The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly: Social Technology Platforms in Higher Ed

The results are in. It looks like Periscope, Reddit and Instagram are in a 3 way tie for favorite tool of the week. Thanks again for participating. These polls will help me determine what tools I would like to incorporate in instructional situations when given the opportunity. 

You guys are the best!

Now, I would like you to imagine you have a chance to vote on the adoption and implementation of a new social technology platform at your University, or perhaps your place of business:

The Good

How would you like it if your University began using a social technology platform that relied on user data, data aggregation, and user feedback to recommend courses you should take, university services you might be interested in, or having other personalized information, curated just for you and sent to you via text or email? The community college system in California is already doing this with Sherpa, a Social Technology Platform. 

The Bad

Some would argue that this technology could be used to beef up campus security, and make the college experience a safer one for students faculty and staff alike by collecting information from Google searches (such as “online research about the personal life and daily activities of a particular faculty member”); Monitoring Facebook activity(namely, “angry and threatening comments on his Facebook wall about that professor”); Amazon purchases (like the purchase of “high-powered firearms and ammunition”); File management (for example, a saved “draft version of a suicide note on his personal network drive”). To many, this function sounds much less appealing and convenient, and more like an overreaching attempt at surveillance and an invasion of privacy. 

The Ugly

This "dark side" of social technology platform capabilities is what many private corporate entities are already doing, only they usually don't claim to do it in the name of campus safety. The data is often easy to collect and users are often blissfully unaware that they've provided some personal information. 

I had a chance to read Reyman (2013) this week, and came to realize that there are a lot of implications of data mining practices for intellectual property on the social web, and what we do now, and what we allow as standard practice now, may have a far reaching impact tomorrow. Will we pave the way for a culture of surveillance? Would you vote to have something like this in place? If so, Where would you draw the line? 

Also: A New Poll is available now! This week we got to try out Pinterest, Goodreads, Diigo, Storify, Flickr and youtube. Let me know which was your favorite!