School spyware in coursebooks

http://serendipity.ruwenzori.net/index.php/2014/05/26/school-spyware-in-coursebooks

by liotier • 12 years ago

157 113 12 years ago

serendipity.ruwenzori.net

c16• 12 years ago

I don't see why schools should be able to tell if a student is revising last minute. Why should they care? Pass the exam is all that's required. No revision method is perfect, and being dyslexic I know the way I work differs from how my friends work. Scary is what this is.

liotier7• 12 years ago

Or the student could even have the knowledge from another source and just need validation through the exam rather than infantilization.

I can easily imagine students rigging their reader with activity simulators.

I wonder which faculty will fall for such useless misguided control trip.

macNchz• 12 years ago

I can easily imagine students rigging their reader with activity simulators.

If this had existed when I was in high school, I definitely would have spent hours writing scripts to automate interaction with the ebook, and more hours trying to reverse engineer their private API for phoning home with the 'engagement' data....before subsequently failing the test.

wwwwwwwwww• 12 years ago

if a student is able to study all the content the night before and still get a decent grade compared to long-haul studiers then there's something seriously wrong with the coursework

lotsofmangos• 12 years ago

That was my general method at school. I found it works for most exams as it is pretty well established all the material they might cover and you can read the notes version in a day.

greenyoda2• 12 years ago

The coursework has to be calibrated so that an average student can succeed. There will always be students who are smarter than average and can pick up the material much faster, or who have a personal interest in the material and have studied it on their own in the past (e.g., some kids actually like math or science or computers and study these topics extensively outside of school).

realharo• 12 years ago

I could see the usefulness in collecting anonymized data for later analysis, but the use described in the article just seems ridiculous.

VLM5• 12 years ago

That also has "higher level" problems. So adjunct history prof A convinced his students to spend, on average, 6 hours watching videos per week and adjunct prof B only motivated his kids to watch 2 hours, obviously the contract we'll renew is for A, heck we should put A on tenure track, what a motivational educator he is!

If the reason were collected and analyzed, it might be the case the prof A doesn't actually speak English or is utterly incompetent about the topic, so the kids are self teaching (true story from my youth!)

Now there may be anecdotal verbal end-of-semester survey results, but thats just meaningless prose from kids, but the number of hours of video watched is a number, therefore it is meaningful...

jib• 12 years ago

Like everything else - used right it is an aide, used wrong it is a negative.

If your goal is to pass tests you're missing out on the point of education. Which is to learn stuff (usually, at least).

The tests are the metric that we measure success with, they are not the goal. Confuse the two and you will most likely continue to confuse the two and you will find yourself writing extra lines of code or whatever metric you're going to confuse for a goal in your professional life as well.

Used right, this could replace part of the focus of tests and instead put the focus on learning. Which is way better. Used wrong, it could become another metric that people want to maximise, because they've confused the metric with the goal.

Metrics are indicators of success/failure, they are not success/failure, so if you try to optimise towards metrics you ultimately just screw yourself.

Use quantitative metrics to identify areas of greatest opportunity, qualitatively inspect and analyse to improve. Repeat. That's the most effective way I know of learning. Used that way, metrics are useful, and having more metrics is good, not bad.

liotier7• 12 years ago

Metrics are indicators of success/failure, they are not success/failure, so if you try to optimise towards metrics you ultimately just screw yourself.

True for the student, but true for the professor too... Why produce a bogus metric such as reading assiduity ?

zimbatm2• 12 years ago

Except for the parents, it's nobody's business what the children do after school. How can children learn about freedom when all their movements are scrutinized and analyzed all the time.

Plus it's really not a good metric. There are many ways to learn a topic. There's fast learners, those who gather information trough other sources, those who like to work in groups. Inevitably these approaches to learning will get hindered by myopic interpretation of this metric.

vezzy-fnord• 12 years ago

If your goal is to pass tests you're missing out on the point of education.

Well, looks like the US education system has already failed on your second sentence.

yew• 12 years ago

I've always liked to imagine that if influential educators were genuinely interested in learning, they would make a better effort to account for Campbell's Law.

Perhaps there is an alternative explanation for the rampant misuse of metrics observed in most modern education systems? One that doesn't involve gross incompetence, I hope.

grkvlt5• 12 years ago

Because if a student fails the exam and only studied at the last minute, that is a totally different scenario from failing but diligently reading the coursework as expected, even re-reading above and beyond. The latter case suggests the student just does not understand the material and would benefit from some one-to-one time with a tutor, whereas the first case suggests the student is lazy and needs a slap across the face.

pfortuny• 12 years ago

Or it may perfectly well mean that the book is crap.

userbinator2• 12 years ago

In the future, you don't read books; books read you.

