Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Colleges are turning students’ phones into surveillance machines

washingtonpost.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 293 posts

Re: Colleges are turning students’ phones into surveillance machines

#231

Post by xvector »

lonelappde wrote: post #126
esotericn wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My interactions with British professors are not in any way comparable to what I know about the US police! It's a really weird comparison to me. Perhaps US profs are way more uptight in general? I'm not really sure how to respond to that, to be honest.

Discretion works great for the privileged portion of the population.

I’m with you here.

I think a decay-based system or an “emergency-token” system doesn’t discriminate between students, but still manages to provide humane leeway to get things done.

Re: Colleges are turning students’ phones into surveillance machines

#232

Post by seem_2211 »

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 went to University that had a similar deadline system (sometimes midnight, sometimes midday, sometimes 3pm - all depended on the lecturer/tutor).

If you had a truly extenuating circumstance, you could always speak to the lecturer via email or during their office hours. Some had more relaxed policies than others, while others had various penalties for being late.

As far as I'm aware, the difference between 12:00:00 and 12:00:30 wasn't ever really a thing, as any reasonable system can expect a few minutes of delay owing to computer problems.

Re: Colleges are turning students’ phones into surveillance machines

#233

Post by janstice »

The uni I work for is about to introduce this, but we're leading with transparency - everything the system sees is on a student-facing dashboard, and there's the opportunity to opt out. And we're targeting engagement rather than attendance - use of the LMS, watching videos, etc rather than basic attendance.

And we have had vendors attempting to get us to look at video-based attendance and attention trackers. This is a privacy nightmare so we have always said no, but as we are keen to get a handle on room usage and efficiency, we investigated using the existing cameras used for lecture capture to count the backs of heads - in this case how many is more interesting than who.

Re: Colleges are turning students’ phones into surveillance machines

#234

Post by joe_the_user »

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.

Wow, so are you saying that being in-college was not like that for you?

If so, that's disturbing given that college was once the time for young people to enjoy their freedom to the fullest. I remember driving from upstate New York to Boston one weekend on a whim with some friends - in the middle of winter, a memorable adventure.

Re: Colleges are turning students’ phones into surveillance machines

#235

Post by mod50ack »

bsder wrote: post #194
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had one professor in college who went hard in the other direction—she told the class "I don't care if you turn in assignments late", and gave no limit on how late you could be. As a student, it was, well, nice. It was true that it was a bit harder to be motivated to finish a paper right away, but it also made the process far less stressful. When I turned in papers I thought they were the best they could be. Of cour…

> I had one professor in college who went hard in the other direction—she told the class "I don't care if you turn in assignments late", and gave no limit on how late you could be. This doesn't work if your class builds on earlier material (most STEM classes). As the professor, I need some feedback as to how well the class understands what I just taught.

It's possible but not in large lecture courses. I took a class with <15 people and our prof was so kind as to essentially let us get in our proofs whenever (which was an absolute lifesaver). But at that scale you of course can tell whether or not people are understanding without the assignments (since everyone is proving things together in class!)

Re: Colleges are turning students’ phones into surveillance machines

#236

Post by LMYahooTFY »

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…

I think I understand the rationale behind this fairly well, and find it sensible to a certain degree.

With that said, I find a particular part of your explanation more intellectually dishonest than the anal probe comment. That's not to say you're being flippant as perhaps that commenter was.

To claim that you're not using this data in terms of surveillance is utterly nonsensical. If you can demonstrate to me how you're not actively conducting surveillance, I'm open to hearing it.

Privacy trade offs may provide measurable gains, but I've yet to come across even attempts at quantifying the loss of individual privacy. You can show asymptotically improving trends, but the costs seem to remain blank, unknown, and I think that is what our flippant friend was trying to get at.

Re: Colleges are turning students’ phones into surveillance machines

#237

Post by mod50ack »

cbsmith wrote: post #227
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 eas…

(relatively) fine for the class attendance (although I still don't feel comfortable with that kind of mechanism for doing it). But the article talks about interventions based on a constant monitoring under the guise of "caring about students' mental health". Now, I suppose I am glad their intentions are in the right place, but I would feel rather infantilized if anybody saw it fit to track me around the clock like that.

It's true that unwritten social rules aren't 100% fair. They're not entirely consistent either. But the foremost one I was thinking about was the increased acceptance of human margin of error in accounting: humans, unlike computers, don't count down the the nanosecond. I've had assignments automatically marked as late because they only finished transferring over the network a second after the due time. A human would never say that's late. Could you tell me that I should be submitting earlier? Sure, fine, but I would still want to reserve the right to correct a final typo. Thankfully in all those cases I've been manually marked not late. But I don't think it's entirely beneficial for us humans to deal with a machine-type accounting of time for our own actions.

Re: Colleges are turning students’ phones into surveillance machines

#238

Post by cbsmith »

mod50ack wrote: post #237
cbsmith wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 eas…

(relatively) fine for the class attendance (although I still don't feel comfortable with that kind of mechanism for doing it). But the article talks about interventions based on a constant monitoring under the guise of "caring about students' mental health". Now, I suppose I am glad their intentions are in the right place, but I would feel rather infantilized if anybody saw it fit to track me around the clock like th…

> A human would never say that's late.

You don't know humans very well then. A human might say it's late even if you turned it in on time. Heck, a human might say you never turned it in.

> Could you tell me that I should be submitting earlier? Sure, fine, but I would still want to reserve the right to correct a final typo.

Hey, I would still want to reserve the right to correct a final typo from thirty years ago. I would still want to reserve the right to correct a final typo from a HN comment from weeks ago. It's nice wanting things. That doesn't make them good ideas.

A computer might try to make corrections right up until the last nanosecond, but a human might wisely recognize they need to get their corrections out of the way well ahead of time and stop looking for typeohs after they've handed in their assignment. ;-)

> But I don't think it's entirely beneficial for us humans to deal with a machine-type accounting of time for our own actions.

That's absolutely true, and in those cases you'd expect a different approach, regardless of whether there was a machine keeping time or not. I just don't think you've found such a case here.

Re: Colleges are turning students’ phones into surveillance machines

#239

Post by cbsmith »

mod50ack wrote: post #237
cbsmith wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 eas…

(relatively) fine for the class attendance (although I still don't feel comfortable with that kind of mechanism for doing it). But the article talks about interventions based on a constant monitoring under the guise of "caring about students' mental health". Now, I suppose I am glad their intentions are in the right place, but I would feel rather infantilized if anybody saw it fit to track me around the clock like th…

As a human, not referring to a machine... when network delays made you late... how did you know when you submitted it that you got it done in time? ;-) Were network delays not something that needed to be factored in if you were submitting via network, much as postal delays might need to be considered when submitting via mail?

Re: Colleges are turning students’ phones into surveillance machines

#240

Post by mod50ack »

kingbirdy wrote: post #168
jdkee wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I teach in political science and I require regular attendance as part of one's grade. Miss more than a few classes absent a compelling excuse and you are docked a half letter grade. Why? My classes are typically small, under 15 students, and are heavily discussion dependent. Engendering open discussion between students, as opposed to top-down lecturing, has resulted in keeping students engaged and actively learning i…

This only seems fair if it's a purely optional course, or you're one option of many who don't implement the same policies. Otherwise, students are paying to be forced to teach their classmates in your class, when that's your job as the instructor.

Fundamental misunderstanding of how it works, I think. You're not paying for a transfer of information from professor to student. You need to engage with the material and make arguments. That's crucial in that field.
Post reply on HN