The proliferation of information technology tools in higher education has resulted in an explosion of data about students and their contexts. Yet, current policies governing these data are limited in their usefulness for informing students, instructors, and administrators of their rights and responsibilities related to data use because they are based on antiquated conceptions of data and data systems. To understand how data privacy policies conceptualize and represent data, privacy, student agency, and institutional power, we conducted a policy discourse analysis of 151 university policy statements related to student information privacy and the responsible use of student data from 78 public and private post-secondary institutions in the U.S. Three common discourses emerged: educational records are static artifacts, privacy solutions are predicated upon institutional responsibility and student agency, and legitimate educational interest in data are institutionally defined and broadly applied. We explore the assumptions, biases, silences, and consequences of these discourses and offer counter- discourses to begin a foundation for the development of privacy policies in a new data age.

Despite their increasingly widespread adoption in post-secondary education, scholars and practitioners know very little about the impact of digital data displays on instructors’ sense-making and academic planning. In this manuscript, I report the results of comparative case studies of five different introductory physics instructors at three institutions who used data dashboards as part of an active learning approach called ‘Peer Instruction’. Instructors expressed frustration with the ways that data displays undermined their existing pedagogical strategies. They were stymied by a lack of clarity on how data is assembled and imbued with meaning, which limited their own sensemaking about the data. They also expressed concerns about how the dashboards facilitated data collection about their instructional planning and decision-making.

We report on the results of an underwater acoustic field experiment conducted in December 2012 on the continental shelf off the Florida Keys in water of approximately 100 m depth. Ambient noise was recorded concurrently on three moored near‐bottom instruments with horizontal separations of approximately 5 km, 10 km, and 15 km. We focus in this letter on instrument pairs with 5 km and 10 km separations. Consistent with theoretical predictions, coherent sums of many realizations of cross correlations of ambient noise records at two measurement locations are shown to yield approximations to deterministic acoustic Green's functions that describe propagation between those two locations. The results presented demonstrate the feasibility of extracting information suitable for use in tomographic inversions from measurements of underwater acoustic ambient noise.