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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 Monday December 30 2019, @01:20PM (1 child)
You're omitting a lot of realities, good and bad.
1. At the pre-college age, a lot of people live in awful school districts. An engaging lecture on Khan Academy beats a traditional classroom taught by Mr. Phone-It-In, or a traditional classroom full of gang members.
2. Collaborative learning requires a teaching system that supports it and small enough classroom sizes for the student groups to be manageable. I went to elementary school and high school 30 years ago, and we did small group projects in a few literature classes in the last year of high school. That was all. Every single other bit of our education was so-called traditional lecturing.
3. Online learning platforms can choose the best lecturers they find in each topic and have them present, and then adjust the learning material based on student and graduate feedback.
4. You can do collaborative projects with online learning using Hangouts, Skype, and so forth. It's rare you need to be in person with someone to work together, unless you're conducting a science experiment.
5. I don't think employers think too much about the college degree and learning environments. I think the biggest benefit is the idea you have some general idea of the field of study in your major and more importantly you showed up for however many years it took and didn't drop out because you were too sickly, lazy, or busy partying.
Last but not least, watch out for those rose colored glasses. Something tells me the 1960s flower-power-LSD kids did not mature a decade earlier than we did.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 01 2020, @11:33PM
It's an issue that employers are not thinking too much about someone's actual level of education. That shows that degree requirements are more about elitism and credentialism than education.
Also, there are plenty of people who are lazy and/or busy partying who end up receiving degrees, especially with increasingly perverse incentives to hand out as many degrees as possible. That's the truly terrifying part, not the drop-outs.