Presumably there's a requirement to be connected to the Internet for some DRM-ish thing, which also reminds me of this: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html

(I only hope this doesn't turn into "This student has been accessing his textbook in a weird pattern... he must be trying to circumvent the DRM!")

acqq3• 12 years ago

I remember reading Stallman's "The Right To Read" in 1997 (see the parent for the link).

It describes the time where a student Dan can't even lend his own electronic books to another student, Lissa:

"He had to help her -- but if he lent her his computer, she might read his books. Aside from the fact that you could go to prison for many years for letting someone else read your books, the very idea shocked him at first. Like everyone, he had been taught since elementary school that sharing books was nasty and wrong -- something that only pirates would do."

We're getting closer every day to this dystopia.

marcosdumay3• 12 years ago

We're getting closer every day to this dystopia.

Except that as we approach it, piracy becomes more and more socially acceptable.

superuser2• 12 years ago

You're attacking a strawman and you know it.

If he lent her the book, then there's a good chance she'd buy her own copy if it was something she wanted to own after giving it back. If he put the book online, no one would ever have to buy it again.

ivan_ah2• 12 years ago

This is terrible!

As .epub and .mobi come more into the fore, reading analytics has sneakily been introduced without any discussion or privacy debate. On js-enabled epub readers spying on one's readers could be as simple as setting up a web analytics backend. I know kindles also collect reader analytics[1].

We badly need free software like [2] to prevent this from happening under-the hood---any privacy-policy promises make by a vendor can't be trusted. Like Eben Moglen says, if they have the logs, there's nothing you can do.

Monitoring one's learning progress could be useful for adaptive learning content presentation and positive reinforcement, e.g., "you learned 7 new things last week." Effort is a great metric! I previously wrote [3] about a proposed learning metric similar to the stats reported by ''uptime''. Also, like gyardley said below, knowing the reader's "knowledge state" can promote the "being in the flow because I'm learning new stuff at the edge of my knowledge horizon"-feeling, so it's definitely something readers would like. Surely all the customized-learning value provided by a centralized web application can be reproduced in js on the client side, no?

[1] http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405270230487030...

[2] https://github.com/readium/readium-js-viewer

[3] http://minireference.com/blog/exams-suck/

saraid2163• 12 years ago

In the future, you don't read books; books read you.

The funny part of this statement is that, given a strong enough trend in this direction, there won't be a you for the books to read.

Then what?

Zancarius• 12 years ago

Then we'll need to shift the analytics platform to understand where our "readership engagement progam" failed and tune the algorithms to identify borderline-literate "at risk" readers so that appropriate interventions can be made. We'll spend millions on these programs, most of which will be in bureaucracy, without ever fully understanding the crux of the problem or how our fear of lax engagement contributed to it.

It's curious in a way. Once you establish that behavior is more important that content, it ought to be obvious what the consequences will be.

Aardwolf• 12 years ago

What if the student printed out the books and studied it from there?

What if the student blocks it with firewall or has no internet or breaks the assumption like by running it on Wine or whatever?

What if they simply don't read the coursebook because they can do without?

liotier7• 12 years ago

What if the student printed out the books and studied it from there?

Printing ? But that would mean circumventing DRM to produce an illicit copy - surely an honest student would not do that !

total2• 12 years ago

I'm not entirely sure on the specifics of what is allowed, but I know MathXL/MyMathLab has a button for printing when one is reading the textbook online through their site.

[Edit] Cleared up some confusing stuff in there.

grkvlt5• 12 years ago

What if they read a course book for a different course? What if a werewolf steals their ebook reader? What if the student can only read Ancient Hebrew? Edge cases are fun...!

The first two points are just asking what happens if you don't use the software. The answer is, surprisingly, you don't get the benefits of the software. The third point is slightly more interesting, but still irrelevant. This sort of thing is not designed to help students who are gifted enough to pass a course without reading the textbook. It is pretty obviously meant for those who need the textbook to learn, and will help those students and their teachers by showing which parts they struggled with, perhaps even unconsciously, and so on. Previously the only way to gain this sort of in-depth information about a student's learning habits was by one-on-one tutoring, following along as the student reads the material and answering questions as they come up. This is obviously an expensive process, although worthwhile, so automating it cheaply is a good thing,

pjscott2• 12 years ago

This sort of thing is not designed to help students who are gifted enough to pass a course without reading the textbook.

