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Colleges Work To Block Net in Class
SkewlD00d writes: "The story is that colleges spent a load of money wiring schools, now they want more money to censor them in class. I bet I can get around any of this, all I need is a proxy server running on campus on port 80. LOL! But breaking it would probably violate the DMCA. Oh no, proxy servers are now all illegal!" From the article: "some classrooms at Bentley have technology that allows teachers to capture a student's e-mails or instant messages and display them on a large screen for the whole class to see." Of course, a lot of classes do (and will) require Internet access -- the article is more about steps taken to control exactly when and to what degree students can reach it. Update: 09/26 13:32 GMT by T : If the AP server-choosing link doesn't work well for you, el_nino-2000 suggests this Yahoo! link to the same text.
I have a friend who works at a large and reputable business school. They are quite concerned about wireless networking and the potential for cheating. The department has asked them to shut down the wireless access points during class hours to avoid that problem. They have tried to do this by a combination of perl code and cron jobs. I pointed out to them that most cards can associate with each other in ad-hoc mode. Needless to say, they didn't like that :-)
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The truly entertaining part is that they provide each of their MBA students with a wireless PDA and similar gadgetry. Some of the folks pointed out that this is the business school so the likelihood of these students knowing how to work around these limitations is limited. I pointed out that there is, in fact, a computer science department and engineering school on this campus. While MBAs are not so good at technology, they excel at networking and getting other people to do their work.
The real issue is how we will deal with this in the future as technology progresses. We see the beginnings in the current arguments about giving kids calculators during tests. I imagine this will follow on into issues along the lines of "what's wrong with being able to do a web search during an exam." At some point it will be up to professors and other educators to develop problems which can't be found via a web search. Inconvenient for them, but it will be a fact of life before long.
Of course, you could just ban technology (PDAs, laptops, etc) during exams
Hmmm...like this lesson will be: We don't respect your privacy.
Would those promulgating these lessons be as ready to open up their own private lives to public examination?
More importantly, their current class of students will be in charge of running everything about 25 years from now.
Is this manner of running roughshod over individual privacy how they would want those students to run the country in the future?
"Provided by the management for your protection."
While students like me are the minority, I think those that are understand that if we are going to do anything else during a lecture that we'll do it with minimal disruption in the class. I'd still favor blocking internet access and the like, only because what's on my computer screen can be seen by people behind and to the sides of me, and that can cause a disruption if it's the wrong type of images, and there are other ways of keeping oneself busy without disrupting others in a class.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
College is...
a fraud.
I am paying for a grade to be given to me.
The professor is expected to teach me, now, the professor might suck ass. Now, you say, why don't you just study more.
The point is, even if you crammed 24/7 on that subject matter, the professor can still be a prick and give you test material that doesnt even relate to the course.
I've had a calc 1 teacher, the rundown on his grades:
of a class of 60:
A - 0
B - 2
C - 10
D- 20
F - 28
Now, if almost HALF the class failed, thats a problem.
I've had friends in a calc course, (differen teacher), gave out test material so hard, that in a class of 60, 40 failed.
Now I have the right to a fair course that I paid for. My salary is going for this guy's food. I expect to be taught well and not some kind of bullshit which i've had to deal with.
Slashdot Hypocrisy at work?
I don't know about you, but I paid money to go to classes when I was in college and so long as I wasn't doing anything that disrupted the other students then I feel they have no right to stop me. I paid for the privledge to be there, but that doesn't mean they should be able to force me to do things their way. The only reason I went to (some) classes at all was the possibility that something interesting/insightful/important would be said; however, the vast majority time I should not have even bothered. So instead I wrote programs long-hand on legal pads (I would have killed for a laptop). Should the professor have stopped me?
At least when I attended college as long as you weren't being disruptive it was your choice to pay attention or not.
It depends on your definition of "disruptive". As a grad student I've instructed my share of classes, and I can definitely tell the difference between a class that is largely paying attention and one that is not. It's tough to teach a class that is disinterested; there's no give-and-take between the lecturer and the students. It's difficult to quantify, but there is a definite relationship between the instructor and students such that a more interactive class leads to a better teaching environment for everyone.
Further, although they're indispensible in labs, I dispute the usefulness of an internet-connected computer in a lecture. Even if it can be used to display instructional material, in my opinion it's a rather sterile way to teach (and learn). Of all the instructional aids I have seen, nothing beats the chalkboard. There's something about the pacing and flow of a chalkboard lecture that's impossible to capture using transparencies, PowerPoint, or the Internet -- probably because a lecturer using the chalkboard is proceeding at the same pace that the students are writing notes, so the students have time to absorb.
Besides, if you're going to be surfing the web anyway, why do it in class? Why not skip and do it from your dorm room or wherever?
