 Okay, we are live. That's right, we're doing this live. I am Jim Groom and I am presenting the final keynote for Reclaim Open's virtual online event and it is my distinct pleasure and I will say honor to introduce our keynote today. Ian Linkletter, who is currently an emerging technology in open education library at the British Columbia University Institute of Technology, formerly a learning technology specialist at the University of British Columbia. And some of you may or may not know that Ian was part of a kind of high profile slap suit and he's been fighting that now for several years and he provides not only an example of what to do but also a deeply personal look at the dangers in our current climate of critiquing the status quo of surveillance technology. Ian is here today to both tell us a story as well as to ask us to take a pledge. So without further ado, let me hand this over to Ian and thank you all for coming. Thank you so much, Jim and hi everyone. Thank you for joining me today. My name is Ian Linkletter, I'm a librarian and my talk is called Pledge Against Academic Surveillance. My thanks to Reclaim Open 2023 and its organizers for inviting me to speak. I'm honored to be here and join you from the traditional ancestral and unceded territory of the Coast Salish nations of the Squamish, Musqueam and Slava Tooth peoples. More specifically, I'm in Vancouver, Canada. Many of you may know me as the dude being sued by Proctorio and some have been following the lawsuits twists and turns since it began in September, 2020. I'm the first educational technologist to be sued by a vendor and it's been a long thousand days coping with Proctorio's strategic lawsuit against public participation. There's no end in sight. Proctorio sued me because I told the truth. Linking to their own YouTube videos, I proved that their product was harmful. Proctorio calls my linking to those videos copyright infringement and breach of confidence but let me tell you what I call their lawsuit, their strategic lawsuit against telling the truth. Proctorio seeks to take this right from all Canadians. If we can't share information and link to things, how do we have a chance against the shitty future tech CEOs have envisioned for us? It says a lot about a company when they spend their resources attacking rights and freedoms. It says they are afraid of the truth and maybe they should be because without truth those who have harmed students cannot be held responsible. That's bad for business and it's precisely the point. If we are going to end academic surveillance it will take a whole lot of truth, the bravery to speak it and a shared commitment to do something about it. Join me today in making that commitment. Academic surveillance technology is a scourge and causes great human suffering. Some of the well-documented concerns include that surveillance software discriminates against disabled students, that the surveillance software perpetuates racist biases, that it's an invasion of privacy and that it causes emotional harm. Listening to students is our responsibility and their voices are all around us saying that academic surveillance technology is harming them. Some may dismiss real student experiences of harm by calling them anecdotal but let me tell you why that's wrong. Taking Proctorio alone, there are thousands of negative reviews which I collated at googlereviews.linkletter.org or you can read hundreds of student complaints at twitter.com slash proctorio. Or you can read dozens more individual accounts of harm in the Washington Post, New Yorker, The Verge, The Guardian, Teen Vogue, Wired, Vice, Volkskrant in the Netherlands and student newspapers like the UBC at UBC and The Lantern out of Ohio State University. The evidence that academic surveillance technology is harming students is everywhere. These are real students reporting real harm believing them is the only ethical option. We know students are being harmed because they are telling us and we must stop it. I have hope we can do this together. We can end the harm. So today I propose we band together as a community and push back on academic surveillance. If there's one thing I have learned from going through my whole experience, it's that we are a community of communities that protect each other. There are so many ways to slice it. Staff against academic surveillance, teachers against academic surveillance, students against academic surveillance, learning designers, developers, privacy advocates, researchers, counselors, parents, lawyers, we're a large group. And I know there are senior leaders against surveillance too, presidents, provosts, deans, directors, senior managers and yeah, maybe even a CEO or two. So today I am presenting the Pledge Against Academic Surveillance. It goes, I will do everything in my power to obstruct, work against and end academic surveillance technologies and their harm against students. You can access it and sign the pledge at pledge.againstsurveillance.net. That's it. I will do everything in my power to obstruct, work against and end academic surveillance technologies and their harm against students. You have power and academic surveillance is harmful. So say it with me one more time. I will do everything in my power to obstruct, work against and end academic surveillance technologies and their harm against students. Go to pledge.againstsurveillance.net and sign your name to this, make