It will inevitably be used to hassle those students, though. You know an easy way to make unusually smart students hate school? Just try to impose a time-consuming, slow, one-size-fits-all study schedule on them by force.

snomad2• 12 years ago

From the educators point of view, it might be helpful to know if a student is struggling because they are not doing nightly reading.

liotier7• 12 years ago

Is the additional knowledge worth scarifying the trust relationship ?

gress3• 12 years ago

This. Trust is a critical resource for a healthy human mind, but it figures nowhere on the evaluation of what effective teaching is.

clarkm• 12 years ago

Trust, but verify.

cokernel• 12 years ago

Then the educator should ask.

Jach• 12 years ago

The educator should ask, but they should also do the monitoring for one year. Then they can find out who the liars are and flag them for future professors.

heynk• 12 years ago

It is too easy for teachers, and maybe yourself, to mistake correlation with causation. "a student is struggling because they are not doing nightly reading". There is no other measurement to determine whether the student is unmotivated or uninterested in the subject, or whether their home environment prevents them from reading nightly, or an unlimited number of other factors that could cause a student to struggle in school.

Perhaps if the student is struggling, the teacher could talk to them 1-on-1 to diagnose the problem. This could reveal that they aren't doing nightly readings as well as any other unknown factors at play.

I do support more measurement vs. less in general, but it requires a lot of responsibility to ensure you're being unbiased in choosing what the measurements "mean". In school, I've seen that measurement does not always lead to better policy.

SoftwareMaven• 12 years ago

Nine year old kids are getting sent home from school with notes saying they are fat, even if they are just one pound over what the BMI charts say they "should" be. Weight is easy to measure and there is obviously an obesity problem, so the natural response is to give kids eating disorders by shaming them over their weight at incredibly young ages.

I have no confidence in our prison-style education system to be able to use this information in a positive way. Common sense flew out the door two decades ago, and it isn't coming back any time soon, and providing "obvious" correlation data like this is just one more tool to use to whip kids with, to ensure they know who the masters are.

readme• 12 years ago

Bring it on, there's money in selling mouse macros to kids.

malisper• 12 years ago

A lot of teachers give an effort grade as well as an achievement grade.

One of my high school teachers gave a whole lecture on how even though Usain Bolt is the fastest man alive, he probably isn't the one who trains the hardest. He believed the person who does try the hardest still deserves an award for their effort. Applying this idea now to students, some are able to not study at all, yet get an A. At the same time there are others who study all the time and get a C. At this point the students grade is based largely on talent, which can only get one so far in life.

Looking at this from the school's perspective they are only trying to measure what they want to measure. Does the student have the necessary skills to help them succeed in life. While spyware may not be the best way to go about it, it certainly makes sense to the schools.

andreasvc• 12 years ago

They're only trying to measure what they want to measure?! Three letter agencies can use the exact same argument, it's basically a carte blanche.

I don't buy the argument with effort grades. There's nothing admirable about studying very hard without getting something out of it; what matters is the effectiveness.

If it is a "problem" that someone with talent can finish a course with an A without studying, then obviously such people need a more difficult course, rather than being punished for finishing something without studying.

throwaway812345• 12 years ago

Effort grades marginalize gifted students with learning disabilities.

aianus• 12 years ago

What are the bright students supposed to do to earn a good grade then? It's not their fault the material is too easy and they don't have to study to do well.

pjscott2• 12 years ago

Jump through all hoops, however meaningless and soul-killing. This will result in good grades.

(I wouldn't actually recommend this, but it's the answer to your question. And, as far as I can tell, it's the only answer to your question -- the system does not care about students more than about a standard deviation above the mean.)

Crito3• 12 years ago

The person who trains the hardest is quite possibly also somebody who trains incorrectly. Why should effort alone be worthy of praise or recognition? Achievement should always be prioritized above effort. Prioritizing effort unjustly disadvantages those who work smarter, not harder.

atmosx3• 12 years ago

Are students families aware of this?

That's kind of scary because kids are learning to be policed from a young age. Might be easier to convince them in the future that it's an acceptable behavior to be officially profiled by third parties. Even if this third party is a school teacher, it's absolutely NOT okay.

I understand the eagerness to monitor and try to help the student as much as possible, but a teacher or a school committee should understand the repercussions of this kind of monitoring, no matter what the results are.

davidp• 12 years ago

Here's the product page for CourseSmart Analytics[0], the product referred to in the link.

By my read it's just as bad as the OP suggests; the screenshots even show specific students' names with their "engagement index".

