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Colleges are turning students’ phones into surveillance machines

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Re: Colleges are turning students’ phones into surveillance machines

#221

Post by ben_jones »

ineedasername wrote: post #85

Speaking from the Devil's Advocate side, as I work in Higher Education analytics: First: this data is, by the vast majority of institutions, used very respectfully in terms of privacy rights and it is ABSOLUTELY never sold. Third part vendors that provide hosted systems are REQUIRED to affirm that they pass nothing on to any other party whatsoever. (I should note that this is the case in public and traditional privat…

> First: this data is, by the vast majority of institutions, used very respectfully in terms of privacy rights and it is ABSOLUTELY never sold.

Bull shit. Bull shit. Bull shit.

Ethical data usage is similar to end-to-end encryption in that it requires rigour at every transfer point, competency and expertise in its implementation, and thorough third party auditing. Are you telling me universities represent any of this?

Re: Colleges are turning students’ phones into surveillance machines

#222

Post by saagarjha »

Accacin wrote: post #185

So I don't even see the point in taking attendance (and as far as I remember at my university in the UK lecturers didn't even take attendence), but if you do , what's wrong with taking a register at the beginning? It's probably cheaper, less error prone and the teach can use their discretion if a student is a little late to class because of ~reasons~.

For large classes, it’d take a while, and students would show up and leave halfway through.

Re: Colleges are turning students’ phones into surveillance machines

#223

Post by BalinKing »

WalterBright wrote: post #193
BalinKing wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not terribly related, but I personally think it’s really cool that you went to Caltech! It bums me out that Caltech doesn’t have as many associated giants of the tech world as e.g. MIT or Berkeley, which might just owe to Caltech’s smaller size, so I always love it when I learn about an awesome alum like yourself :-) If you don’t mind me asking, what Hou(v)se were you in?

Page. Caltech is quite a bit smaller, only 130 undergrads in my graduation class, or something like that (don't recall exactly). Bill Gross is likely the most famous alumnus of my class. Quite a few in my class (79) became quite wealthy in the tech business, though not the really big money.

A Rudd myself, but I have some good friends in Page.

That is really interesting that your class size was only 130, AFAICT nowadays they're ~240. At least, the classes of 2022 and 2023 were in that ballpark. (I wonder if Caltech has become less selective, or has just received more applicants?)

Idealab has an active presence on campus even today, so Bill Gross seems to have left his mark :-)

Re: Colleges are turning students’ phones into surveillance machines

#224

Post by seventhtiger »

yusyusyus wrote: post #219
seventhtiger wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand how not tracking attendance is treating adults like adults. Your workplace will track your attendance until you retire. It's pretty normal. Just because a student has issues with discipline or motivation I shouldn't let them fail. Tracking attendance improves academic results so I'm not sure what the advantage is to not tracking it.

Workplace attendance tracking is certainly not universal. When I teach classes, if a student does not perform the requisite work to complete the course, I’ve no interest in their success. I am an instructor, not a motivator.

For the vast majority of jobs being absent a full work week without approval means you don't have a job the next week. Why does being an adult university student mean you can be absent for months and still succeed? It has nothing to do with adulthood.

And why do we need instructors? Let's just give each student some textbooks and their exam schedule. If they can't succeed we're not interested in their success.

The Darwinist argument can always be used to withdraw any and all levels of support. You can't use it to justify just the level of support you prefer.

Re: Colleges are turning students’ phones into surveillance machines

#225

Post by xvector »

ellius wrote: post #73
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 h…

I’m almost 2 years into my first job after college and sometimes the amount of freedom I have continues to delight and baffle me.

Like if I want to go to the movies on a weeknight - I can do that. If I want to travel out of state on the weekend, it’s no problem. Like, there’s nothing stopping me.

Re: Colleges are turning students’ phones into surveillance machines

#226

Post by ianlevesque »

xvector wrote: post #225
ellius wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 h…

I’m almost 2 years into my first job after college and sometimes the amount of freedom I have continues to delight and baffle me. Like if I want to go to the movies on a weeknight - I can do that. If I want to travel out of state on the weekend, it’s no problem. Like, there’s nothing stopping me.

Always treat life that way!

Re: Colleges are turning students’ phones into surveillance machines

#227

Post by cbsmith »

mod50ack wrote: post #2

I'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 grok the insidious creep of social credit policy or the gross invasion of student privacy.

You're attending a lecture at a college. You're not in a private location. Traditionally, what the beacons were doing would be done by TAs taking attendance, class participation grading, or simply by having trivial pop quizzes during class. Adding bluetooth beacons just makes the process more efficient (and makes it easier for students to fool the system), but it doesn't change its essential nature.

Making lecture attendance a part of your grade may seem like bad policy or infantalizing to you, but that doesn't make it an invasion of privacy or social-credit policy.

Your tangential advocacy about "social understanding" missing the negative consequences of that approach. In particular that inconsistency of rule application creates a hole you can drive a truck through for all kinds of unfair and biased consequences (literally exactly what is brought to the table by a "feeling" application of the rules), and with little gained. While thoughtful empathic responses can be very helpful in a lot of situations, I don't think you've made a good case for this one.

Re: Colleges are turning students’ phones into surveillance machines

#228

Post by cbsmith »

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…

> This is downside of tech, false positive and negatives

As opposed to non-tech solutions, which don't have false positive & negatives? Please.

Re: Colleges are turning students’ phones into surveillance machines

#229

Post by xvector »

smichel17 wrote: post #117
userbinator wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been an instructor for CS courses before so I know what you mean. I never made deadlines anything but absolutely final, which is appropriately not unlike a lot of other things in life --- from what I've heard from others, any leniency just tends to cause more whining. Someone who waits until the last second to do something is not going to do any better if given a tiny bit more time (nevermind the question of how…

My university cs department (most of them, anyway) used a system I liked very much: - Due dates are hard (usually midnight) - Everyone gets 3 "emergency tokens", which give you a 24 hour extension on the assignment, no questions asked. Max 2 per assignment. - On occasion, you could get an extension without using a token by speaking to the professor in advance, if you had extenuating circumstances. It was a good compr…

Emergency tokens were a lifesaver for many of my college classes.

They gave me the freedom I needed to make micro-adjustments to my college/life balance and greatly lowered stress.

Re: Colleges are turning students’ phones into surveillance machines

#230

Post by cbsmith »

jahmed wrote: post #156
Nasrudith wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I work in higher ed. I wouldn't say admin are douchebags, they are just under pressure and responding with a solution. For various reasons schools are under pressure to increase student success which is measured by retention, persistence, graduation rates among others. These systems help "teach to the test" if you will. They are pitched in slick presentations with complex statistics with dubious claims to non-technic…

In fairness though, thinking by enforcing attendance you improve outcomes is a misreading of the data. Sure, when students attend classes, they tend to do better... when the choice to attend is without consequences. Once you make it mandatory, there's a good chance it will cease to be an effective predictor of outcomes, and it may even negatively harm outcomes (classrooms behave differently when attendance is mandated).
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