.html?c=us
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beloch
First off, no matter how you do it, it's pretty much impossible to do a
quality job of what this firm is promising for $2.89 per student per year.
However, there are host of other problems here.

-A lot of bad jokes are going to create false positives, which will make teaching staff ignore the warnings they do receive.

-The odds are rather high that a kid will post an orgy of pre-meditations and then do something horrible, but this contractor will either miss it or his warning will be ignored.

-Kids don't like being spied on and will use social networks that aren't monitored. Some geeks might even try encryption or code-talk.

What would I do? Educate children about the importance of getting their
friends help when they need it. The people who know kids best are their
friends. Compared to this contractor, they won't fall for as many bad jokes
nor ignore as many subtle danger signs. Teach children to be good citizens who
care about each other rather than carefully tended and monitored potential
threats.

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mehmehshoe
I live in the area and I am friends with teachers within the school district.

I see this article as a fluff/pr/sales bit of writing. The article states
nothing about the tech or who supplies the names of the children to be
watched. Most of the people on HN can guess the tech. Who is giving the ID of
the targets is the interesting bit.

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mehmehshoe
"a larger portion" of contract workers across the globe who labor a maximum of
four hours a day because "the content they read is so dark and heavy,"

Oh great, he is using Mechanical Turk to watch over students in LA.

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loser777
$40,500 is a lot of money for a public school district. This kind of spending
really feels like a game of whack-a-mole to me. There were two suicides in
your school district? Ignore the underlying factors and and go straight to
"social media," because that's what all the buzz is about today, right?

It's a shame that given the serious shortage of public school funding in
California that spending is done in such a myopic (and frankly, stupid) way.
If you really want to build a better school, is adding excessive policing the
first thing you should do?

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xenophanes
> Glendale Unified School District is comprised of 31 Schools and over 2,620
> employees, serving 27,000 students in grades Kindergarten through 12th
> grade.

You are very naive about budgets. You should change that if you want to
freelance or do a startup. 40k is very little money for them.

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hobs
If so, they should stop asking people to buy tissue paper for classrooms.

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adamnemecek
That's right, get them used to gov't surveillance while they are young.

/s

~~~
keithpeter
As a teacher (of older students than secondary) my first thought was this. And
how they will develop work rounds and restricted language codes &c

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ZirconCode
Nobody has mentioned yet. I took a look at the geolistening website, and the
pictures alone pointed to an entirely different problem.

I don't think the problem is lack of surveillance, I think it's teachers who
are blind to what's happening at their schools, and parents who are doing a
bad job at parenting (exporting it to education).

If a parent listens to their child well, the child will tell them they are
being bullied, or have problems. If the child is afraid to, or is ashamed, the
parent should notice this. It's not normal behavior. The same goes for
teachers. If a parent complains to the school that their child is being
bullied, that shouldn't be ignored. If a teacher notices a child being
bullied, that shouldn't be laughed off. Children try to seek help by nature.

This seems to be an all-round lack of awareness and care for the child. I
don't think technology can do much good with that attitude.

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gweinberg
Can somebody explain to me why what students do outside the school is any of
the school's business?

Oh well, I'm sure the students spend at least as much time cyberstalking the
teachers as the schools do cyberstalking the students.

~~~
jonlucc
This has concerned me since a student in my high school was punished for
making some mean comments on another students wall on Facebook. Facebook was
fairly new at the time. I presumed this would stop happening as people got
more used to social services.

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jka
Social media monitoring is a huge industry at the moment, which I can say from
first-hand experience. Lots of businesses, individuals, and organizations want
to know what is being said about them or their field.

Even though no company providing these services can have perfect coverage (not
even a perfect coverage of _public_ internet communications), or perfect
accuracy (generally it boils down to what you can express with search facets
and boolean expressions), they _can_ very aggressively sell the capability to
people and organizations, because the 'idea' makes sense, and the fear/need is
genuine - maybe there are relevant good/bad things happening out there that we
need to know about.

I think this may be the real story here: there are private companies
incentivized to sell surveillance of public communications, regardless of end-
result quality for the customer, and education is just one of many places
where that is relevant.

I don't think this is going to change - we now take for granted that search
engines can see what is on the public web, and the same will become true of
public social media -- although these tools are (generally) not yet as well
known to the public as Google web search.

I'd personally really like to see distributed and private social
communications technology to take off, so that this kind of legitimized spying
becomes near-irrelevant, and I think there are big opportunities there - but
we're not there yet and there'll be some interesting ground to navigate in the
meantime.

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bencollier49
This will filter out and miss the really nasty children (who'll just use
networks with privacy), and catch the stupid ones who need education rather
than discipline.

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unimpressive
>This will filter out and miss the really nasty children (who'll just use
networks with privacy)

Well the obvious solution to that is to outlaw privacy.

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InclinedPlane
Yet another example of how schools are more about incarceration and control
than education. Right now with public schools in the US we're at the edge of
spending less per student on teachers than on administrative staff and other
expenses. So many forces keep telling us to increase spending on education.
And we have. Whether at the K-12 level or at colleges and Universities total
spending on education has more than doubled (per student, adjusted for
inflation) since the 1970s, while education outcomes have generally been flat.
What has increased at a pace with spending is non-teaching staff, which, not
surprisingly, don't seem to accrue any benefit in learning to the students.

The only way to solve the problem is to wrest control of the system away from
the powerful interests that dominate it today. Unfortunately, a lot of
legitimate educators are part of the machine and don't see any other way to
make things better other than to continue to feed the machine with the hope
that maybe a little bit trickles down to them and the kids.

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INTPenis
Is this really new? I believe privacy issues have just gotten a spotlight now
but I clearly remember a situation that happened involving my sister when she
settled in the US more than 10 years ago.

I was running a small web host at the time and we just happened to host her
website, for free of course. She had just moved to the US, gotten her green
card and started a job as a teacher.

The school she was working for, or wanted to work for, had investigated her
and found her personal website somehow. Even though she was posting under a
pseudonym, and the website was hosted in Sweden. I don't remember if it was in
Swedish though, maybe not.

They objected to certain things on that website, not sure if it was the BDSM
links or something about linking to Amazon.

Either way, she didn't have a computer at the time so all she could do was ask
me to take the website down for her.

As I remember it, a lawfirm hade made this discovery on behalf of the school
where she wanted to work.

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benbristow
" All of the individual posts we monitor on social media networks are already
made public by the students themselves. Therefore, no privacy is violated."

Just use privacy settings on Twitter/Facebook then.