An aggregated view of student engagement seems like it would be quite useful, e.g. "hmm, only 5% of my students are spending more than a minute looking at this really important chart, I should emphasize it in my next lecture". But Panopticon-style policing, and as you say, comfort with that policing -- shudder.

(edit - fixed product name)

[0] http://instructors.coursesmart.com/go/institutions/analytics

nevir• 12 years ago

Yeah, as a tool for improving coursework, it sounds great. Too easy to abuse, though :(

Jormundir5• 12 years ago

So now we're going to call grading "policing"?

I'm not sure what line I crossed to get so many downvotes, but I really don't understand why this is outrageous.

Can someone please explain for me why we're fighting a school for measuring user interaction and adjusting based on that data?

angersock2• 12 years ago

Part of the American War on Education.

marcosdumay3• 12 years ago

There is a huge difference between "discovering if the student learned the lesson" and "verifying that the student behaves in the school aproved manner". The first is named "grading", and the last "policing".

Both must be done for some degree, but that degree vary widely.

raverbashing• 12 years ago

And the universities are charging how much for this "education" again?

Plagiarism software, auto-marks software, now this BS

Where are the real Professors? Where's the real education?

People are leaving "university" with nothing but debt.

gyardley• 12 years ago

You could write an article about digital resources adapting themselves to match individual students' ability and learning speed, allowing every student to receive activities most likely to put them in a state of 'flow' -- and most everyone would think the monitoring required to do that was awesome.

Like most things, it's not the monitoring that's objectionable, it's how that monitoring is used.

wyager3• 12 years ago

Like most things, it's not the monitoring that's objectionable

I vehemently disagree.

ivan_ah2• 12 years ago

What about self-monitoring?

Imagine a reader with reading analytics stored in localStorage, generating a "your progress" view?

There could be an opt-in "share my anonymized stats" option, with the anonymization being done on the client. As an author, I can say that such "reading stats" would be very useful for content-dev purposes, but it should be up to the reader to choose whether they want to share them with the author.

Houshalter• 12 years ago

Just stating you disagree is not an argument and doesn't add anything. Optimizing education could be awesome. Nothing is wrong with statistics, even personalized ones. The problem is when they are used badly. For example, factoring them into grades creating an incentive to game them or unfairly punishing atypical cases.

total2• 12 years ago

I'd be highly interested in knowing how exactly it goes about showing these metrics:

* By class: The defense would probably be that it helps the teacher get a better understanding of the class and how to change tactics.

* Per student: The defense here would probably be that it helps the teacher target a particular student for the purpose of individualizing the support they provide.

The 'per student' method is far more open to abuse in that it would also allow the teacher to pick out students that didn't match what they believed to be 'appropriate' studying. Both opens are open to abuse, though, as a 'by class' metric would show them that some students study in a way that does not align with the teacher's belief(s); they might have their opinions about some students slacking off or what have you and decide that they are the ones pulling down the stats and single them out as a result.

Either way, this amount of surveillance opens up the door for a good deal of abuse and there should be a good amount of discussion regarding it before it is thrust upon unknowing student.

mediumdave• 12 years ago

First of all: I think the US education system (at both K12 and college/university levels) is deeply disfunctional.

However, I can understand and sympathize with a teacher's desire to understand how his or her students are using their time outside of class. In particular, knowing that a student who is struggling is not studying or is only attempting to cram at the last minute could be useful information for finding a strategy to help that student to improve.

I think the real problem is that many of the students I see (I teach CS at a small college) are focused on the external artifacts of education --- grades, a degree, etc. --- and not the actual learning. If students don't see an intrinsic value in what they are doing, they will try to game the system by cheating, memorizing instead of learning more deeply, etc. Over time I have come to realize that one of my duties as an educator is to try to motivate students to learn. As such, any information available to me that will help me understand whether or not a particular student is using his or her time effectively outside the class is valuable.

gress3• 12 years ago

With all due respect, students are not the ones gaming the system. If you make the system into something that functions like a game, then it will be played.

VLM5• 12 years ago

What you call a game, is also called operant conditioning and some other google terms to research are "B F Skinner".

It works really well for mere vocation training, habits, etc. Doesn't work very well for education.

There can be some disturbing introspection involved WRT the purpose of the organization, is it vocational, educational, or merely a financialization scam. This also gives an thin smear of "icky" across the whole discussion of the merits of expensive spyware.

