Schools engaged in doom‐monitoring students' online interactions and content creation: an analysis of dominant media discourses

Abstract

Background: Growing public concern about the safety and security of schools has led many schools and school districts within the United States to hire private companies to monitor students' online interactions and the content they create, including on social media. The use of such technologies supposedly increases schools' awareness of what students are doing online and, thus, helps to identify and prevent potential issues such as mental health problems, cyberbullying, or self-harm that might otherwise go unnoticed. However, there is currently no evidence to support that social media surveillance or content monitoring is able to effectively address these public health and safety issues. Methods: Thus, our study explores how the different voices present in the discoursestudents, school officials, privacy advocates, and service providers' representativesjustify or condemn the surveillance of student-produced online content in publicly available news media articles. We adopt a critical discursive psychology approach to study news articles, which were published in international media in the last 3 years (2019 N = 53; 2020 N = 56; 2021 N = 77), reporting on the use of digital surveillance technologies targeting student-produced content. Results and conclusions: Three dominant interpretive repertoires emerged from the analyzed news media articles: 'silenced students, expert adults', 'a solution in search of a problem', and 'the normalization of surveillance for a good cause'. Our findings show that, under the auspices of protecting children, schools are actively engaged in 'doom-monitoring', which is the indiscriminate and inaccurate surveillance of people in anticipation of the next bad thing. The opinions and views of adults, including school officials, vendors, and civil liberties advocates, dominate over the voices of students. Key Practitioner Message• Schools use digital surveillance tools to 'doom-monitor' students on a mass scale.• Doom-monitoring is the indiscriminate and inaccurate surveillance of people in anticipation of the next bad thing. • In discussions of school surveillance, student voices are mostly silent, and adults speak for them.• Doom-monitoring success stories are anecdotal but reports of negative effects, for example the 'chilling effect' on students' free expression, are common.

Using ChatGPT in Education: Human Reflection on ChatGPT’s Self-Reflection

“…Secondly, the possibility of plagiarism (also called AIgiarism, see: https://medium.com/ @cristian.nedelcu/chatzero-is-the-best-tool-to-spot-aigiarism-737846323985 (accessed on 29 June 2023) and https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/dec/31/ai-assistedplagiarism-chatgpt-bot-says-it-has-an-answer-for-that (accessed on 29 June 2023)) is one of the biggest concerns regarding the adaption of ChatGPT in education. This has evoked responses varying from forbidding the use of ChatGPT or adapting the assessment of students' learning, to creative ways to embedding it in educational practices [22][23][24][26][27][28]32,[42][43][44][45].…”

Editorial: Control alt delete – technology and children's mental health

“…Software that tracks logins, monitors students' online searches, email content, identifies 'inappropriate' material and views students' screens in real time may limit selfexpression and privacy. Kikerpill et al (2022) highlight the risks associated with such 'doom-monitoring' and the imbalance between 'silenced students and expert adults'. Greater discourse involving young people and development of sensible guidelines are required to ensure that such monitoring is ethically administered.…”

“…Kikerpill et al. (2022) highlight the risks associated with such ‘doom‐monitoring’ and the imbalance between ‘silenced students and expert adults’. Greater discourse involving young people and development of sensible guidelines are required to ensure that such monitoring is ethically administered.…”

Research on online public opinion dissemination and emergency countermeasures of food safety in universities—take the rat head and duck neck incident in China as an example

“…This directly leads to the generation and development of public opinion, for which it is necessary to establish a campus Weibo comment forwarding and comment prediction model based on neural networks (10). Schools pay attention to students' interactive content on social media, and then understand students' performance on online platforms, providing a basis for identifying and preventing potential problems (20). Finally, in the research on the processing and guidance of online public opinion in colleges and universities, for college students to develop healthily physically and mentally, it is very necessary to guide college students' public opinions on social media, thereby promoting the formation of students' correct values and outlook on life (21).…”