a commitment. There's a contact email on the site if you ever wish to remove your name but I promise you'll be in good company. If you experience any recrimination for believing what you believe, take it from me, the community will protect you. And thank you to Reclaim Hosting with a special shout out to Jim and Taylor Jaden to Brian Lamb and Brenna Clark Gray for letting me use the Against Surveillance domain and to Micah Prynne for helping me work this. When you sign your name, you will be asked to optionally add your organization too. I understand this may be a riskier move. So tell your colleagues and do it together. If you have academic freedom, especially take this step. You have something many educational technologists don't. So flex your freedom and stand with all of them everywhere against surveillance. And if you're a senior leader watching my talk thinking, I could never sign this, it's too big a risk. Sign it anyway in support of your employees. Show them that you will not only protect them but will help them do their best work against surveillance. Do everything in your power. There's a word in the pledge that I want to draw special attention to and it's obstruct. Don't get me wrong, okay? If you put education first, you are a great educational technologist. If you protect students, you are an ethical educational technologist. But if it just so happens that you're a bumbling incompetent fool of a surveillance technologist, you have my respect. We all make mistakes repeatedly, especially when experiencing moral distress. In the course of my 15 years as an educational technologist, I worked with hundreds of faculty. Part of the job is to develop relationships of mutual trust and respect with the educators you support. We all have faculty who would stand up for us as being good at our jobs. Stay strong in your beliefs and let people watch your back for you. Many of us have unions or professional associations who would protect us in doing our jobs as written. So let it be a relief to you when I tell you that surveillance tech isn't ed tech. Just because it's leaching from the ed tech budget doesn't mean that it is. And so as an educational technologist, you don't have to support it. If a technology has no pedagogical purpose, it isn't an educational technologist. You're the expert. If you have to get your union involved, it's already an ethical issue, and make it a labor issue too. Other duties as assigned might be in your job description, but this doesn't mean you have to spy on students. It's not what you are employed to do, and it's not what you went to school for. And it just so happens that you're really, really bad at it. We all have our strengths, and yours is in your convictions. Academic surveillance is not without its supporters. They are free to make their own for surveillance pledge. I don't care, and I will make fun of them. I have been told that I am dangerous as if without e-proctoring or AI text detection, bridges are gonna start falling down or someone's appendix will burst. It is not dangerous to protect students from harm. There are people out there who think these tools prevent cheating, but there's no evidence this is true. Remember we were talking about evidence, not anecdotes? What's evident is that students are terrorized by this technology. It deters them from being themselves, from accessing their exams if they have dark skin, and from feeling safe and secure in their own homes. There are entire business models that require administrators to believe that without surveillance, there can be no such thing as academic integrity. But how can this be the case when there is no evidence academic surveillance software even does what it's supposed to do? Adding AI to the technology only makes it more discriminatory. It's time to put a stop to this once and for all. So now that you've taken the pledge, what can you do next? Whether you're a president or a practitioner, you have the power to say no. Obstruct the encroachment of surveillance. You'll know it when you see it and you might only get one window of opportunity. When a company like Turnitin and shitifies their tech with discriminatory AI that no one asked for, we must be tenacious. Say no to the vendor. Say it more than once, loudly. Don't feel badly about having fire in your voice. You can't be friends with the corporation, so don't be friendly. Sound the alarm unless serves in social media. Warn your faculty and get them involved. Post a notice on your public website. Remind the company that their contract will eventually be up for renewal. And you won't forget this. All of these things have happened in the resistance against Turnitin's AI text detection. And we won. In response, they quietly enabled the ability to turn off the AI score from the admin settings page. If your institution uses Turnitin, turn it off. Innocent students are being accused every day by this AI text detection score. If we're going to end academic surveillance, we will need an alternative vision for the future. As Dr. Chris Gilliard says, every future imagined by a tech company is worse than the previous iteration. So let's map out the one we want. I know we've got this. I was fortunate to watch some of the other reclaim open talks as they streamed live. The future I hope for and believe in is one where there is an open alternative to every closed system. Instead of standing by as every pork