Another game theory topic not yet discussed is the classic writing prof problem of how a prof spends her time. Would a prof be better served at whatever goal by spending 15 minutes thinking about improvement of the next lecture, analysis of errors in latest quiz to respond at next lecture, or analyze the gathered stats to hurry along the primate dominance ritual game of rating and classification of students by an arbitrary reward structure?

TravelTechGuy• 12 years ago

This technology has been around for a couple of years now. 2 years ago, I was working for a video platform company, installing our product at few of the top-tier universities. Some courses required watching videos of recorded lectures and external material, as part of the syllabus. Our system reported back the watching habits of the students: did they watch all the videos? Did they watch the entire thing, or just scrubbed to the end? Did they watch at the assigned time, or wait till the day before finals to cram them all?

We could provide very good statistics. An algorithm could predict the student's chance of success in the course, based on his watching habits, way before the course ended.

To the best of my knowledge, the data from the algorithm was never factored directly into the course's grade, but rather was used to counsel students on their studying methodology.

oakwhiz• 12 years ago

Interestingly, this sort of tracking can come up with false negatives. Imagine a situation in which multiple students are studying together in a group, and they decide to watch the videos together, on one computer. Only the student that is logged in will be tracked, and the other students might appear as though they haven't watched any videos at all.

Jormundir5• 12 years ago

I think outrage at this is a little unjustified. Monitoring user interaction is how you get data to effectively improve your platform. In the case of schools, they should be monitoring student interaction in order to gain insights in how to improve their system, just as any website does. How are we supposed to improve the education system if getting quantitative data is outrageous?

If you're outraged at this software are you also outraged at all of the awesome new developments in ed tech to create self-paced curriculums? Those involve plenty of monitoring as well.

When I went through the education system, I was seen as a genius in elementary school. I scored in the 99th percentile in math on the standardized tests, and participated in the advanced math tracks two years early. I was on track to be very successful. Then middle school came along.

First half of sixth grade, I continued my performance from elementary school, doing extremely well. Then I started with the destructive questions I'm sure a lot of HNers are familiar with: "Why do I need to learn this?", "Am I ever going to use this in real life?". This is when the grades started tanking, and I basically didn't participate in my education. I didn't recover from this terrible attitude until I entered college.

I never really established any study habits, and it's something that still weighs me down now, graduated from college and in the workforce. To relate to the story, I wish these sorts of programs were available when I was a student. I wish I was graded on my study habits even in elementary school.

I don't really understand the defense of cramming. The goal of school is not to pass all of the tests with high scores, the goal of school is to establish strong habits that will optimize your education and your effectiveness in your future profession.

I think the best way to help our kids develop these skills is going to be through lots of monitoring. It's certainly good to question the effectiveness of monitoring, and what it's encouraging, so I respect that sentiment of the other posters, but really? Outrage?

Lets encourage our school system to try new things, measure the effectiveness, and readjust based on data. I would really love to steer this debate away from whining about being free to choose less effective study techniques and monitoring. Monitoring is essential to providing adjustments on a per-student basis, allowing highly customizable content for the most efficient education.

Edit: I guess I should have known better than to make a dissenting comment on this type of article.

DanBC• 12 years ago

(I didn't downvote you)

Children are being ised as experiments for privacy violating new technology.

Some of this is less acceptable than others.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biometrics_in_schools

http://www.wired.com/2011/06/webcam-scandal-resurfaces/

Jormundir5• 12 years ago

Yes, I see this side of it. It's certainly important to question the uses and effectiveness of techniques - monitoring or otherwise.

My problem with the narrative of the comments in this thread is that they seem to be paranoid, and they have tunnel vision about CourseSmart, while making claims that will rule out all of the effective new ed tech platforms coming out.

Just look at something like Newton, they monitor your performance like crazy, but they do it in order to make your personal curriculum much more effective for you. Getting outraged about monitoring doesn't even really make sense. We monitor everything these days as an effective way to improve our products, now when a school does it some huge line is crossed? Don't you want our education system to improve? Shouldn't they be trying to improve in the same effective way we improve websites? You monitor user interaction and make adjustments based on that data.

null_ptr• 12 years ago

I think outrage at this is a little unjustified. The whole schooling system is built around monitoring student progress. I think the best way to help our kids develop these skills is going to be through lots of monitoring. It's certainly good to question the effectiveness of monitoring, and what it's encouraging, so I respect that sentiment of the other posters, but really? Outrage?

I don't think you realize the damage all this pervasive monitoring will do to warp and stress people's minds, being subjected to it 24/7 from early childhood. It will take away all awareness that they are the directors of their own life. It will condition them to constantly act for the benefit of an unseen observer instead of living their life for themselves and being unafraid to walk off the beaten path. And yes that includes being able to cram for a 5th grade history test the night before, it's not like they're handing in their Master's Thesis.

