Ignorance and Peace Narratives in Cyberspace

Years ago, when young nuns were entering a particular Catholic convent, they were asked to write autobiographical essays which were filed away along with other information about each nun. When they were elderly, these nuns agreed to be a part of a study on Alzheimers, giving permission for scientists to perform autopsies upon their deaths. Susan Kemper, a cognitive psychologist and psycholinguist was able to take the autobiographies from these humanities-based school teachers, and predict the probability of alzheimers from their sentence structures at eighteen. Luckily, replications of this kind of research are difficult. I say luckily because these kinds of findings might have potential hazards for those whose writing at 18 indicates alzheimers: specifically, living in a country in which health care is not a fundamental right, insurance companies might want access to this kind of data.

I think of this study each time that I find myself in a meeting as an administrator at a university in the United States, navigating difficult decisions about gathering writing samples from a large group of 18 year old students. While our assessment rhetoric suggests that we “come in peace,” I find myself worrying over the potential hazards of employing certain cloud computing resources to facilitate our data collection of student essays. This paper explores the challenges of being proactive with existing and future data mining possibilities when facing the realities of institutional expectations for assessment and when facing the fact that one’s own understanding of cyber capabilities is less than ideal. This paper discusses the current assessment cyber resources, trends, and pressures within USA institutions and the challenges of reactive/proactive labor in the midst of multiple levels of technological/informational literacies amongst administrators.