What are your student data privacy predictions for the next five years?

Last month, the Florida Education Technology Conference (FETC), one of the largest conferences in the United States dedicated to educational technology, highlighted innovative ways in which educational technology is used in schools, as well as predictions for the future of student data privacy - a topic that has garnered much discussion in recent weeks.

"In five years, I think education technology will be completely ubiquitous, and it will be integrated into parts of the curriculum that we are just beginning to conceive of," said Leah Plunkett, a fellow at Berkman Center for Internet and Society, during her session on data privacy with Paulina Haduong. While the growing presence and use of educational technology will bring about new opportunities for learning for students, it will also require new privacy and security policies at schools.

During their session, Plunkett and Haduong tested the audience's attitudes towards privacy by posing hypothetical situations, such as the implementation of a robot hall monitor that notified parents if students were caught breaking school rules. The audience had several concerns about the situations, asking if the information would go into a cloud drive or private database, who the robot would be controlled by, and if students would even know if they were being monitored. The audience members also made the following data privacy predictions for the next five years:

• What's called education technology will become routine.
• In five years we'll be struggling to be more efficient.
• Within five years the U.S. will face a catastrophic public privacy issue in the public space in the cloud.
• We'll be trying to get teachers up to speed on technology. Students are there.
• A reciprocated relationship will develop between advanced teachers and inexperienced teachers who don't have the (technological) savviness.
• We might line up legislation to allow teachers to be innovative in the classroom to protect privacy.
• We'll learn what data we can safely put in the cloud.
• Our privacy concerns will diversify over new several platforms that will develop over the next few years.
• In five years, there will be more devices with more operating systems that will lead to more data being collected and more privacy breaches. (The Journal)

Interested in learning more? Read the original article, "Predictions for the Future of Student Data Privacy" by Patrick Peterson (The Journal), and be sure to view your Speak Up 2014 data if you have not already, as we asked questions regarding student data privacy.

What are your student data privacy predictions for the next five years? Let us know by commenting on this post, our Facebook page, or our Twitter account!