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You're free to do whatever research on children's behavior after you get informed opt-in non-coerced consent from the legal representatives of all the participa

You're free to do whatever research on children's behavior after you get informed opt-in non-coerced consent from the legal representatives of all the participants of the study and approval from a supervising IRB (Institutional Review Board)/REC (Research Ethics Committee), otherwise it should be called "forced surveillance and data harvesting". This is not a new discussion, the research community has long ago established a near-consensus about what are the appropriate ethical boundaries, permissible tradeoffs, and non-negotiable safeguards when studying human subjects, and this goes waaaaay beyond that.

dr_dshiv 4y ago
Please don’t do the extreme outrage machine. Please listen. Those consensual agreements you speak of specifically include the use of research to support normal educational practices. That’s why conducting research on normal educational practices is one of the few exceptions to the requirements for informed consent in research. That’s because it was understood that there is an ethical trade off —gathering informed consent from kids in education settings is so difficult that they knew requiring consent would prevent the research from occurring. That’s what I’m saying —rather than “black and white” thinking that collecting data from kids is evil, consider the real societal losses from banning research to improve educational practices— including what is now normal online educational practices. This needs nuance. For more information: https://research.virginia.edu/irb-sbs/normal-educational-practice https://research.virginia.edu/irb-sbs/normal-educational-pra...
- noasaservice 4y ago
  So what you're saying is that an IRB is just 'too onerous' and that getting informed consent (from the children or their guardians) is just too hard? And then you have the audacity to tell us to "don’t do the extreme outrage machine"? Just wow.
  - workingon 4y ago
    Yeah with no concerns about the limitations or monetization of the data that the edtech companies are collecting. Data on the habits of children has to be some of the most valuable data in the data-for-sale corporate/black markets.
  - dr_dshiv 4y ago
    You should have read the link or listened to what I wrote. Yes. You are contributing to the outrage machine.
  - dr_dshiv 4y ago
    Not that IRB is too onerous. We still get IRB approval. But approval can come with an exemption from informed consent when it involves research on normal educational practices.
mlyle 4y ago
> This is not a new discussion, the research community has long ago established a near-consensus about what are the appropriate ethical boundaries, permissible tradeoffs, and non-negotiable safeguards when studying human subjects, and this goes waaaaay beyond that. Unfortunately, our definitions are extraordinarily broad and technically almost anything is human research by the letter of the definition. In practice, we don't call everything that interacts with data about people "human experimentation", but figuring out the exact line is very hard. E.g. I am a teacher. I do things differently from year to year. I do my best to gather the best metrics on this time series data that I can in order to inform my choices on what I consider best practices. Do I need to get an IRB involved? My institution doesn't have an IRB. I really wish there were high quality controlled experiments in education that I could rely upon. But the vast majority of the educational research is crap. Think about, say, Khan Academy. I have a hard time imagining a world where interacting with millions of kids on a protocol is OK, but the second we take some basic metrics to try and figure out how well it works, it's bad. I'd arguably ethically one needs to perform a certain basic level of monitoring and optimization of any intervention.

dr_dshiv 4y ago

Please don’t do the extreme outrage machine. Please listen. Those consensual agreements you speak of specifically include the use of research to support normal educational practices. That’s why conducting research on normal educational practices is one of the few exceptions to the requirements for informed consent in research. That’s because it was understood that there is an ethical trade off —gathering informed consent from kids in education settings is so difficult that they knew requiring consent would prevent the research from occurring. That’s what I’m saying —rather than “black and white” thinking that collecting data from kids is evil, consider the real societal losses from banning research to improve educational practices— including what is now normal online educational practices. This needs nuance. For more information: https://research.virginia.edu/irb-sbs/normal-educational-practice https://research.virginia.edu/irb-sbs/normal-educational-pra...

noasaservice 4y ago
So what you're saying is that an IRB is just 'too onerous' and that getting informed consent (from the children or their guardians) is just too hard? And then you have the audacity to tell us to "don’t do the extreme outrage machine"? Just wow.
- workingon 4y ago
  Yeah with no concerns about the limitations or monetization of the data that the edtech companies are collecting. Data on the habits of children has to be some of the most valuable data in the data-for-sale corporate/black markets.
- dr_dshiv 4y ago
  You should have read the link or listened to what I wrote. Yes. You are contributing to the outrage machine.
- dr_dshiv 4y ago
  Not that IRB is too onerous. We still get IRB approval. But approval can come with an exemption from informed consent when it involves research on normal educational practices.

mlyle 4y ago

> This is not a new discussion, the research community has long ago established a near-consensus about what are the appropriate ethical boundaries, permissible tradeoffs, and non-negotiable safeguards when studying human subjects, and this goes waaaaay beyond that. Unfortunately, our definitions are extraordinarily broad and technically almost anything is human research by the letter of the definition. In practice, we don't call everything that interacts with data about people "human experimentation", but figuring out the exact line is very hard. E.g. I am a teacher. I do things differently from year to year. I do my best to gather the best metrics on this time series data that I can in order to inform my choices on what I consider best practices. Do I need to get an IRB involved? My institution doesn't have an IRB. I really wish there were high quality controlled experiments in education that I could rely upon. But the vast majority of the educational research is crap. Think about, say, Khan Academy. I have a hard time imagining a world where interacting with millions of kids on a protocol is OK, but the second we take some basic metrics to try and figure out how well it works, it's bad. I'd arguably ethically one needs to perform a certain basic level of monitoring and optimization of any intervention.