Big data and schools: Education nirvana or privacy nightmare?
InBloom, a nonprofit startup founded with funding from the Gates Foundation and Carnegie Corporation, is taking center stage and spreading around some significant funds as an official sponsor of the South by Southwest Education conference in Austin, Texas this week. They hosted the official opening night party on Tuesday, are sponsoring a "networking lounge" with free coffee and snacks at the Hilton next to the convention center, and are debuting the first live demonstrations of their technology with representatives from pilot districts and states. It's quite a splash for what is basically a highly technical, behind the scenes infrastructure company. InBloom promises to bring all the potential of "big data" to classrooms in a big way for the first time. Their stated mission: to "inform and involve each student and teacher with data and tools designed to personalize learning." "We want to make personalized learning available to every single kid in the US," says CEO Iwan Streichenberger. "The way you do this is by breaking the barriers--making data much more accessible." But to some educational activists, InBloom represents a danger, not an opportunity. InBloom began as the Shared Learning Collaborative in 2011. It gets a bit technical, but basically, ten districts in nine states agreed to build a shared technology infrastructure. Currently student data, from attendance to standardized test scores, is locked in dozens of different "student information systems" that don't talk to each other. "In one district we work with in