Some district leaders say they’ve been inundated with huge data requests that appear politically motivated and can be massively expensive and difficult to decipher. At least one school board has asked lawmakers to help slow a “runaway train.”
I’m a little unclear on what exactly the work Owatonna had to do for the request mentioned for them. Other school districts mention doing more than just a keyword search, but what exactly is involved with “fulfill a data request related to an equity plan and assessment and a word search of district correspondence”. The article they linked to has no additional information, or my adblocker is too aggressive. It shows people with piles of paper, but why are they printing all that out like that in the first place?
LLMs would actually make it very easy to address some of the issues, like this:
“Literally, they wanted, for instance, a review of every course with, quote, ‘a sociological theme for issues of equity.’ That’s not a keyword search,” Pekel said.
They’re pretty good at taking in text and spitting out answers to questions like “Does this text address theme X?”. Though when legal gets involved, maybe it requires a person to blame if a document gets missed.
The cost includes more than just the word search.
I’m a little unclear on what exactly the work Owatonna had to do for the request mentioned for them. Other school districts mention doing more than just a keyword search, but what exactly is involved with “fulfill a data request related to an equity plan and assessment and a word search of district correspondence”. The article they linked to has no additional information, or my adblocker is too aggressive. It shows people with piles of paper, but why are they printing all that out like that in the first place?
LLMs would actually make it very easy to address some of the issues, like this:
They’re pretty good at taking in text and spitting out answers to questions like “Does this text address theme X?”. Though when legal gets involved, maybe it requires a person to blame if a document gets missed.