Of this week’s readings, this article——“Ethical challenges of edtech, big data and personalized learning: twenty-first century student sorting and tracking .” appeals to me the most. It mainly talks about big data learning and the privacy issues that come with it. To be honest, when talking about personalized learning through big data I never thought about the privacy issues, this article opened up new ideas for me. I agree that as the article says personalized learning developed by big data can help students learn better, and the article mentions that through many personalized learning systems, student data such as age, gender, grade level, and test scores are analyzed based on idealized models of student performance, students from the same background or class, or nationwide pools of grade and/or ability levels. A profile is created for each student to help teachers address the issue of differentiated learning(Regan & Jesse, 2019）.

But collecting this data can also cause privacy leaks. This article proposes to guarantee the non-leakage of information through an authoritative third party or a role like artificial intelligence, but I don’t think I agree with this idea very much now, because there is no real authority in the management of big data now, because now I have harassing phone calls every morning, which makes me very tortured. On the other hand, if there is really that absolute sense of artificial intelligence and no one can view this information, this may be the only way to achieve real privacy protection. In general, people should not only focus on the benefits of big data for personalized learning, but also on how to prevent the ethical dimension from arising, so the government should issue more specific decrees or more severe measures to protect people’s privacy.

Regan, P., & Jesse, J. (2019). Ethical challenges of edtech, big data and personalized learning: Twenty-first century student sorting and tracking. Ethics and Information Technology, 21(3), 167-179. DOI: 10.1007/s10676-018-9492-2