What happens if we break student data out of the bowels of the institution, hand it back to students, and provide them with an API to moderate institutional access? It's a revolt against centralized, monetized, dehumanized data farming (our cultural paradigm?) - and it makes awareness of digital exploitation fundamental to the pedagogical mission of the university.
A Personal API creates a culture of openness, promoting digital literacy by revealing the structures of institutional data-gathering on the one hand and lending students and third party providers the documentation to create their own tools on the other. Sounds something like EdTech going Indie, going Open.
After meeting in March of 2016 at the #IndieEdTech weekend at Davidson College Kin, Phil, Olga, Adam, Erika, and Andrew connected around this two-fold mission of the Personal API. Kin Lane, the API Evangelist, and Adam Croom, Director of Digital Learning at the University of Oklahoma, will discuss the technological and ideological implications of using retainable, reusable, revisable, remixable, and redistributable API's. Andrew and Erika will offer student perspectives, showing that revealing the structure of the institution built for you can only do its job when students design the structures with you. Phil Windley, Enterprise Architect in the Office of the CIO at BYU, and Olga Belikov, a BYU Instructional Psychology and Technology graduate student, will outline BYU's implementation of complementary University and Personal API's.
This panel represents a reclamation of identity and power in education through decentralized data ownership and use.
