The Paradigm Change: From Confidentiality to Collaborative Learning

The law on higher education in Romania currently brings up the subject of the confidentiality of student assessments. Education grades, like many other details, are part of the category of personal data, and which are protected by General Data Protection Rights. The author researched in the literature how this confidentiality progressed in other countries with an older tradition, such as the USA. The starting point was the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, where “privacy” was interpreted as “personal data”. Since that moment, the acceptance has widened a lot, and in a restrictive way. The author identified what were the historical problems with these “personal data” and discovered that they originate from the 60s, when racism and political policing, in the absence of integrity, affected the educational records in schools. This injustice tried to be corrected through Federal Education Rights and Privacy Act, namely by making school records transparent to parents/students, but also by making these records confidential to third parties. The author then identified failures in the application of these principles, with effect primarily in the area of violence in schools. Confidentiality in the name of protecting personal data has also generated negative effects, namely the limitation of social interaction and the disappearance of motivation for learning. The author also proposes a solution for reactivating social interaction and motivation for learning, and that is gamification. Details are given about gamification, applied for many years at TUIASI. It is demonstrated that social interaction is preferable to anonymization that generates alienation and then the triumph of mediocrity.