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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, @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.