Jormundir5• 12 years ago

I'm not claiming this monitoring is effective, I'm saying: "Don't get outraged, let them run a test of the program and see if it's effective".

I just don't think it makes sense to get mad at a school for trying to use data to improve their effectiveness.

TeMPOraL• 12 years ago

*It will condition them to constantly act for the benefit of an unseen observer instead of living their life for themselves and being unafraid to walk off the beaten path.

I wonder in what ways this could be different from being raised in a religious family and being taught since early years that you're always watched by God and your misbehaviour displeases Him. It does sound very similar.

chestnut-tree• 12 years ago

I feel we're sleepwalking into a future where all our online or digital behaviour is tracked in some way. And we're not stopping to think about the implications.

Our online behaviour is already tracked and recorded to a large degree. Analytics software is everywhere and growing. The tracking is often not anonymous either; it's far more valuable to companies and organisations when tracking can be tied to an account or email address.

More and more companies are encouraging schools and students to use their digital products and online services. This trend is likely to grow (Google's presence looms particularly large). Tracking data anonymously and aggregating it can have benefits. But to evaluate a service properly, we need to know what is being tracked, how it is aggregated, who has access to that data and how long that data is kept. These are things that companies simply do not reveal. And something that a lot of individuals never ask about in the first place.

atmosx3• 12 years ago

Imagine a company requesting your digital profile from your school years.

Doesn't look good.

VLM5• 12 years ago

Oh, thats not so bad. I'd worry about discovery process in legal matters. "Oh, she read and re-read mommie pr0n over and over in lit class, clearly she was the type to be asking for it, begging for it, so my client is innocent"

I'm NOT saying thats right or wrong WRT, well, anything, I'm just stating the fact this WILL be a problem in court.

Any civil case involving death -n- destruction will be extremely interested in the program authors stats vs class averages for any bug related topics. Not to mention the legal liability of the school for passing a student who spent less than the median amount of time studying garbage collection algo scalability WRT RTOS interrupt latency or whatever. J Random Programmer may be judgment proof, but a uni with an enormous endowment certainly isn't, and they knowingly granted degree credentials to a programmer who later when on to cause grevious bodily harm...

omarhegazy• 12 years ago

If you're afraid of looking silly to the company, just remember that everyone will be having that fear if their digital profile is requested. Relatively, your value doesn't change. If everyone has stupid stuff on their digital profile, well, the company still needs to hire people, they're not going to reject everyone because that guy posted pics with booze and that guy posted some incriminating status and that guy got in a fight with his LIT 101 teacher over the legitimacy of the class and nearly got suspended! So I doubt anyone rational enough is gonna care.

Also, the most successful companies hire the most capable programmers, so the most successful companies have to be aware of the fact that whatever stupid status you posted about getting arrested for a night in your freshman year at college is not at all correlated to your skill as a programmer. So they wouldn't even bother wasting the legal effort and time to get their hands on your digital profile from Google or Facebook.

Most of this tracking stuff is just going to be used for targeted advertising. All this social and personal stuff is pretty much useless for the workplace unless you're like, a murderer or rapist or something (in which case you're already in records far different than Facebook's or Google's and it really doesn't matter what they do). 70K NSA employees aren't going to randomly stalk the intricate life of some random Average Joe to figure out what color underwear he's wearing. Another irrational fear is that you're unwittingly breaking some stupid bullshit tiny law and all this tracking will allow you to get in trouble with that. howevermanyK Google employees aren't going to hunt you down and get you in trouble because you did something technically illegal because that costs resources to develop the technology to automatically detect those crimes and then legal resources to accuse you of them, and Google really doesn't get anything out of spending those resources (I doubt the government would pay off Google for that information, either, because if it's some insignificant, mundane, bullshit traffic violation caught by a Google Car, the government wouldn't care because they're too busy spending their resources towards more important stuff, like murders or kidnappings. Big companies already cooperate with government on large scale crimes like that, if that qualifies the trend.) No one is going to fucking make the US into some 1984 clone because that's in no one's incentive.

All of this data is just going to be sold to advertisers because all of these companies don't have any other source of revenue because we all decided we'd rather get ads than directly pay money for Google products. In very rare cases, the government is cooperating with regards to stuff like murders or kidnappings or such.

