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from the 1984-was-not-a-"how-to"-manual dept.
When Syracuse University freshmen walk into professor Jeff Rubin's Introduction to Information Technologies class, seven small Bluetooth beacons hidden around the Grant Auditorium lecture hall connect with an app on their smartphones and boost their "attendance points." And when they skip class? The SpotterEDU app sees that, too, logging their absence into a campus database that tracks them over time and can sink their grade. It also alerts Rubin, who later contacts students to ask where they've been. His 340-person lecture has never been so full.
"They want those points," he said. "They know I'm watching and acting on it. So, behaviorally, they change."
Short-range phone sensors and campuswide Wi-Fi networks are empowering colleges across the United States to track hundreds of thousands of students more precisely than ever before. Dozens of schools now use such technology to monitor students' academic performance, analyse their conduct or assess their mental health.
But some professors and education advocates argue that the systems represent a new low in intrusive technology, breaching students' privacy on a massive scale. The tracking systems, they worry, will infantilise students in the very place where they're expected to grow into adults, further training them to see surveillance as a normal part of living, whether they like it or not.
In response we have:
How to (Hypothetically) Hack Your School's Surveillance System:
This week, hacktivist and security engineer Lance R. Vick tweeted an enticing proposition along with a gut-punch headline: "Colleges are turning students' phones into surveillance machines, tracking the locations of hundreds of thousands," read the Washington Post link.
Vick countered with an offer to students:
If you are at one of these schools asking you to install apps on your phone to track you, hit me up for some totally hypothetical academic ideas on how one might dismantle such a system.
We're always up for hacker class, so Vick supplied Gizmodo with a few theories for inquiring minds.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Grishnakh on Sunday December 29 2019, @05:56PM (1 child)
>And wtf is it with taking attendance. We stopped doing that part way through high school.
This is my question too. I went to two different state universities (I transferred halfway through), and I don't remember any class ever taking attendance. If you wanted to learn the material, you showed up. If you didn't think you needed to bother, you could skip it. Attendance was always optional, unless of course there was an exam that day (I guess you could say that was optional too, but you wouldn't pass without it of course). I ended up skipping my freshman Chemistry class lectures because I didn't find them useful, and only attended the once-a-week small-group class led by a TA, because I found that far more useful than the 300-person lecture. I ended up getting an A of course.
This attendance thing sounds like a power play by angry and incompetent professors who aren't doing a very good job teaching and who want to see a lecture hall full of students sitting through their useless lectures, instead of skipping them and just studying the material on their own or with TAs that are far better at teaching than them.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 29 2019, @07:33PM
> This attendance thing sounds like a power play ...
More like the grade school funding mechanism where my high school got a fixed amount of state aid (money) for every student that showed up for a day. I came in late nearly every day my senior year (no morning classes), but always signed in before 10am which meant that the school could claim a full day of compensation for me.