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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: -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."