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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

#251

Post by mod50ack »

joe_the_user wrote: post #234
xvector wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think the comment is saying that that freedom began in college, but that freedom is still exciting and new.

Re: Colleges are turning students’ phones into surveillance machines

#252

Post by snvzz »

iudqnolq wrote: post #220
snvzz wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Even for an informal system, there's always a last person allowed in, and hence a cutoff. Is there really? In my faculty, doors were kept open. I entered lectures at 20% of time left and nobody would bat an eyelid.

They meant for turning in assignments.

Oh.

Hard deadline system with some conveniences.

It was possible to upload the work multiple times, and for an hour or so after deathline, to select which of the uploaded copies would be the hand over.

This allowed for e.g. uploading some code that works, and later progressively optimized/improved versions, without fear of uploading something partially broken by the end.

Re: Colleges are turning students’ phones into surveillance machines

#253

Post by mod50ack »

cbsmith wrote: post #239
mod50ack wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(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?

At the very least, the timestamp on the file (although, yes, timestamps can be spoofed, etc., etc.). In any case, I've always been pardoned when the "lateness" is three seconds' worth of processing. But if I were waiting on line at the deadline to hand in a physical assignment (the closest analogy I can make), I think that most reasonable profs would not take issue with me if I didn't happen to get to the end of that line by the nanosecond specified. Of course, it's _possible_ that a prof could be a real stickler, with a huge digital clock on the wall and a hand on the submission box. But that, again, to me reflects only an extension of the way people are treated in huge classes (often largely freshmen) in college. If there are a handful of people in a seminar, "deadlines" have never in my experience been a thing in the same way.

Re: Colleges are turning students’ phones into surveillance machines

#255

Post by sys_64738 »

blihp wrote: post #51
astura wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's where you learn the material? Beyond that most of my anthropology classes (I minored in anthropology) had class discussion as part of the grade. I even had one professor who had us move the desks into a big circle as we entered (and put them back as we were leaving) in order to better facilitate discussion. Also you'd have to be there to hand in previous assignments and get new assignments. Most of my classes…

Attendance is irrelevant to most of your points: 1) Some can learn the material without attending. If they don't learn it, their grade will reflect that. 2) If one is present but doesn't participate, how does taking attendance help reflect that? (This is just a lazy prof/TA as they really should be noting participation, rather than attendance, if it's relevant to grading for a course) 3) If your assignment(s) don't g…

How does one get the material without attending? Where I studied, the courses were not simply following the course text as the course. Perhaps at lower tier schools that’s all they do.

Re: Colleges are turning students’ phones into surveillance machines

#256

Post by esotericn »

novok wrote: post #59
esotericn wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 we…

What it really means you have to have a policy that sounds more humanistic, but in the end is the same as a hard deadline: For example, if you are arriving for a family dinner, if you are 10 minutes late, it's NBD, but if you are 3-4 hours late you have just pissed everyone off. If you constantly ask for slack from your friends, to the point where it becomes common, your friend's internal & informal credit rating of…

It's not the same, because you're ignoring the human factor and focusing on one narrow part of the result.

Imagine a real family that applies these deadlines. You walk in the door and your mother starts talking about applying for an 'extension' for your lateness.

Perhaps at the end of all of this you have the same outcome, that every family member feels the same way about you.

But you don't feel the same way about them in both cases, because in one, they act like robots, and in the other, they act like the imperfect people we all are. In one, they're strange threats, in another, they're lovable human beings.

I can't express strongly enough how nefarious this trend towards engineering all aspect of the human experience into 'process' is.

Theoretically, me having this conversation with you on HN is the same as real life. Practically, it's completely different and the latter would be far preferable if we could do it in the same amount of time, because we're not computers, we have real emotional and physical needs that are unsatisfied if everything is reduced to the most "optimal/efficient" interaction.

It feels like you treat others as threats. Your employer, your professor, the police etc, all threats. The better model is to create a society in which they are your equals - many countries have achieved that - not fence them off as some sort of 'different class of human' and then mitigate the damages.

Re: Colleges are turning students’ phones into surveillance machines

#257

Post by JadeNB »

mistymountains wrote: post #174
JadeNB wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Many of the colleges that use this are third rate colleges that aren't going to have too many "creators, entrepreneurs and groundbreaking scientists". Surely on HN at least we can be free of the idea that only first-rate colleges have (a substantial quantity of) students with such exceptional potential. (I would go even farther and deny that there is any particularly strong correlation between 'rate' of the school…

He never once wrote that only first-rate colleges produce these individuals, nor has anyone with any sense ever stood by rankings as anything more than a proxy for some deeper hierarchy. And yes, like it or not, the higher ranked schools attract and produce more ambitious and intelligent humans in the aggregate.

> He never once wrote that only first-rate colleges produce these individuals, nor has anyone with any sense ever stood by rankings as anything more than a proxy for some deeper hierarchy. And yes, like it or not, the higher ranked schools attract and produce more ambitious and intelligent humans in the aggregate.

The specific claim was:

> > Many of the colleges that use this are third rate colleges that aren't going to have too many "creators, entrepreneurs and groundbreaking scientists".

which is much stronger than saying that more such people are attracted by higher-'rated' colleges; I have no problem with the idea that there are lots of such people at first-rate colleges, only with the idea that there aren't many at other colleges. I agree that the claim says nothing about causality or about 'production' of such students, but neither did I.

Re: Colleges are turning students’ phones into surveillance machines

#258

Post by threatofrain »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #159
threatofrain wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We could speak the same way about police to make it obvious why some people don’t like the double edge of discretion. Isn’t it such a burden that police have to wear cameras? It’s probably much harder to exercise any executive discretion that way, let alone have any natural conversation, especially when people may demand lawsuits and firings over such footage. Must police be very equally kind to both white and black…

That's not a reasonable analogy. Police cameras are there to make sure power is not abused, they are not there to eliminate discretion. There are actually multiple actors in the justice system that have a large degree of discretion, the police, the prosecutor and the judge. To me this indicates that your thesis is erroneous.

Cameras and abuse are part of the same language of power, control, and mistrust.

Discretion is a matter of trusting power, and as I've mentioned, discretion shrinks in front of a camera. When cameras provide the kind of ammunition to humiliate, sue, or pressure for job termination, then your discretion is compromised. Why did one forgive one youthful offender of marijuana possession and not the other? Was it race? These are potentially humiliating questions.

We can also contemplate what it means for employers to extend monitoring to social media, and whether that compromises your willingness to express your thinking in forums, and whether monitoring employees has anything to do with control and trust. Recently US border patrol agents were found discussing Latinos and other minorities in depraved ways. Does observation of their social media restrict their individual expression? Yes it does.

As to the fact that judges and other parties have discretion, well, I have at least forwarded one example of judges sentencing more harshly based on whether they've had lunch. That is part of discretion -- that some people get to enjoy the sweet fruits and others do not. This humiliating fact about judicial discretion would not have been known without observation.

Re: Colleges are turning students’ phones into surveillance machines

#259

Post by DreamScatter »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #38

> The dream of some administrators is a university where every student is a model student, adhering to disciplined patterns of behavior that are intimately quantified, surveilled and analyzed An appropriate dream for a college administrator. But a travesty for creators, entrepreneurs and groundbreaking scientists. I’d be curious. Would these same administrators object to their timeliness being similarly measured? Qua…

Universities are now obsolete if you are an inventor, scientist, entrpreneur, etc. One can be more successful and better allocate time outside a university at this point, than in the rigidly retarded academic environment (which holds people back from true discovery and learning).
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