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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 dw861 on Tuesday December 31 2019, @01:37AM
There is more to it than just the smartphones. At this point, for any larger class, almost all written content is shared via a course management system/portal/what-have-you. In part this is because students now demand copies of slides, etc, in advance of the day's lecture (I have commented on this in other SN threads). Other aspects encouraging the adoption of these systems include online quizzes (marked by machine), and class bulletin boards.
What most students don't realize, is that as the instructor, I am also given access to their login behaviour. So, I can see which students have never logged in; which ones compulsively check for new content every 20 mins; those that log in once at the beginning of term and never log out. I can see a record of each and every page load.
Now, while I can only see this for the classes that I happen to teach, the faculty, and higher up, university admins, can see these details for all students at the institution. No doubt, they can also see my instructor login activity.
Some valid arguments can be made for why these trends are good and helpful. But there are also just as many, for why this is dark and scary.