I mean, if you don't like that, fine. Go ahead and petition to get the ability to pay $30 a year to use Google products (which is the revenue per user per year that they're making off advertisement). Just recognize that this data isn't going for some James Bond-villian-esque desire rooted in pure evil. It's advertisement.

VLM5• 12 years ago

The discussion seems to be drifting into the positives and negatives of the morality of the technique without discussing the rather more important critique of one-size-fits-all techniques, pounding down any nail that stands up, and shoving every peg thru the round hole, no matter if round or square. If a school is trying to do something good, giving them an evil tool doesn't matter, and if they're trying to do something evil, then the presence or absence of tools isn't going to matter much.

616c2• 12 years ago

As an IT guy in a university (a satellite campus of US university to be more specific), this shit would not be kosher. We evaluate crap for our people because this school is far from a tech school, and we would never be able to get this out the door to students lest one of them or their professor(s) found out, and the shitstorm would be enormous.

We cannot even reliably monitor computers or remote into them, as the perception of monitoring in a poli sci school has caused so many fights in the past, no campus of the university has the balls to even try.

But good luck to the IT group that gets away this. They will have a fun time explaining it to the angry students or their guardians who foot the bill for this horseshit.

But since the author quotes Neal Stephen, who cares, right? We teach kids the ideals of society in class and school policies (at least for us, won't speak to others), then the ideal society lacks them altogether and government agencies violate the very same trust in society and established protocol, lie about, and probably gloat in their office how stupid these kids are with their monitored engagement.

I give everybody a F, personally.

greenyoda2• 12 years ago

Recording students' activities in their own homes seems unacceptably intrusive. If people think this is acceptable, would it also be OK for the software to sample ambient sound to insure that the student isn't watching TV or talking on their phone while they're supposed to be studying? Or how about requiring students to periodically perform some kind of dexterity test on their computer to prove that they aren't drunk or stoned or sleepy? Or maybe requiring them to see a psychiatrist if their studying profile fits the software's criteria for ADHD or depression?

At what point does student monitoring cross the line and become NSA-style surveillance?

freditup• 12 years ago

My 'biggest' technological nightmare in the latter years of high school was that regular schools would have enough online presence that snow days would become mandatory 'learn from home' days. Teachers would still hold classes, students would still have to attend (virtually), do work, etc.

However, teachers tracking my studying would have been just as bad I think.

Crito3• 12 years ago

The way to combat that is to very vocally accuse anybody trying to institute those sort of policies of being an evil classist who is keen on neglecting the education of families who cannot afford reliable internet access, or computers for each school-aged child. The more vitriolic the better; the idea is to catch them off guard such that the fastest way for them to combat the accusations is to backtrack completely.

Some schools may get around these accusations by doing shit like providing each student with computers/tablets with cell cards. That's when you start beating on the privacy drums. Most public schools do not have anywhere near the necessary resources to do that though.

RaSoJo• 12 years ago

The only lessons and areas that i ever remember from my youth, or any other time, has been when: 1) I was given the freedom to take my time and play around with the ideas for however long i wanted 2) Had no one breathing down my neck

Having to adopt such tools shows the failure of the education system in keeping students interested.

With the lack of freedom goes the willingness to explore and with that goes innovation.

I am feeling quite frightened for my kids right now.

Jormundir5• 12 years ago

After brewing on this for longer, I think I have a better perspective than my initial posting.

Monitoring student behavior, engagement, studying techniques, etc., is going to be very important for improving our education system. We need more quantitative data to be able to adjust the system based on what's working and what's not. However, monitoring students gives schools the tools they need to force students to behave the way they want, and punish when they don't. This is where the program described in the article crosses the line. Student behavior is being policed in order to corral them into a narrowly defined "acceptable" behavior. This is why it's going to be extremely important for monitoring to happen transparently, and for these monitoring programs to be very open to scrutiny, and we should all rightly shun a program and especially its implementors for crossing the line into policing.

That being said, lets be careful about over-punishing the practice of monitoring, as it is the best tool we have today for meaningfully improving education. I'm very excited about the new advances in ed tech, almost all of which include monitoring, and I really don't want them to be slowed or stopped because we as a community overreacted to the concept as a whole, rather than focusing on the misuse of the data collected from monitoring.

snomad2• 12 years ago

Interestingly, I first heard about CourseSmart on HN on Apr 9, 2013. At the time, HN generally (IMO) seemed positive (not coming up in HN search for me, the NY article was http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/09/technology/coursesmart-e-t...).

Is some of the monitoring negativity in this thread a result of the Snowden leaks and changing attitudes?

