I share McRae's concern about the rhetoric of personalized learning; this seems like a slippery slope away from public and communal education and into private and individualized education. This comes in combination with the commodification and commercialization of education, as pointed out in his discussion of businesses intending to profit from data collection and usage. Both trends reflect and reinforce a larger societal trend of undermining democracy through promoting consumerism and individualism, which I've discussed a bit in this post.
At the same time, my limited teaching experience has shown me that teachers are responsible for gathering, monitoring, interpreting, and reporting massive amounts of interrelated data. My previous work experience, in combination with this new challenge, inclines me to look for powerful database solutions (such as learning management systems) that will assist me and my students in better assessing their learning and determining next steps. I flip back, though, when I reflect on how absolutely messy learning is. The very fact that ICT functions via algorithms seems to indicate that it's not suitable for gathering or measuring this kind of activity. In fact, I came across that very struggle in my previous job, as occupational health and safety shares much of the messiness of learning.
I think McRae hits the nail on the head here: "Ironically we have more data on student assessments, and fewer opportunities for deep conversations between parents and teachers." Increased data drives a decrease in conversation. It lulls us into a false sense of security that we have all of the information we need, and we are able to interpret it correctly in order to make ethical and correct decisions from it. One of my frustrations in my previous job was that we had a ton of data, but the data we were gathering weren't telling us anything meaningful about what was actually going on. On top of that, the whole industry was asking for the wrong data, and we analysts were expected to explain it in common terms (or executives would simply slice, dice, and interpret the data to suit their purposes). This made meaningful discussions with the folks on the ground - the people doing the work, the people who were the source of our data and those most affected by our decisions - seem unnecessary. Wherever possible, I would phone people or chat with them face-to-face to get "the rest of the story," which often made the data I was "supposed" to gather and report seem even more meaningless.
Deep conversations take time. They take energy. And they take money. They are antithetical to short-term, for-profit goals. But I believe they are critical to building and sustaining truly effective learning communities. McRae's post was a wake-up call for me, and hopefully others, from a bit of a pro-personalization-via-data-driven-technology trance.
P.S. As a note related to McRae's discussion on teacher-to-student ratio issues, consider that, within the increasingly standard Incident Command System used by emergency responders, the span-of-control is 3-7 with the ideal being 5. McRae notes, "These same teachers, who hold a keen awareness of each of their student’s particular learning styles and passions, are also simultaneously contending with issues of poverty, lack of parental involvement (or conversely helicopter parents), large classes, familial and community influences, student effort and numerous digital and popular culture distractions that add to complexity of their professional practice." Sure, teachers aren't responding to emergencies, but it certainly makes you wonder what kind of ratio would be most beneficial for ensuring the well-being of our children and schools.