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Colleges are turning students’ phones into surveillance machines

washingtonpost.com

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Re: Colleges are turning students’ phones into surveillance machines

#71

Post by grawprog »

WalterBright wrote: post #43

> logging their absence into a campus database that tracks them over time and can sink their grade. Fortunately, I attended a college (Caltech) that as institute policy did not take attendance and no part of the grade was based on attendance. The result was nobody was disruptive in class, because if students didn't want to attend, they didn't attend. I remember sitting in class as a freshman thinking about this and e…

My school was the same. The teachers told us straight up, they didn't care if we showed up or not, we were paying to be there, the teachers got paid the same whether we showed up or not and in the end, if we chose not to show up for a lecture, there's a good chance we wouldn't know the material well enough to pass the tests on it anyway, so our grades just always reflected our own efforts. I remember missing one stats lecture, for a good reason, and being nearly completely screwed over for a bit after that. I ended up having to teach myself the stuff I missed just to stay caught up.

Re: Colleges are turning students’ phones into surveillance machines

#72

Post by wildmusings »

isthis1984 wrote: post #67
userbinator wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's called authoritarianism.

Thanks, @droithomme's comment put me onto that to, I didn't realise it was classed as a personality type not just a form of government. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Authoritarian_Personalit... this irritates me even more that its been known since the 50's and we still put up with it. The book is here https://smile.amazon.com/Authoritarian-Personality-Theodor-A... the comments are an interesting study alone.

>this irritates me even more that its been known since the 50's and we still put up with it.

Throwing a label on it doesn’t make it a bad thing. Authority can be a gift. It helps people thrive by giving them the motivation to live up to their potential. If everyone just let everyone else do whatever they wanted, humans wouldn’t have gotten very far. Of course, freedom to choose does a lot of good too. There is a balance to be had.

Re: Colleges are turning students’ phones into surveillance machines

#73

Post by ellius »

WalterBright wrote: post #43

> logging their absence into a campus database that tracks them over time and can sink their grade. Fortunately, I attended a college (Caltech) that as institute policy did not take attendance and no part of the grade was based on attendance. The result was nobody was disruptive in class, because if students didn't want to attend, they didn't attend. I remember sitting in class as a freshman thinking about this and e…

I attended a private high school that gave us a remarkable degree of freedom at a young age. We were allowed to drive off campus as upper classmen, choose a wide range of electives, and generally were treated as the near-adults we were.

Recently I read that my high school is instituting a random drug testing policy. I wrote a letter (that I'm sure they promptly ignored) saying how the thing I most remember about my high school experience is that I was trusted with a high degree of autonomy, and in return I was expected to act responsibly and to think about issues with a seriousness not often expected of teenagers in our society.

It seems like more and more these infantilizing policies are becoming a norm in our society. Instead of trusting human beings and granting them personal autonomy and responsibility, we act like imposing ever-greater layers of rules and controls will produce good citizens. Frankly I think this is a disastrous approach and is creating entitled, helpless, and childish adults. It's a massive disservice to ourselves and our society.

I'll never forget my first day of college. Lots of the other kids in my dorm were running around like crazy people. You could tell they'd never really been free to be themselves and run their own affairs. I felt very different. While it was a significant change to be totally on my own, it felt like a natural extension of the freedom I had slowly been granted over the previous two or three years. I was ready to deal with it. I didn't do everything perfectly, and I could have made better decisions, but by and large I felt like the transition to adulthood was comfortable and natural. The more we impose these command-and-control models, the more I fear we are robbing our children of that same feeling and casting them into adulthood with poorer tools than we were given.

Re: Colleges are turning students’ phones into surveillance machines

#74

Post by mindfulhack »

Due to what we know of history, universities who deploy this type of system will clearly not be the melting pots of tomorrow's leaders, geniuses, and world changers. Neither do I see how this helps a university's bottom line. To me this seems only like a university-killing move, by forcing many talented folks to non-campus ways of learning - or other institutions that respect diversity.

Re: Colleges are turning students’ phones into surveillance machines

#76

Post by mnm1 »

astura wrote: post #30
mnm1 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously. I was lowered an entire grade in one class for not attending despite my work being of the highest quality. Attendance was not even listed as part of the grade on the syllabus so I was graded on something without even being told ahead of time. Teachers that do that should be fired. As should teachers that lose your midterm. But I doubt anyone cares about the students and the impact things like this have on…

> I was graded on something without even being told ahead of time Ever heard of a pop quiz?

Ever heard pop quiz testing on material that wasn't part of the class or even the subject? Me neither.

Re: Colleges are turning students’ phones into surveillance machines

#77

Post by mnm1 »

QuesnayJr wrote: post #64
mnm1 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously. I was lowered an entire grade in one class for not attending despite my work being of the highest quality. Attendance was not even listed as part of the grade on the syllabus so I was graded on something without even being told ahead of time. Teachers that do that should be fired. As should teachers that lose your midterm. But I doubt anyone cares about the students and the impact things like this have on…

There are very few universities where you can be graded on something that is not on the syllabus. People cheat in life because the rewards are so high, not because they had a bad experience in college. Someone who uses a bad experience in college is just looking for an excuse.

So you expect people to act counter to everything they've been taught in life? That shows a deep understanding of the human condition.

Re: Colleges are turning students’ phones into surveillance machines

#78

Post by Nasrudith »

ryzvonusef wrote: post #10

""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…

Lets not blame tech, the root cause is the administrators are douchebags. Tracking because they can is their fault. Adding control because they can is their fault. Not doing their testing of their unneeded system? Not being responsive at the tech support level? All their fault. They neither need nor deserve the excuses and allowing them that rhetorical shield has only harmful results.

Re: Colleges are turning students’ phones into surveillance machines

#79

Post by catchmeifyoucan »

> "calculate personalized risk scores”

Seems like they're trying to predict social outcomes. Red flag.

Also seems the technology behind this is a BLE Beacon - would be hillarious if someone dropped a rasperrby pi in the class in some corner that kept making web requests on your behalf the entire year.

Attending class is a choice - and that decision is best left up to the student.

Re: Colleges are turning students’ phones into surveillance machines

#80

Post by isthis1984 »

wildmusings wrote: post #72
isthis1984 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks, @droithomme's comment put me onto that to, I didn't realise it was classed as a personality type not just a form of government. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Authoritarian_Personalit... this irritates me even more that its been known since the 50's and we still put up with it. The book is here https://smile.amazon.com/Authoritarian-Personality-Theodor-A... the comments are an interesting study alone.

> this irritates me even more that its been known since the 50's and we still put up with it. Throwing a label on it doesn’t make it a bad thing. Authority can be a gift. It helps people thrive by giving them the motivation to live up to their potential. If everyone just let everyone else do whatever they wanted, humans wouldn’t have gotten very far. Of course, freedom to choose does a lot of good too. There is a bal…

Certainly, but is that discipline you mean? Discipline is a good thing in general, but this isn't discipline - its imposed conformance.
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