for-profit company makes their product worse and more expensive, we can work as a community to develop and host our own apps using those resources. It turns out that once you've removed the profit incentives, the surveillance layer typically vanishes. From Canvas to Microsoft Teams to Zoom to Google Docs, open alternatives exist. Respectively, they're called Moodle, Mattermost, Jitsie, Etherpad, and there are many others. Spark a server and demonstrate what you do with even 5% or 10% of your organization's Zoom or Microsoft budget. When I was an educational technologist, I didn't have the support needed to implement new open applications, but I did have a professional development fund and I used it on Reclaim Cloud to install open web applications in one click. It was my own private skunkworks and learning lab and I had a lot of fun with our learning designers envisioning a better future without corporations dictating it to us. In the future envisioned by big tech, students are surveilled 100% when reading their electronic textbook, when taking exams, when submitting assignments, and when participating in a virtual classroom. We can stop this, prove that a better future exists if only your institution would support you in scaling it up. And if you're fortunate enough to be in higher education in British Columbia, you have free access to WordPress and MatterMos through the OpenETC. It's an open ed tech collaborative funded by BC Campus, hosted by BCNet and run by a community of volunteers. It's a model for all of us to learn from. So check out the OpenETC at opened.ca and get inspired. These are just a couple of ideas for how to advance open educational technology at your institution. Perhaps your school already has robust supports for open and if so, that's awesome. Keep pushing it as an alternative to academic surveillance fueled garbage. If there's one message I want you to take from this, it's that you are not alone. It only takes one person to hold the line against academic surveillance and you can grow this movement within and across your communities. Encourage others to take the pledge at pledge.againstsurveillance.net and let's see what we can do together. Ethical values will light the path to a future without academic surveillance and I look forward to seeing you there. Thank you all. Thank you, Ian. Took me a little while to get back into the stream because I was blown away but I really appreciate you coming on here, sharing your story but making a very, very powerful pitch for the pledge and to make it happen. So we could look there. I'm not seeing right now questions in the chat but if any do come in, we'll see that. But I'm interested in just quickly asking this connection between open and surveillance is kind of like you made it beautifully at the end of your appeal and I really like the idea that with open ETC in Canada with something like Reclaim Cloud by using these open source technologies you are in some ways reclaiming your privacy and the control over that data and having more instructional technologists or librarians or folks within the university faculty, students use these tools there's the collateral impact of actually reclaiming some of this personal data and avoiding the business model that many of these folks are approaching. So there's actually a real deep relation between that value of open and resisting surveillance. Yeah, in the last several years we've seen an emerging trend of these for-profit companies getting bought up by private equity firms and one of the biggest issues with that is that the affiliates clause that's present in almost every privacy policy says that data can be transferred within other units or organizations owned by the same person or a PE firm. So when a company like Instructure for example gets purchased by a PE firm like Tom Abravo that owns 50 other companies that data could potentially be transferred to one of those companies and then sold to a different company with other companies under its belt. The only way to stop the propagation of private student data is to store it yourselves have your own jurisdiction over it. Now one of the worst acronyms of all time the NGDLE, say that again with me three times. I call it Boondoggle. The Boondoggle, exactly. Probably a better description. So the next generation digital learning environment which was talked about by Edgicoz in like 2015. I remember reading a bit about that and then writing a bit about it. And one of the things that struck me about this vision of this next generation of digital learning environments was that it basically used the LMS as a way to hook in all these other proprietary softwares to share data and share it. Like that was actually the model the very thing you're talking about this idea of the next generation had little to nothing to do with open and everything to do with the kind of the LMS is a single site for the collection and distribution of data to third party vendors. Yeah, it's a giveaway. I mean, there's companies out there that sell LMSs and they don't include core tools like Team Chat or things like that. And what they say as an excuse is that they want to integrate with the best tools. They don't want to be the tool for everything. And that's such a cop out because all it does is hand over student data to other companies. And those companies, you know, they tend to get bought and sold along with the data. Yeah. Now, and