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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

#151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a super uncharitable interpretation of the GP's argument. Privacy is a spectrum. By your "logic", should students' entire identities be concealed from education personnel? Of course not. That's just as ridiculous as what you proposed.

Arguably, yes. As covered in Stephenson's Dodge . Students are fully anonymized, in meatspace as well as in data. So there's no possibility that anything except performance affects assessment.

Stephenson managed to present both a Utopian and Dystopian view of the future at the same time... I'm not sure his work there is very instructive in this matter. But the thing is, factors other than quantifiable performance do impact assessment. As just one small example, from what I have seen in analyzing the data, the best performing students at some of the worst inner city schools tend not to be nearly as prepared for college as comparable students from better school districts. In short, there quantifiable performance, anonymous from further detail and context, would not accurately predict their academic performance. At the same time, these students typically have overcome many more obstacles to get to where they are, and while they do not always get the same grades, their determination often sees them through to the end where their counterparts may not. Context matters, and the more context you get, the less anonymous things become. That's the problem with either extremist view of total open "privacy is dead" views or total privacy maximism. They seek to avoid the hard work of dealing with the ambiguity in favor of black/white views. Because it is hard work. It involves messy questions. Do we save students hundreds of thousands of dollars and years of their lives by tracking details of course interactions and systems usages? A noble goal, put that way it's hard to say no. But what if the student doesn't want it? Do we give up on it completely? What if we can balance it somehow with informed consent, is that sufficient? If not, is there something we can do that doesn't sacrifice things that are beneficial for students but also allows each person to fully control their data footprint? If we go ahead with any of this, what further monitoring might we then justify? Is it a slippery slope or do we have checks & balances in place to make sure data capture & usage doesn't leap ahead of carefully considered policy & consequences? None of the above are easy. You can ignore them all if you choose a black or white view of things. But either way you give up quite a bit, and whether you choose black or whether you choose white, society will still exist in unending shades of gray.

Re: Colleges are turning students’ phones into surveillance machines

#152

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…

The issue with authority isn't that it is bad or evil in and of itself. The issue lies in the fact that the people who would seek to have authority are almost universally the worst candidates for such a position.

This is a primary driver of people who believe strongly in the minimalism of government or people like myself who believe that processes that bestow authority need to be extremely cautious, and ideally double-blind and short-lived rather than personality-driven.

Re: Colleges are turning students’ phones into surveillance machines

#153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a super uncharitable interpretation of the GP's argument. Privacy is a spectrum. By your "logic", should students' entire identities be concealed from education personnel? Of course not. That's just as ridiculous as what you proposed.

On the contrary, it's a concise rejection of the worldview that privacy means privacy from others, not privacy from me, and that students are interchangeable units subject not to any consideration of ethics but only performance.

It's a concise reduction to the absurd that doesn't leave room for conversation. It's a flat statement of "your wrong" that adds nothing to the conversation, with the subtext of "I'm too lazy to actually put together an argument with a claim and a few premises and a bit of explanation to flesh things out".

It's the opposite of constructive. It's combative and inflammatory. HN, unlike many other venues for discussion, is a halfway decent community precisely because such comments are in the minority and tend to be quickly downvoted.

Re: Colleges are turning students’ phones into surveillance machines

#154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like in the case of schools, there legal risks they have to face that cause this. If something happens to a student while that student is in your care, you get the blame. If the school restricts freedoms they're simply reducing their legal risk. It's a shame. I agree with you that giving students more and more freedom as they grow is tremendously helpful to their ability to adapt and be responsible by the time…

Is the legal risk different now from back then? If so then maybe those legal decisions weren't great. Maybe they were. But at least worth revaluation.

I think it is. I think people used to be less litigious, so schools had less to worry about. The law was certainly less complex, providing less potential risk than it does.

Additionally, I'd be willing to bet school districts have dedicated legal departments, or lawyers on retainer these days and I'd bet that's a recent change.

Re: Colleges are turning students’ phones into surveillance machines

#155

> 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…

In college right now, and last semester I had an experience similar but someone different in my data structures class. The professor didn't take attendance, and stated that while we didn't have to show up,

a. It was strongly recommended in order to do well in the course (a difficult honors course), and

b. He wanted to make the class interesting enough that we wanted to show up.

The class almost always had perfect attendance. It opened my eyes so much.

Re: Colleges are turning students’ phones into surveillance machines

#156

""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.

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-technical staff who are poorly versed but like many high-level managers, smarter than their own good.

These systems are often pitched as turnkey solutions with very little input from the people on the ground who are expected to support and triage incidents in a system where training is thin if it even exists.

If, before you send your kids off to college, you look at college rankings then you're just as culpable in the use of these metric boosting systems.

Re: Colleges are turning students’ phones into surveillance machines

#157
post #95

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…

How about having the student’s score decay as some function of how late they turn it in? If they turn it in before the deadline, they get 100% of their marked grade, if it’s an hour late 90%, a day late 50%, etc (use whatever function you want)

At my u iversity your grade would decay by 5% a day, if I recall correctly.

Re: Colleges are turning students’ phones into surveillance machines

#158

""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…

Students used to (still) take the iClickers (https://www.iclicker.com/) for other students to answer questions in large lectures.

Re: Colleges are turning students’ phones into surveillance machines

#159

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…

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.

Re: Colleges are turning students’ phones into surveillance machines

#160
post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work in higher ed and we use a student success analytics platform. Where I see this going wrong is administrators want a system to do everything. We want to identify the at-risk student, nudge them automatically, and have a successful outcome. Schools don't want to invest in people to actually make outreach or connection with students because that is hard. As a result, we generate a ton of data with little to show…

We're not perfect, but as we have brought on analytics systems and engaged in institutions drive projects like my use of Xgboos with LMS data, we have invested heavily in additional advising resources because we recognize that data is irrelevant if you don't have people that will take action on it. I can make data driven predictions all day long about students at risk. What matters is what do we do about it? I've spo…

That's great, thanks.

I get frustrated as a technical staff person, who personally enjoys being on the cutting edge, often being the one in meetings saying 'data is great but how will we actually use it?'.

Honestly, I'll probably retire form higher ed in a few years and go work for an outfit like yours.

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