Watters brings up plenty of interesting points throughout “The Manilla Envelope” relating to control, privacy, electronic development, and today’s students. The first few pages go into great detail about the unfortunate reality of one’s work being lost to the digital ether of today; a stark contrast from the author’s manilla envelope containing the schoolwork their mother thought most relevant to hold onto, a deliberate choice, the contents being selected over the years from the complete collection of the author’s schoolwork. While the message of the introduction was clear to me, the right to choose should be inalienable, I feel as though the student of today has all the more choice compared to their analog predecessors. It has never been easier to simply copy a document onto a personal device for permanent safekeeping; the example in the text of the family with no personal device was striking, yet digital-analog alternatives, like flash drives, bridge the gap between such realities and allow those who wish to store data for incredibly cheap.
Later in the work, a much more striking topic took shape; the question of data ownership. “What happens to student data? ‘I don’t know.’ We shrug. How long will they be stored? ‘I don’t know’ We shrug again. Who has access? ‘I don’t know.’ We shrug yet again. ‘But hey, this new ed-tech tool is free!’ teachers say. And usually that is enough.” (16) Data is perhaps the biggest buzzword in today’s world as it gets thrown around to mean all kinds of things, yet the fear surrounding it is almost non-existent. People generally have yet to realize the greater implications of what data breaches are; unknown entities having such sensitive information about one’s life gives them immense power and control whether it be political or commercial. The author brings up a powerful point regarding how sensitive academic data can be, and how loosely educators or admin control this data. Wholly, the work is a poignant commentary on the state of academia and its broader impact on how the immense data of students can be “lost” or forgotten, and fall into all kinds of hands; while the initial statements regarding the difficulty of data maintenance are not something I agree with personally, I recognize their importance in setting up the (more important) later statements regarding the academic data and the preservation thereof
