“Students can thus be monitored for signs of depression, anxiety…” as if being constantly under the eye of an unseen watcher wouldn’t be a cause for depression and anxiety. :smack:
I read the article in the paper version. One of the schools mentioned was VCU, where my son is a student. He mentioned that some of his classes do this.
I am too cynical to believe that the schools are doing this.
Here’s what I don’t get. When I was an undergrad in engineering and computer science (1970s), none of the professors took attendance. You were graded based on your performance on work that you turned in and exams you took. (I never missed classes so I don’t know what would happen if you habitually missed classes.) In grad school (MBA and tech management), participation was a critical part of your grade in classes where business case studies were discussed, but the professors noticed participation, not butts in seats.
By the time a student is in college, they are supposed to be there because they want to get something out of it, and attending class is part of that benefit. If they don’t want to attend class, they get pretty much whatever reward they’ve earned. Letting students, who are mostly legally adults, be responsible for themselves is part of the whole college experience, and part of the adult experience.
Is putting students under house arrest improving their academic performance? Or just making parents and the school feel like they are in control?
The article mentions a lot of the things that colleges could do with the technology but not as much as to what they’re actually doing with it in real life.
If they want to use some high tech way of taking attendance, ok, whatever. I had some large lecture classes that took attendance. I took two music appreciation classes that I could have gotten A’s in without ever going to class once, but the professor wanted us to hear the music from recordings, not just read about it in the textbook. And that was fine, I’d sometimes check out the score and follow along while the CD was being played. Other large lecture classes could care less about attendance. But, I figured it was best to go, if the professor or TA beats a topic into the ground, that’s a likely an exam question even if it’s only a paragraph in the text.
Upper division classes in political science featured tons of discussion, I can’t imagine getting a good grade without being there.
But, trying to diagnose depression based on someone’s campus movements? I’m of the opinion that you should get out of the dorm and do things. You’ll have the rest of your life to play video games or watch movies, but I’m not the Campus God making the rules. Thinking someone has an eating disorder based on their dining check ins? Well, maybe, but if the meal card is a dollar amount rather than a 3 meals per day plan, I can see someone that brought a ton of food from home eating in the dorm mostly for the first couple weeks of the semester.
Anyway, it kinda reminds me of all the data that your employer can collect on you but doesn’t really use unless you’re on the shit list. Amazing how managers at my last company would only care about arrival and departure times, breaks, and the amount of time on sports websites when they were looking to get rid of you. Then, that 35 minute lunch and non-work related website became a crime worse than mass murder and required written warnings and a zero bonus in hopes that you’d resign.
This whole concept terrifies me…[del]the school[/del] Big Brother is tracking 6000 data points per day-that means once every 4 minutes.
There is one way I can think of to make the students wake up and see how intrusive that is:
Use the one issue that is on every student’s mind: sex.
Publicize the fact that the school knows and records your sex life.
They know every time you enter the dorm room of a member of the opposite sex, and how long you stayed.
Maybe somebody will hack the computer and publish it all, in an interactive site where anyone can pick any student’s name and see where they spent the night.
If enough embarrassment ensues, it may be possible to stop the surveillance before it becomes institutionalized and all-encompassing( like what is happening right now in China. )
Is this intended to be a serious post? First of all, not all students are straight. Second, I can remember plenty of times I entered the dorm rooms of female students and never once had sex (I’m gay) It was for the usual stuff, studying, talking politics, or just watching movies or playing games. I remember plenty of times falling asleep watching a movie with friends, waking up at 2 am and then heading back to my dorm.
Yeah, I know all that, too. I was a student once, and spent lots of late nights in other dorm rooms.(And never got laid, either…dammit. 
)
But ( to be serious again):As the OP says, Big Brother style surveillance is here, and nobody seems to care. But one thing students do care about is sex. If you can motivate a few of them by scaring them about intrusion into their sex lives, then they may protest. And that might be enough to force the University to cancel the constant surveillance, and use it only for taking attendance in class.
Around the same time (late 70s, early 80s) I went to a community college and two different 4 year schools. I only had one teacher who didn’t take attendance (or homework) into account for grades. And that was for a math class where the grading was completely objective. In the unlikely event that someone could show up only for the final and ace it they’d get an A for the course. And even then he’d take attendance and homework into account if someone was on the border between two grades.
Again, there article has a lot of conjecture about all this tracking, but it doesn’t look like any university is using this for anything other than taking attendance.
If colleges are going to be in loco parentis again, like they were prior to the 1960s or 1970s, this could give more incentive for students to take online courses, leaving the physical campus for the BYU Types who really want to Learn In A Pure Atmosphere, for whatever definition of Pure applies to the specific school they choose. That, or there will be a huge blowup when a serious crime happens despite the monitoring, and the parents point fingers at the school for not preventing it despite all of the fancy monitoring they’re doing making them culpable for not stepping in. Because in loco parentis is one of those cuts-both-ways kinda things, legally, and you can’t take on the “we’re doing it to protect you” mantle without, you know, being responsible when you fail to do the protecting when protecting time comes 'round.
This story was in the Washington Post back in July. It talks about some high school seniors who decided to vandalize their school as a ‘prank’. The graffiti included racist, homophobic and anti semitic slurs - you know, like all good pranks :rolleyes:
The students got caught because their phones auto-logged onto the wifi network.
A lot of them have probably always had parents tracking them, if they weren’t always under the direct supervision of an adult.
They’ve never had privacy, no wonder they’re not worried about losing it.
When I went to university some of the residences were open and some did not allow overnight guests, depending on the degree of loco the parentis desired.
Although privacy rights are important, the biggest problem with tracking is the lack of transparency. If data is collected by whomever and being sold to whomever for whatever purpose. The lack of meaningful consent is problematic. The track record of companies collecting data could be a lot better. And without knowing purpose, one cannot really consent. Saying people have never had privacy is not really true. What there is is asymmetry, the people collecting data are usually very reluctant to put themselves under the same microscope, which does not foster trust.
Although surveillance law would seem to offer a degree of guidance, if the college says they can collect data to help deal with, say, depression, and then do not intervene, this could make them liable for failing to intervene. By comparison, many universities have been sued for failing to monitor, say, fraternities or clubs that have a university affiliation.
The reason colleges are putting these in is because they are cheap and easy. The reason they are cheap and easy is because, by God, they are going in everywhere.
If you are buying online, your online shopping is being tracked. If you avoid that by going to a shopping mall instead … you are being tracked.
A neighbor of a relative apparently got caught this way in another state. Not racist stuff though AFAIK.