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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 29 2019, @07:15PM (2 children)
Higher education over the predecessor of this:
Online anti-plagiarism software. We had to give royalty free rights to all our written works in th english department in order to recieve a grade for the entire length of class. I actually bothered to read the EULA and they didn't take any responsibility, but kept royalty free access to your papers forever. Tell me how teaching students to accept giving away their work royalty free is a good first step to learning to be a productive and suitably conservative member of society who can take full advantage of our all nations best laws to enhance our own situation while providing community benefit, as opposed to a rent seeking collector of other's information by locking in exclusive contracts in lots of backhanded fashions and generally pulling American to new lows.
I'm not saying the plagiarism idea was bad in itself, but having it mandatory, handling by a 3rd party corporation and doing it to the detriment of the students definitely was. For reference the average paper showed up with between 10 and 25 percent platgiarism scores. heard you needed between 50 and 85 to get questioned and anything above that was automatic failure. I don't like cheaters, but I hate parasites and rent seekers far more, and these companies were exactly that, not unlike the educational publishing market and others.
Moving to always on tracking of students was simply the next step of professors writing it in as far as handling their students went. The next will be machine learning the content of papers at A, B, C, D, and F levels and automatically marking the grades without ever looking at them.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday December 29 2019, @10:10PM
At the undergrad level at least, even in "creative writing" classes, you're not expressing your creativity like you would trash-writing in a SoylentNews Journal. You're banging out the kind of swill that they want to read and according to their own constraints. It's like being in a creative painting class and losing points because you chose not to paint a generic seascape. Hell, my English 101 professor would have us do write-ups about his own mediocre crap.
I think I've said this before here, but I got an undeserved "A" in that class after other students started complaining to the administrators and when he addressed it I sent him a private message saying something like, almost literally verbatim, "I haven't said anything, I ain't no snitch, I just wanna pass the class and get on with my life."
And that was many years ago. I can't even imagine the horror that students are going through now, where even rights answers in math and computer science are marked down and considered to be racist and heteronormative. I couldn't imagine taking engineering or computer science classes and being marked down or even failing the course for using oppressive constructs such as "master-slave configurations."
You see this in industry after it gets Jewed-up. "Let's not use a 'master-slave' configuration, let's instead call it a 'producer-consumer' configuration because more cheap gadgets need to be sold to more Goyim."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 29 2019, @11:01PM
Plagiarism is more of an issue when instructors are lazy in developing assignments. While there's no way to completely prevent plagiarism, the writing prompts can be designed so plagiarism is unlikely.
As someone who teaches science classes, I've generally assigned persuasive writing and focused on two types of assignments:
1) Apply your knowledge of a topic and write your opinion about an issue.
2) Examine some data and develop a hypothesis that explains the results. Then justify your hypothesis.
One recent assignment I gave that fits the first category is whether we should be engineering rivers with flood control systems or structures to make them navigable. They're required to write a concise essay stating their position and then defending it. In the process of doing so, they demonstrate to me whether they understand the issues and the underlying science.
For the second example, I presented students with data such as the global average temperature, carbon dioxide concentrations, solar output, and other relevant data sets. I asked them to examine the data and tell me which hypotheses best explain the observed warming since 1970 and why. This is assigned after a couple of lectures in class that discuss the physical processes involved like the greenhouse effect, albedo, aerosols, and things like that.
There's an upper bound on the amount of words. Students are required to fully answer the questions and to cite a certain number of sources. I don't have a specific citation format and I actually allow limited use of Wikipedia. My rule is that other sources must be included besides just Wikipedia. When online sources are involved, I allow students to even just give me the URLs. As long as I would be able to easily find the source they're citing, it's allowed.
I try to make the topics relevant to students so they'll actually want to answer the questions. They're not asked to write five page papers or whatever about topics they're not interested in, with citation formats like MLA that they'll probably never use again. I don't think it's particularly likely that students would easily find other essays to plagiarize that would fit my restrictions. But I also try to reduce the incentive to cheat. I don't require my students to submit their papers to services like TurnItIn, nor have I seen any significant indication that cheating has occurred.
Using services like TurnItIn treats everyone like they're potentially committing academic misconduct and creates a toxic environment. Those services probably aren't necessary, provided that assignments are developed in such a way to discourage cheating.