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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 danmars on Thursday January 02 2020, @08:23PM
I took some online courses circa 2007 when I was in college, and my girlfriend took a bunch more circa 2015, and they were at least as good as the in-person classes, but with the added benefit that you didn't have to participate at a specific time and place that required you to adhere to a specific schedule. There is a lot more participation if you have to post in writing about something, and then you have to respond to classmates' posts, than for you to all sit in a lecture together or go to a group thing where you may not necessarily get randomly grouped with people who have a clue what they're talking about. Plus you have none of the awkwardness of needing to deal with people in person. I fully support 100% of General Education / Humanities Requirements classes being online. Maybe there's some value to having your specialization classes in person, but there wasn't any for gen ed requirements. And I've seen specialization classes online, and they seem to work just as well.
I don't know who hurt you, but online university classes are not all terrible.