Thread by @sarahesilverman

Some thoughts about resisting harmful edtech, partially inspired by our UM Dearborn #ungrading group

Its so important to recognize what power, privilege, + influence you have in your role (faculty, staff, admin). Obvi, the nature/amount of that power varies widely. But... 1/

Students very often have less power than instructors, and certainly less than admins. Harmful surveillance techs are very often implemented for the convenience or data hungriness of people w/a lot of power, despite their invasion of student privacy+ discriminatory features 2/

I'm not saying that resisting things like eproctoring, plagiarism checking etc is easy, but I also don't think it is useful to see our hands as "tied" because of accreditation requirements or other instructors with different views about academic integrity. These are solveable 3/

There are a lot of different steps that you can take to lessen the harms here, even if you are still working towards total abolition on your campus. I just wanted to summarize some of the ones I know about (from my and others' experience) for eproctoring specifically 4/

1. Start w/harm reduction. If there is an eproctoring system in place, make sure that any student can opt out, make on campus testing spaces available 5/

2. Raise awareness (part a): make information available about how eproctoring tools aren't accessible for all, may flag disabled students as cheating, may not recognize s's w/darker skin, don't actually prevent cheating, and create extra work for instructors to reviews flags 6/

3. Raise awareness (part b): make information available about how monitored exams are far from the only pedagogically legitimate assessment (yes, even for sciences). Provide instructor support around open book exams, authentic assessments, project-based, etc. 7/

4. Resist the increased surveillance of HW and lower stakes assignments. Disable proctoring on 3rd party tools like Mcgraw Hill, Pearson, Tophat etc. As @Jessifer says, "start by trusting students". We need to trust students with their homework as well as bigger assessments 8/

5. Gather info about the real impact of proctoring on campus - if it is available, but rarely used, maybe alternative solutions can be developed for those few users. Savings from canceling expensive contracts can be redirected to better solutions, like real instructor support 9/

6. If you are ready to cancel a proctoring contract or implement an anti proctoring policy, prepare for some potentially difficult conversations. There is a growing community of folks who have done this work and can share experiences and tips. 10/

There are definitely many more ideas, and YMMV. Again, different folks have different amounts of power and risk, especially precarious instructors and staff. But many of us have much more power than the students who are being harmed by these technologies. 11/11

@Autumm @mayapbarak @emilyluxon I found that our discussion of power/risk in ungrading had a lot of overlaps with edtech resistance after thinking over the weekend