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
Yeah, except that you don't need to do most of that *in* class do you?
Although, if science fiction is any indication, 25 years from now, you will need to constantly access some sort of network constantly to function in a place like college.
The question that really needs to be asked here is whether large, non-participatory classes are going to be of much use in 25 years, and if not, how will we replace them? I personally haven't found any non-participatory classes I've taken to be more useful than a decent book (and hell, why can't they just tape the thing and I'll watch it on VHS, DVD, or QuickTime?). With network access, school should become a meeting of tutors with students via email or other messaging (IRC, AIM, whatever), and scheduled appointments for more difficult questions. Using moderated forums and FAQs teaching redundancy goes down, and if more than a couple students ask the same question or have trouble with a specific topical area, the tutor sets up a quick meeting with the lot of them to sort it out.
I remember my junior high math classes were similar to this, it was called "packet math" and we rarely had full class lectures since everyone in the class worked on topical packets. You took a pretest. If you passed that you skipped the packet. If you didn't pass, you worked through the packet-- reading and solving sample problems. If you solved the sample problems correctly you took a post-test. If you passed that you went to the next packet. Otherwise you worked through the material again, this time with more supervision from the tutor/teacher.
Applying this model to higher education (say 10th grade and beyond), instead of tuition, your billing rates could be based on how much of a tutor/teacher/professors time you used up, in addition to straight fees for each topic/class. Schools would still want to offer certain topics/classes where groups (for live discussion, interactivity, or critiques) were necessary or as seminars. But to get past the required courses of a general nature, some students would be far more efficient under a test, work, test approach. And for those students who need more individual attention, it's there.
I do not have a signature
It can vary a lot. I went to one lecture in the 2nd half of my final year. It was a pre-exam revision lecture for a course that I quickly realised that I hadn't done, but that was OK because I fell asleep anyway as I'd been up all night hacking Xfire.
And yet I still got a solid degree from a great school, because I knew my shit. While I was "goofing off" from class, I was learning actual programming skills, rather than the abstract pet projects of the professors. I scammed enough notes off of my classmates (or off of their screens - lock those X terms, guys) to figure out what I was expected to say in the exams, and I dutifully said it and was graded on that basis, not on what I actually knew.
And now that I think about it, sometimes the only chance I got to use computer resources was when a class was held in a lab. I had the choice of two-finger typing in a stupid toy program, or I could demonstrate to myself why PPK authentication is a waste of time for open source programs. I chose the latter route, and learned a lot more.
So let's not just write off all non-class related work as a waste of time. I've wrangled lab classes, and I'd far rather walk around, see what the students are doing, encourage the smart kids (including the ones going faster than I can keep up with) and just kick the real wasters out. I don't want some crippleware nanny program doing it for me. In fact, my first assignment would be to get the class to find a way around it.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
The fact of the matter is, you are ONE student among many, and your actions can completely mess up the environment for everyone else.
If it was only one student, this really wouldn't be a problem now would it?
Why should professors worry so much about this kinda stuff? In the past do you remember college professors getting pissed over doodling or daydreaming? In high school, its different, everyone has to be there, and its almost the teachers job to mold every student into something. But in college, its different, their should be mutual respect from the student and the teacher.
Maybe the professors are pissed that some students can still do this (surf, IM) and still pass the class, which is up to them to deicide how to form their classes. But hands down, the college already has your money, what the hell should they care what you do? Our advisor said it best "We HAVE your money now...thats the easy part...you STAYING here is the hard part"
You might stop the stupid people.
But if you have access to the school's internal network--you can ssh to one of your probably several university shell accounts--you can get out. And for the most part, there isn't anything they can do to stop that. Do your pr0n surfing, etc from another machine. I doubt the prof has a button to turn off all of the traffic going out of the campus.
They say the prof can capture e-mail and/or IM and display it. I have to imagine that isn't a very robust system. Maybe just consists of packet sniffing? That probably won't be useful if you have ssh'ed into another machine and send your mail/IM from there.
So maybe they could shut down ssh on school machines. Well, if you live in a dorm, set up ssh on a different port on a machine there and ssh into that. You could have all kinds of fun with that.
The list of ways to get around this kind of thing goes on and on, and IMHO you will probably learn more about networking than you might from a monotone prof. You get out of class what you put into it. If students don't care enough to pay attention, I say let them fail, and if they can pass anyway, let them pass.
This sig is false.
I remember several years ago, when Chapman University (was Chapman College) had a cheating flap. Students were bring HP calculators to history class stored with key words, names, and dates. I remember asking why it never occurred to a professor or proctor to wonder WHY someone would use a calculator in a HISTORY class.
How hard would a history test be if your wireless Palm was connected to, say, Encyclopedia Brittanica's web site?