Australian schools to collect ‘facebook’ like data from all students

16Jun08

An interesting development out of Australia as students in Queensland may be forced to have their photos, interests, and aspirations profiled in a massive database meant to help educators keep track of their progress. The idea from Queensland’s Education Minister, Rod Welford, is to collect this data so that schools and teachers can track student progression as well as check in on how they are doing. The database would be accessible from any Internet connection, and users would have varying levels of access to the data. The biggest complaint about the plan is concern over how the data can be kept private, and who has access.

In reality all this data already exists in one form or another, so this plan is more about collecting and sorting the data into useful reports. Is it too much? That’s tough to tell. As a teacher I know that it could be useful to search for a students favourite baseball team, but if I have to look it up instead of knowing it from conversations with them I don’t think it would mean as much during future interactions.

This is an interesting idea, but it seems to have a few problems that all large database projects have: who is in charge of collecting the data and who is in charge of keeping it current and relevant? Besides, is it really useful to know that at the age of 12 Adam wanted to be a golf professional like Tiger Woods, then at age 13 he wanted to be a bioengineer? I agree this is interesting historical data, but how useful is it really?