Technological Solutionism and the Perils of Perfection!

Dear Commons Community,

Evgeny Morozov, the author of To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism. has a featured article in today’s New York Times, providing commentary on the hubris of Silicon Valley technology companies that purport to be able to solve all of life’s problems by providing an app or some other tech solution.  As an example of Morozov’s position:

“Recent debates about Twitter revolutions or the Internet’s impact on cognition have mostly glossed over the fact that Silicon Valley’s technophilic gurus and futurists have embarked on a quest to develop the ultimate patch to the nasty bugs of humanity. If they have their way, no individual foibles would go unpunished — ideally, technology would even make such foibles obsolete.

Even boredom seems to be in its last throes: designers in Japan have found a way to make our train trips perpetually fun-filled. With the help of an iPhone, a projector, a GPS module and Microsoft’s Kinect motion sensor, their contrivance allows riders to add new objects to what they see “outside,” thus enlivening the bleak landscape in their train windows. This could be a big hit in North Korea — and not just on trains.

Or, if you tend to forget things, Silicon Valley wants to give you an app to remember everything. If you occasionally prevaricate in order to meet your clashing obligations as a parent, friend or colleague, another app might spot inconsistencies in your behavior and inform your interlocutors if you are telling the truth. If you experience discomfort because you encounter people and things that you do not like, another app or gadget might spare you the pain by rendering them invisible…

Sunny, smooth, clean: with Silicon Valley at the helm, our life will become one long California highway.”

Morozov’s conclusion cautions us about the intrusion into our lives of big technology:

“Silicon Valley, oddly, likes to wear its “solutionism” on its sleeve. Its most successful companies fashion themselves as digital equivalents of Greenpeace and Human Rights Watch, not Wal-Mart or Exxon Mobil. “In the future,” says Eric Schmidt, Google’s executive chairman, “people will spend less time trying to get technology to work … If we get this right, I believe we can fix all the world’s problems.”

Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg concurs: “There are a lot of really big issues for the world that need to be solved and, as a company, what we are trying to do is to build an infrastructure on top of which to solve some of these problems.” As he noted in Facebook’s original letter to potential investors, “We don’t wake up in the morning with the primary goal of making money.”

Such digital humanitarianism aims to generate good will on the outside and boost morale on the inside. After all, saving the world might be a price worth paying for destroying everyone’s privacy, while a larger-than-life mission might convince young and idealistic employees that they are not wasting their lives tricking gullible consumers to click on ads for pointless products. Silicon Valley and Wall Street are competing for the same talent pool, and by claiming to solve the world’s problems, technology companies can offer what Wall Street cannot: a sense of social mission.

The ideology of solutionism is thus essential to helping Silicon Valley maintain its image. The technology press are only happy to play up any solutionist undertakings. “Africa? There’s an app for that,” reads a real (!) headline on the Web site of the British edition of Wired. Could someone lend that app to the World Bank, please?

Shockingly, saving the world usually involves using Silicon Valley’s own services. As Mr. Zuckerberg put it in 2009, “the world will be better if you share more.” Why doubt his sincerity on this one?”

Tony

Big Brother: Keeping an Eye on Online Test-Takers!

Dear Commons Community,

In the past couple of years,  the issue of monitoring online test takers keeps coming up in various meetings and forums.  The accreditation agencies among others keep raising it  with colleges and universities that offer online courses.  Online  cheating especially is generating concern as more students enroll in MOOCs for college credit, and not just for personal enrichment. Already, five classes from Coursera, a major MOOC provider, offer the possibility of credit, and many more are expected.

One option is for students to travel to regional testing centers at exam time. But reaching such centers is next to impossible for many students, whether working adults who can’t take time off to travel, or others in far-flung places who can’t afford the trip.  The New York Times is also reporting on:

“… eavesdropping technologies worthy of the C.I.A. that can remotely track every mouse click and keystroke of test-taking students. Squads of eagle-eyed humans at computers can monitor faraway students via webcams, screen sharing and high-speed Internet connections, checking out their photo IDs, signatures and even their typing styles to be sure the test-taker is the student who registered for the class…

Employees at ProctorU, a company that offers remote proctoring, watch test-takers by using screen sharing and webcam feeds at offices in Alabama and California. ProctorU recently signed an agreement to proctor new credit-bearing MOOCs from Coursera, including one in genetics and evolution offered at Duke and one in single-variable calculus at the University of Pennsylvania.

MOOC students who want to obtain credit will be charged a remote-proctoring fee of $60 to $90, depending on the class, said Dr. Andrew Ng, co-founder of Coursera, based in Mountain View, Calif.

Other remote proctoring services offer different solutions. At Software Secure in Newton, Mass., test-takers are recorded by camera and then, later, three proctors independently watch a faster-speed video of each student.

Compared with services where proctors are monitoring students in real time, this combination of recording first and viewing later “gives greater latitude for the institution to adjust the timing of exams to whenever they want,” said Allison Sands, Software Secure’s director of marketing. The cost is now $15 per exam.”

In sum, online classes are not new anymore but earlier courses typically didn’t have to handle exam proctoring on the scale required for the multitude of students enrolled in MOOCs.  New technology and service providers are evolving to address the problem.

Tony