I’ll admit to not thinking this through properly, but it’s interesting how Facebook is responding the CA mess by making promises of further openness and personal control of data. It’s all a bit without substance and doesn’t really deal with the issue that it’s the whole premise of Facebook that’s broken, not some feature bug. It’s working exactly as it was designed to – they just didn’t anticipate the outcome (or did but don’t care). Any changes offered could be rolled back when the fuss has died down anyway. I think Zuck sees it as a PR problem and is handling it accordingly.
What I haven’t got sorted in my head yet is whether there is something similar going on with LMSs. The model of a command-and-control (I know that’s an overly perjorative label!!) systems is a natural fit for the opaque harvesting and analysis of data. Yes, it can be used for good as well as evil but I’d be interested in whether people feel that the current generation LMS model actively works against what Lawrie’s talking about here. If we’d designed an LMS from the assumption that it should be transparent, controlled by the student how different would it look? Would it even be recognisable as an LMS?