that's something when you're talking about the Bravo purchase for Instructure that had been talked or Canvas have been talked about at length a couple of years ago. It is interesting to think about what they're buying as well as, you know, all the collateral data collected and what they do with that. Yeah. I got into arguments online about whether the $2 billion that was getting paid was partially because of the value of the student data and people were saying like, oh no, it's because they have all these customers and their business is booming. But meanwhile, their CFO was actually going to investor conferences and bragging that they have the largest database of student data in the world over one trillion data points and trying to get investors to salivate over what that might mean for their bottom line. Yeah. I mean, it's almost like a whole... It struck me as a moment and we do have a question. I will get to that if you have time. I want to be mindful of your time. But it's interesting how there's a point in the last five to 10 years when you've been in the ed tech business from what I've seen for quite a while, you know, anywhere from 15 to, is that correct? 15 years. Yeah, I mean, I don't know how you don't look like that's possible age-wise. But like you've been doing this for a long time. And one of the things I wonder if you've noticed as well is ed tech had this strange moment when everyone was investing that it was no longer a discussion about what you can do. It was a question about like investments. And it was almost like the financial papers reading educational technologists at a certain point. Like it just, the conversation shifted where it was about bottom lines and like buyouts. It had nothing to do with teaching and learning. Yeah, I mean, if you paid attention to what CEOs were saying for, I would say about 2019 to 2022, especially was concentrated buying and selling. You know, it was all about how much they had to offer to investors, not to students, not to schools, not to teachers. You can tell where people's hearts and minds are at when all they talk about is money. Yeah, absolutely, I was about to say in Italian, but Italian is bad enough. So, okay, we have a question. Taylor Jaden is asking, do you have suggestions or insights in how to empower students themselves in fighting against surveillance and taking ownership over their data? And he says, obviously we can stand together as technologists, teachers, et cetera, but how do we empower students to make their voices heard? Well, if there's one thing that I learned from the whole Proctorio scandal at UBC, it's that students can really band together and get their leadership on board. In less than six months after I was sued, Proctorio was heavily restricted and that was due to the work of students and student senators and student representatives who were just so dogged with talking to their newspaper and anybody that would listen about the real harm that was being done. Stories kept emerging about people who were having panic attacks, having to take their tests and the day before the Senate vote, a student wrote a letter to the UBC editor about two racist experiences that he had trying to take a Proctorio exam and not being allowed in by the software. So I guess my message to students is to make yourselves heard and find your allies because just because you aren't seeing every staff member tweeting on social media doesn't mean that they won't go to the ends of the earth within the institution to protect you. Yeah, and a lot of the early obviously issues with surveillance and Proctorio happened with students. They were targeted as well. And so it wasn't like, this idea of banding together and this notion that not being alone and as a community and as educational technologists, you started this talk saying that you were the first to have been sued by a company. And I think about some of the things when Blackboard was kind of the big evil empire, which seems quaint now by comparison to think about what would have happened that that moment should a corporation took that choice that Proctorio did. And we're living in it now and you've come to represent the best, if you will, of educational technologists and re-positioning and re-centering our ethos and our cause on teaching and learning and creating a web of good for that environment. So I will just say personally, I am blown away by what you have come to represent but what you continue to do and by the good work and the kind of, I mean, the sheer kind of, I don't know how you would say it, like strength, iron will, to have to deal with this on a regular basis. We can come in, we can listen, we can check out and do our things. You've been living with this for like you said, 1,000 days. And I think all of us need to recognize that and come and support and do what we can. So I personally wanna say, and I think I speak for many people in this community, thank you for all you've done in it. Thank you for supporting me. Absolutely. Big fan. And with that, I think we'll end the stream and just a big virtual round of applause for you and for Ian and all the work you're doing. Thank you. Thank you too. pledge.againsturveillance.net Wait, hold on, wait, look, we're prepared, we're technologists. What? Don't forget, like and subscribe. Wait, wait, there we go. It won't be unlisted. It'll be a good company. See you there. Great, bye-bye. Bye.