[liberationtech] Hey kids, welcome to the panopticon!

[Richard Brooks]

This is not just for students. There are companies marketing
academic "analytics"
(https://www.aaup.org/file/AcademicAnalytics_statement.pdf)
which allow administrations invasive information collection
on faculty activities for analyzing "productivity."

Have heard many descriptions of all the types of data that
can be collected on the activities of departments and
individual faculty members. Have never heard any mention
of insights gained or ways of improving the quality of
work.

Have seen some suggestions for the academic equivalent
of search engine optimization. They suggest ways of tricking
people to cite your papers more often and inflate your h-index.
(Somehow I have difficulty imagining Einstein, Goedel,
Wiener or Newton obsessing about their citation numbers
in hopes of getting a raise.)

It seems like management by using the eye of Sauron and
instilling terror on your Untertanen (better in German
https://www.interglot.com/dictionary/de/en/translate/Untertanen)
is starting to be considered to be the best way of improving
the quest for knowledge.

And, if Rutgers (a public institution) is willing to shell out
$500K on this snake oil to spy on tenured faculty, you can be
certain that lots of public institutions will pay more to track
the students who have a worse bargaining position.
And, of course, university administrations are not the only
people tracking the poor kids:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/10/22/dont-leave-campus-parents-are-now-using-tracking-apps-watch-their-kids-college/

On 1/2/20 11:27 PM, Spencer Sevilla wrote:
> 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
> <mailto: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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> 


-- 
===================
R. R. Brooks

Professor
Holcombe Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Clemson University

313-C Riggs Hall
PO Box 340915
Clemson, SC 29634-0915
USA

Tel.       864-656-0920
Fax.       864-656-5910
Voicemail: 864-986-0813
email:     rrb at acm.org
web:       http://www.clemson.edu/~rrb
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