Echoing the thank you for sharing this Zoom resource/critique Mehitabel. Ushnish, I really appreciate this text from Shea Swagger, "Our Bodies Encoded," which explores and critiques proctoring software. Shea says what I want to say, only with fewer curse words than I sometimes use when talking to colleagues about surveillance software. https://hybridpedagogy.org/our-bodies-encoded-algorithmic-test-proctoring-in... Best, Kim Kim Jaxon Professor, English (Composition & Literacy) Director, Northern California Writing Project<http://norcalwp.org/ncwp/> CSU, Chico kjaxon@csuchico.edu http://www.kimjaxon.com/ @drjaxon <https://twitter.com/drjaxon> Pronouns: she/her/hers ________________________________ From: Air-L <air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org> on behalf of Ushnish Sengupta <ushnish.sengupta@gmail.com> Sent: Thursday, July 30, 2020 11:21 AM To: air-l@listserv.aoir.org <air-l@listserv.aoir.org> Subject: Re: [Air-L] non-Zoom platforms....again Thank you for the excellent summary document on Zoom Mehitabel I am also concerned about the racial inequity issues of automated online proctoring systems, that are used in conjunction with videoconferencing systems such as Zoom.
From what we know of bias in facial recognition and detection algorithms, these systems that try to detect student faces changing direction (potential cheating) during online exams have a significant number of racial injustice issues.
Ushnish Sengupta Message: 2 Date: Wed, 29 Jul 2020 22:28:45 -0400 From: Mehitabel Glenhaber <glenhabe@usc.edu> To: alexandre.hocquet@univ-lorraine.fr Cc: air-l@listserv.aoir.org Subject: Re: [Air-L] non-Zoom platforms....again Message-ID: <CAMASph4WHCA1xi1xxpuDwR5A4nFKqoSioyvenLbcTdUJkVaXag@mail.gmail.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8" Hi Alexandre and everyone, This is maybe a bit adjacent to your question, but I have also been concerned watching Zoom rapidly gobble up a near-monopoly on remote education in the United States. Here is an informal resource that I created at the start of the pandemic, and recently updated, warning about the dangers of Zoom becoming a monopoly, and advising educators about alternatives, and how to minimize the harms of using Zoom in the classroom: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1o7Eq17jdWCtu2CaC15JBbdVU1p7fx2_jReH6qoFa... I hope it's helpful to you in writing your article, and also generally to folks on this list going into teaching remotely the next semester. I think the situation in the US is very similar to the one you describe in France (with the exception, perhaps, that there was less of an existing open source infrastructure which Zoom replaced - though that's just my impression) Cheers, Mehitabel On Wed, Jul 29, 2020 at 7:41 PM Alexandre Hocquet < alexandre.hocquet@univ-lorraine.fr> wrote:
Dear AoIRers,
long time lurker, first time poster*. A recent inquiry to the list asking for non-Zoom platforms gave me the idea to ask advice here regarding a project for an opinion piece I have about the recent taking over of online conferencing by Zoom (and Microsoft Teams) in Academia.
My point is that the Covid crisis has led (in France at least, and I'm willing to have the opinion about academics in other countries) to the complete outsourcing to those two corporate platforms for online teaching (and scholarly conferencing), which means
1) the renouncement to a once functional dedicated national infrastructure (namely, in France, the use of free software Jitsi within the state-sponsored "Renater" academic infrastructure)
2) the surrendering of Academia to corporations well known to abuse the extraction and commodification of data (Zoom) and well known to "embrace, extend and extinguish" anything within their reach (Microsoft)
My point is that it is completely contradictory to a supposed general institutional trend towards "open science", and that open software is often forgotten besides open litterature and open data, and that the pandemic has accelerated the disintegration of an academic national and open infrastructure.
So my questions are :
1) Is anybody aware of an already existing piece expressing that concerns ?
2) Is anybody willing to share what is the situation in their country regarding this issue ?
Best,
* for a little background and as a newcomer presentation, I am a historian of science and my area is the issue of openness within scientific modelling software .
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