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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: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday December 30 2019, @04:11PM (1 child)
Totally agree.
85% agree, there are still significant bastions of actual research and learning in academia - they've been in the minority for some time now, but they still exist.
That sounds like the Pol Pot solution: abandon the cities, return to agrarian economy, smelt metals in residential backyards!
How about: we require the ability to perform a job competently, whether demonstrated via degree or apprenticeship / time in grade? When I was coming up through high school, the students were teaching the teachers computer science, and even at University level roughly 5% of the students were at a peer or better level with most of the Comp Sci professors. This isn't just about computer science, either - if you've got 10 years working experience in all areas of a business, getting a paper MBA from some institution is a waste of everybody's time and your money. Government, the courts, and corporations need to back off on the idea that a University degree somehow "qualifies" people for certain job titles and start recognizing alternate forms of learning / experience / demonstration of ability.
Having said all that, I'd say that we need to drastically increase the amount of people appropriately trained for the available jobs and get over the idea that passing the 4 year $100K B.S. gatekeeper is all that it takes to get a job in this economy. The gatekeeper indeed should be rendered irrelevant, but not by sending the boys back to the farms to plow the fields with oxen.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 01 2020, @11:02PM
Rather, jobs that did not used to require degrees (and indeed do not need degrees at all) now require them. Software development is an example; more such jobs now require degrees, completely unnecessarily.
This is more what I meant. I agree.