[liberationtech] Hey kids, welcome to the panopticon!

[Spencer Sevilla]

Knowing undergraduate students' propensities for sleep, cheating, and beer
money... I eagerly await the role of "phone walker" as a side job for an
entrepreneurial nerd who was already planning to head to class and the
library anyways ;-)

But in all seriousness: this is horrendous, and in my eyes the greatest
damages revolve around the normalization of surveillance and training
students to get used to supervision. On the other hand, I also care a lot
less about the social impacts of private universities, as opposed to public
ones. It's hard for me to envision this approach taking hold at a public
institution, just because we're always so chronically underfunded, but I do
tend towards the optimistic side of things.

On Thu, Dec 26, 2019 at 2:27 PM Thomas Delrue <thomas at epistulae.net> wrote:

> There's so much wrong with this approach that I don't even know where to
> start... Your title was incredibly appropriate!
>
> On 12/24/19 19:46, Yosem Companys wrote:
> > When Syracuse University freshmen walk into professor Jeff Rubin’s
> > Introduction to Information Technologies class, seven small Bluetooth
> > beacons hidden around the Grant Auditorium lecture hall connect with
> > an app on their smartphones and boost their “attendance points.”
>
> And what about those students that either don't carry a cell phone or
> those that turn those anti-features off? Why are those punished even
> though they participate equally well?
>
> At some point, this is just a professor being a lazy person and not
> actually wanting to do their job properly (like taking attendance - heck
> why does attendance even matter if you pass the class, what are we, 5?)
>
> > And when they skip class? The SpotterEDU app sees that, too, logging
> > their absence into a campus database that tracks them over time and
> > can sink their grade. It also alerts Rubin, who later contacts
> > students to ask where they’ve been. His 340-person lecture has never
> > been so full.
> >
> > “They want those points,” he said. “They know I’m watching and acting
> > on it. So, behaviorally, they change.”
>
> This sounds very much like an abusive relationship: "I hold something
> you like and I *will* make you act out things as silly as I can think
> them."
> This sounds more like a power-trip rather than anything else.
>
> > Short-range phone sensors and campuswide WiFi networks are empowering
> > colleges across the United States to track hundreds of thousands of
> > students more precisely than ever before. Dozens of schools now use
> > such technology to monitor students’ academic performance, analyze
> > their conduct or assess their mental health.
> >
> > But some professors and education advocates argue that the systems
> > represent a new low in intrusive technology, breaching students’
> > privacy on a massive scale. The tracking systems, they worry, will
> > infantilize students in the very place where they’re expected to grow
> > into adults, further training them to see surveillance as a normal
> > part of living, whether they like it or not.
>
> I am happy to see people speaking up against this! I commend them for
> daring to speak out and hope their voice gets amplified!
>
> > “We’re adults. Do we really need to be tracked?” said Robby Pfeifer, a
> > sophomore at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, which
> > recently began logging the attendance of students connected to the
> > campus’ WiFi network. “Why is this necessary? How does this benefit
> > us? … And is it just going to keep progressing until we’re
> > micromanaged every second of the day?”
> >
> > This style of surveillance has become just another fact of life for
> > many Americans. A flood of cameras, sensors and microphones, wired to
> > an online backbone, now can measure people’s activity and whereabouts
> > with striking precision, reducing the mess of everyday living into
> > trend lines that companies promise to help optimize.
> >
> > Americans say in surveys they accept the technology’s encroachment
> > because it often feels like something else: a trade-off of future
> > worries for the immediacy of convenience, comfort and ease. If a
> > tracking system can make students be better, one college adviser said,
> > isn’t that a good thing?
>
> The road to hell is paved with good intentions...
>
> > But the perils of increasingly intimate supervision — and the subtle
> > way it can mold how people act — have also led some to worry whether
> > anyone will truly know when all this surveillance has gone too far.
> > “Graduates will be well prepared … to embrace 24/7 government tracking
> > and social credit systems,” one commenter on the Slashdot message
> > board said. “Building technology was a lot more fun before it went all
> > 1984.”
>
> It appears that some people read Orwell's 1984 and took it to be a
> manual rather than the warning it was intended to be.
>
> > Instead of GPS coordinates, the schools rely on networks of Bluetooth
> > transmitters and wireless access points to piece together students’
> > movements from dorm to desk. One company that uses school WiFi
> > networks to monitor movements says it gathers 6,000 location data
> > points per student every day.
>
> What could possibly go wrong...
>
> > School and company officials call location monitoring a powerful
> > booster for student success: If they know more about where students
> > are going, they argue, they can intervene before problems arise. But
> > some schools go even further, using systems that calculate
> > personalized “risk scores” based on factors such as whether the
> > student is going to the library enough.
> >
> > 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.
>
> It appears that they are in the wrong 'business' then.
>
> > But some educators say this move toward heightened educational
> > vigilance threatens to undermine students’ independence and prevents
> > them from pursuing interests beyond the classroom because they feel
> > they might be watched.
> >
> > “These administrators have made a justification for surveilling a
> > student population because it serves their interests, in terms of the
> > scholarships that come out of their budget, the reputation of their
> > programs, the statistics for the school,” said Kyle M. L. Jones, an
> > Indiana University assistant professor who researches student privacy.
> >
> > “What’s to say that the institution doesn’t change their eye of
> > surveillance and start focusing on minority populations, or anyone
> > else?” he added. Students “should have all the rights,
> > responsibilities and privileges that an adult has. So why do we treat
> > them so differently?”
> >
> > [snip]
> >
>
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