Views & Opinion
The New Radicals Comment by Ed Macnair, CEO, CensorNet
From this month, schools –
along with councils, prisons and NHS trusts – are required to take specific action to stop people being drawn into terrorism under new rules laid out in the new Anti- Radicalisation Law as part of the Counter Terrorism and Security Act. This new law states that "a specified authority must, in the exercise of its functions, have due regard to the need to prevent people from being drawn into terrorism." Specified authorities will be
expected to ensure children accessing the internet in school are safe from terrorist and extremist material that could lead to radicalisation. Schools will need to demonstrate they are protecting pupils from being drawn into terrorism by establishing appropriate levels of internet filtering and putting safeguarding policies in place to identify children at risk, and intervening as appropriate. However, radicalisation takes place on social media and therefore
the security technologies in place need to not only be able to filter access to the internet – but they also need to be able to monitor access to social media sites and any content posted to be effective. Whilst the new Anti-Radicalisation Law is a welcome one, the sad truth is that extremist groups attempting to radicalise our children online have always been just a click or two away; whether it is a Facebook group that one of their friends shares a posting from or a seemingly innocuous Instagram post that a family member may have ‘Liked’ in error. In fact, the problem caused by popular social media sites has got worse since YouTube changed its recommended column to an ‘Auto Play’ feature where the next video in the list is played automatically, meaning a ‘safe’ video could be followed by something far more unsavoury. Schools, colleges and universities are already faced with a
constant battle to manage and police large, distributed networks. The problem is exacerbated by the numerous entry points now available to pupils through the likes of hand-held mobile devices and BYOD. Yet, teachers and staff struggle to oversee and monitor all of a student’s various online activity and access to cloud applications. Many educational institutions already use specialist internet
filtering tools as a means of restricting access to harmful content, and must consider the use of these filters as part of their overall strategy to prevent students from being drawn into terrorism. Radicalisation is but another category of the growing list of the
darker corners of the web like pornography, sites promoting criminal skills or hate crime – that it is our duty to protect the next impressionable generation from. Schools need to have safeguarding policies in place and protect pupils and staff alike from extremist material when accessing the internet and social media. Every school should implement robust web security and content filtering technology to protect children from inappropriate messages and content – but they need to go a step further. Only through a technology that offers a combination of web filtering and social media control can schools benefit from an early-warning system and highlight any pupils who could be susceptible to radical messages.
18
www.education-today.co.uk The future of higher
education, driven by data Comment by Michele Nemschoff, MapR Technologies There is an opportunity for educational institutions to tap into
the latest technological advances, especially in the realm of big data and analytics, to transform education.
Using the past to focus on the future Big data can provide a broad and deep quantitative picture by combining data from inside and outside an organisation including from multiple channels (social media, web logs), and a range of viewpoints (context, content, sentiment, location, time). The predictive analytics output from big data could actually represent new knowledge about the past, present, and future. Netflix or Spotify are good examples you may have come across; these companies use predictive analytics to recommend videos and music for a highly engaging personalised experience. The same methods could be applied to education. By focusing on learning and learner profiles, predictive analytics can
look at students’ past records, performance in different subjects, and course preferences and choices to determine what will suit individuals best. This can help teachers to understand the proficiencies and limitations of their students. New, data-driven knowledge would enable them to refine the teaching process, get the best out of their students and create a better curriculum.
Looking outwardly to match the job market At the same time, big data can be used to look outwardly at the job market – to understand and address where the skills gaps are and which careers are set to grow. This could be one of the most important applications of big data in education – marrying student skills with those in demand by employers.
Extending the reach online On-demand and online courses are becoming more and more popular. Education from Khan Academy, as well as from massive open online courses (MOOCs) offered by renowned universities, seems to be the wave of the future. By applying big data and analytics to online educational content and delivery, you can tell which content is effective and evolve curriculum and processes accordingly.
Adding big data to the curriculum Big data itself is entering the curriculum. There is a growing need to improve understanding and approaches for making sense of big data and how it can be used to solve a variety of problems and improve decision- making. For example, a group of students from a data mining course at Stanford University entered the Netflix Challenge, a contest held to design a movie recommendations algorithm that does better than the one developed by Netflix. Instead of developing sophisticated algorithms to improve results, as
most of the teams did, the students who got much better results used a basic algorithm, but with augmented data. The main lesson learned was that more data beat better algorithms when analysing existing data. The opportunity for big data in education is huge. It can change the
way we conduct higher education today. From offering more personalised courses and more accurately choosing the right programme for students, to continually improving online courses and adding more data science into the curriculum – big data and analytics have the potential to transform the entire experience for both students and educators.
September 2015
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