Personal learning artefacts: persistence, ownership and privacy

Traditional classrooms have been often regarded as closed spaces within which experimentation, discussion and exploration of ideas occur. Professors have been used to being able to express ideas frankly, and occasionally rashly while discussions are ephemeral and conventional student work is submitted, graded and often shredded. However, digital tools have transformed the nature of privacy. As we move towards the creation of life-long archives of our personal learning, we collect material created in various 'classrooms'. Some of these are public, and open, but others were created within 'circles of trust' with expectations of privacy and anonymity by learners. Taking the Creative Commons license as a starting point, this paper looks at what rights and expectations of privacy exist in learning environments? What methods might we use to define a 'privacy license' for learning? How should the privacy rights of learners be balanced with the need to encourage open learning and with the creation of eportfolios as evidence of learning? How might we define different learning spaces and the privacy rights associated with them? Which class activities are 'private' and closed to the class, which are open and what lies between? A limited set of set of metrics or zones is proposed, along the axes of private-public, anonymous-attributable and non-commercial-commercial to define learning spaces and the digital footprints created within them. The application of these not only to the artefacts which reflect learning, but to the learning spaces, and indeed to digital media more broadly are explored. The possibility that these might inform not only teaching practice but also grading rubrics in disciplines where public engagement is required will also be explored, along with the need for consideration by educational institutions of the data rights of students.

Effects of environmental colour on mood: a wearable LifeColour capture device

Colour is everywhere in our daily lives and impacts things like our mood, yet we rarely take notice of it. One method of capturing and analysing the predominant colours that we encounter is through visual lifelogging devices such as the SenseCam. However an issue related to these devices is the privacy concerns of capturing image level detail. Therefore in this work we demonstrate a hardware prototype wearable camera that captures only one pixel - of the dominant colour prevelant in front of the user, thus circumnavigating the privacy concerns raised in relation to lifelogging. To simulate whether the capture of dominant colour would be sufficient we report on a simulation carried out on 1.2 million SenseCam images captured by a group of 20 individuals. We compare the dominant colours that different groups of people are exposed to and show that useful inferences can be made from this data. We believe our prototype may be valuable in future experiments to capture colour correlated associated with an individual's mood.Colour is everywhere in our daily lives and impacts things like our mood, yet we rarely take notice of it. One method of capturing and analysing the predominant colours that we encounter is through visual lifelogging devices such as the SenseCam. However an issue related to these devices is the privacy concerns of capturing image level detail. Therefore in this work we demonstrate a hardware prototype wearable camera that captures only one pixel - of the dominant colour prevelant in front of the user, thus circumnavigating the privacy concerns raised in relation to lifelogging. To simulate whether the capture of dominant colour would be sufficient we report on a simulation carried out on 1.2 million SenseCam images captured by a group of 20 individuals. We compare the dominant colours that different groups of people are exposed to and show that useful inferences can be made from this data. We believe our prototype may be valuable in future experiments to capture colour correlated associated with an individual's mood.

The analytical approach of the European Court of Human Rights in surveillance cases—the implications, justifications, and future of the Court’s reasoning, with a focus on the legislative impact in Ireland

A notable feature of the surveillance case law of the European Court of Human Rights has been the tendency of the Court to focus on the “in accordance with the law” aspect of the Article 8 ECHR inquiry. This focus has been the subject of some criticism, but the impact of this approach on the manner in which domestic surveillance legislation has been formulated in the Party States has received little scholarly attention. This thesis addresses that gap in the literature through its consideration of the Interception of Postal Packets and Telecommunications Messages (Regulation) Act, 1993 and the Criminal Justice (Surveillance) Act, 2009. While both Acts provide several of the safeguards endorsed by the European Court of Human Rights, this thesis finds that they suffer from a number of crucial weaknesses that undermine the protection of privacy. This thesis demonstrates how the focus of the European Court of Human Rights on the “in accordance with the law” test has resulted in some positive legislative change. Notwithstanding this fact, it is maintained that the legality approach has gained prominence at the expense of a full consideration of the “necessary in a democratic society” inquiry. This has resulted in superficial legislative responses at the domestic level, including from the Irish government. Notably, through the examination of a number of more recent cases, this project discerns a significant alteration in the interpretive approach adopted by the European Court of Human Rights regarding the application of the necessity test. The implications of this development are considered and the outlook for Irish surveillance legislation is assessed.