From my POV - as a developer at a university - this seems to go with 2 of the "hot" trends in education.

1. Personalization - Monitoring reading habits will allow other software / professors to tailor material to individual student needs. Any slightly decent professor would presumably factor in exam results and not solely rely on this indicator. (e.g. student is reading some other material, already knows the material).

Of course, we should demand privacy rights. They should already be covered under FERPA, perhaps that needs to be modernized to cover all cases (not just this one)?

2. Getting graduation rates up and students out in (close to) 4 years. If a student is getting bad grades on exams, and not reading (as this software might indicate) the professor can talk to the student and see if they really have the resources/time to successfully finish the class. If not, perhaps the seat can be opened up for another student.

It sounds harsh, but why should a student occupy a seat and then blow off the course? Shouldn't (at least state) schools be able to prioritize resources effectively?

weland• 12 years ago

I have mixed feelings about a system like this one. On one hand, knowing more about the habits of a student (or of students in general!) is very helpful, but when it goes wrong, it can have very bad results, and I find it hard to weigh the benefits and the risks.

Even with monitoring happening transparently and open to scrutiny, the damage it does in such contexts is typically irreversible. GPAs usually don't get revised and, when they do, it's hard to revise them objectively, retracted disciplinary actions don't give students their time back, and most people usually get exactly one chance at going through a stage of the educational system (especially the early ones).

This is especially scary and open to misinterpretation because, like anything that gathers only a small, well-defined subset of data (for privacy concerns, ironically!), it's bound to paint an incomplete picture. High school me would have been fucked if cramming had been actively discouraged or penalized; but not because I was lazy! I actually had trouble sleeping (and still do). This would regularly kick my life into zombie mode starting Wednesday or so during busier weeks, so if I had a test on Monday, Sunday evening was literally the only time when I could study (after recovering all the lost sleep on Saturday). Working around cases like this would get complicated once the bureaucracy kicks in, and we'd have kids like I was having to produce medical papers that certify they have a condition which sometimes makes it acceptable for them to cram. This is ridiculous.

analog31• 12 years ago

In my view, reducing poverty and improving teacher training are probably the best tools we have for improving education. Monitoring behavior seems like a gratuitously technological solution.

As for policing, kids take a quiz or exam on the material at some point. Maybe that's enough. It provides a way to know if kids learned the stuff, while providing reasonable flexibility for kids to come up with their own ways of learning it.

And at least for younger kids, what I've observed is that the school already has a way of policing their behavior at home, simply by assigning a sheer quantity of homework that commands every waking hour.

atmosx3• 12 years ago

Yes, that's another huge problem. Kids shouldn't study that much material IMHO. The studying hours required should be limited, I don't know how or why, but it's incredible the amount of a work a good student must put up at the age of 9-17 to get through school successfully[1].

[1] I'm referring to the average kid, not people who things came easy at school [...].

59nadir• 12 years ago

I think you're way off with your point that we can't (or shouldn't) shun these based on the principle that monitoring is wrong. There is nothing to gain from having kids expect to be monitored and being ok with being monitored.

Educational systems shouldn't rely on the students to be working hard or work right; they should clearly be relying on the teachers and the school to set up a good environment for the students to _want to learn_. Monitoring students will give nothing. Maybe monitoring the teachers would, though, if that's the route you want to take. Something tells me they wouldn't like it that much.

socrates1998• 12 years ago

Scary.

The number one thing our education system teaches is compliance and obedience.

This is just an extension of that.

saraid2163• 12 years ago

Absolutely agree. That's why people who disagree with this only have appeals to fear in response, rather than having the capability to make a substantive, reasoned argument.

The compliant and obedient understand fear.

liotier7• 12 years ago

In a cute attempt at defusing this interesting PR situation, Coursesmart attempts to talk to its detractors individually instead of participating in a public discussion:

https://twitter.com/liotier/status/471308846749982720

https://twitter.com/liotier/status/471307993850859520

liotier7• 12 years ago

This reminds of the Robbins v. Lower Merion School District WebcamGate scandal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robbins_v._Lower_Merion_School...

davidbauer• 12 years ago

This is exactly the kind of observation I've built the Dystopia Tracker for. So far, there's no entry for Snow Crash – somebody care to add it? http://www.dystopiatracker.com/E?t=Snow%20Crash

liotier7• 12 years ago

Lovely quote in a New York Times article about Coursesmart: “It’s Big Brother, sort of, but with a good intent” - of course, it always starts with a good intent ! http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/09/technology/coursesmart-e-t...

School spyware in coursebooks

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