Disgusting that an IT "professor" forces students to install spyware on their own hardware.
Students should unite and collectively uninstall the malware.
Colleges are turning students’ phones into surveillance machines
11–20 of 293 posts
Re: Colleges are turning students’ phones into surveillance machines
#12This is so ripe for abuse. I would not want my daughter going to a school that implemented such a program.
Re: Colleges are turning students’ phones into surveillance machines
#13""Several students said they didn’t mind a system designed to keep them honest. But one of them, a freshman athlete at Temple University who asked to speak anonymously to avoid team punishment, said the SpotterEDU app has become a nightmare, marking him absent when he’s sitting in class and marking him late when he’s on time. He said he squandered several of his early lectures trying to convince the app he was presen…
That's likely a violation of the institution's academic honesty policy.
Re: Colleges are turning students’ phones into surveillance machines
#14Re: Colleges are turning students’ phones into surveillance machines
#15Weird.
My university didn't care if you attended lectures. Why would they? It's not a prison camp.
More focused tutorials with 1 on 2 or 1 on 4, sure.
Not everything needs to 'scale'.
Re: Colleges are turning students’ phones into surveillance machines
#16What's wrong with an attendance sheet?
It’s work.
Re: Colleges are turning students’ phones into surveillance machines
#17> “We’re reinforcing this sense of powerlessness … when we could be asking harder questions, like: Why are we creating institutions where students don’t want to show up?”
This is a great rebuttal. The tracking app of focus, SpotterEDU, was made to target student athletes and reduce truancy. But the founder has an odd history and this just smells of a money grab under the guise of helping students. The professors who lay laurels on the application because attendance is up need to assess performance of their classrooms with the app and those from the past without it to really make a statement.
Re: Colleges are turning students’ phones into surveillance machines
#18What's wrong with an attendance sheet?
Why does attendance matter?
Re: Colleges are turning students’ phones into surveillance machines
#19I'm a college student myself (my university, as far as I'm aware, has no system such as this). As far as I'm concerned, it's both an insidious creep of social-credit policy and a gross invasion of student privacy. It treats us as children rather than as the adults we are, and seems to me to be a sign of the re-infantalization of colleges. Many generations ago, when the age of majority was for the most part higher, co…
I don't think those informal understandings should stay so informal. If it's the fact that having your paper due by 4:20 is fine, then let it be 4:20, although the midnight deadline is likely something most people wouldn't do if they had to collect submissions in person, and so in this scenario we have automation possibly enabling more flexibility in student schedules. If students need extra room to pass the bar and…
Do you actually want to live in this world in which every interaction that's not amongst close friends or family is necessarily bureaucractic with zero discretion?
Is it actually _better_, or does it just maximise specific metrics that you're able to easily quantify?
More to the point - do you want to _be_ that person?
I'm glad that my professors were human beings and not automatons - I probably wouldn't have done well otherwise (bureaucrats are not my idea of good role models).
Re: Colleges are turning students’ phones into surveillance machines
#20I'm a college student myself (my university, as far as I'm aware, has no system such as this). As far as I'm concerned, it's both an insidious creep of social-credit policy and a gross invasion of student privacy. It treats us as children rather than as the adults we are, and seems to me to be a sign of the re-infantalization of colleges. Many generations ago, when the age of majority was for the most part higher, co…
I think it's great. Western-style democracy is on its way out and we will probably see its end before our own deaths. It's good to start easing younger generations into an absolute surveillance so that the transition will be easier for them to accept later.