Slashdot Mirror
University Gives Away iPhones To Curb Truancy
Norsefire writes "A Japanese University is giving away iPhones to its students to use the phones' GPS functionality to catch students who skip classes. The University claims students currently fake attendance by having other students answer for them during rollcall, they also said that while this can be abused by giving other students the phone, they are much less likely to do this due to the personal information, such as email, a phone generally contains."
Okay. Umm.. Who the fuck cares if students show up to class or not. At university we are old enough to decide if class is a waste of time or not. I skipped tons of classes during my undergrad degree and this enabled me to actually assignments that I wouldn't have otherwise had time for.
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Go canucks, habs, and sens!
Don't the Japanese in general already have better phones than the iPhones? I don't see the appeal of actually using the iPhone except as a tracking device to give to a friend.
not babysitting.
Would I use the university provied phone as my "pretend to go to class phone" or as my "drug dealer phone"?
as far as I know, the Japanese have way better phones. I thought they didn't like the iPhone?
They'd probably just keep their email on their "cool" phone, and get their friends to carry their "lame" iphone to class.
Forcing someone to attend won't magically make him interested or engaged in the subject. They need good teachers for that. And good exams so bad studens won't pass by cheating and those who do pass will be actually well prepared.
Dude hold my phone and let me borrow your notes after class.
People signed each others names on the attendence sheet all the time at my college.
Doesn't it defeat the purpose to tell the students this ahead of time? Who would they use the iPhone if they knew this was the case? Or does the school "force" them to do it? Well, even if they did, use your regular phone for personal stuff and the iPhone purely to appease the school and hand it to your friend who goes to class, like the article says. If it's a "prestigious" school, as claimed, why should they care so much if the students are in class as long as the school still gets the tuition money out of them?
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." --Mark Twain
Now that every student will be able to browse the web and chat with their friends in class, I'm sure fewer will cut.
... how about making the classes worth attending, and making testing difficult enough that poor attendance matters?
Actually the iPhone has emoji support
"They also said that while this can be abused by giving other students the phone, they are much less likely to do this due to the personal information, such as email, a phone generally contains."
Sure, assuming they're dumb enough to store such information on a device owned by a third party...
8==8 Bones 8==8
Technical solution to a social problem? How about just count the number of names on the sheet, or learn to recognize your students? I don't know, crazy ideas...
If "Having other students answer roll call for them" is an indetectible method of circumventing the rollcall procedures, then Japanese professors are just playing into the West's "All Asians Look Exactly Alike" stereotype. Way to go, Nihon.
MSIE: The world's most standards-complaint web browser.
... When people started taking exams. If someone can pass an exam coupled with any assignments they would have been given as part of a module, then I would deem them qualified. Attendance is no measure of academic ability.
Seriously, what?! I don't have an iPhone but are you telling me you can't password protect your private data? Ridiculous.. At high school level I could see the need, but at a university where the students are paying to be there?
Dear slashdot, why am I seeing an advertisement for scientology on the slashdot front page ?
Yes, I could become a subscriber.
Yes, I could use ABP
Why scientology ?
Note: I'm an American. But it appears as if we're misunderstanding Japanese culture. This is after all, the same culture that has "monsters" come house to house in some villages, to scare children who have been lax at their school work, share a drink with the parents, and then move on. Here in America (and many western cultures), attendance in university classes is not deemed necessary; if you're smart enough to pass exams and assignments on your own, you're qualified. In the east, the attitude towards attendance appears to be different. Maybe that's why so many (higher tier) jobs are leaving America.
Do not dare to insult of Hello Kitty nation symbol Japan's, gaijin dog!
As I understand things, it's not simply a matter of "better". Personalization is important in Japanese culture. There's huge variety of phones and consumers can find and tweak one to be "perfect" for each individual. But Apple seems to have a diametrically opposed "one size fits all" philosophy of consumers products -- "we built the most perfect product we could, and it's the one you should use." (I type this on a MacBook Air with a piece of paper taped across the camera that has no lens cap and can't be turned off). So from what I've heard, the iPhone has done poorly in Japan and the reason is cultural mismatch. If there's a university program pushing iPhones on students, it strikes me as not unlike Apple's historical practice of using educational systems to gain footholds in markets. But good luck to them trying this in Japan...
After I wrote the above, I found the following story on "Why the Japanese Hate the iPHone:"
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/02/why-the-iphone/
Ah, so maybe you're right about simply "better" phones. What I wrote at top was opinion stemming from 9 years working in the telco industry, quite often closely -- sometimes in person in Tokyo -- with my then-employer's Tokyo office and Japanese customers.
Need to have your phone send faulty GPS coordinates so people monitoring your location think you are in class? There's an app for that.
And what if students forget their iPhone at home?
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
Prof: Dude, you weren't at my class! .. I left it hat home .. the battery died) .. my mom needed a phone so I gave her mine) .. my girlfriend wanted to take a look at it) ... ok.
Student: Yes I was.
Prof: No, your iPhone wasn't registered here!
Student: Oh yea
(or: Oh yea
(or: Oh yea
(or: Oh yea
Prof: Uhm
Student: gg no re
The only way this could achieve anything is if they made iPhones mandatory in class. Which would be insane.
Forgo the "college experience" entirely, do a military stint in a technical specialty, and avoid having to pay out a boatload of cash for a degree that has a minimial ROI anyhow.
So now the students get a free method to skip class even easier. Anyone that plans on skipping can just give it to a friend that plans on attending. As far as I know, cell phones are so ubiquitous in Japan that all students will already have a cell phone and thus not care about someone else having their iPhone for a few hours. More so, if students leave their phones in a common place, and they think someone is going to miss a class, they just grab their phone for them and fake their attendance like normal. This entire plan seems silly. Why not go for biometrics if you want to keep kids in the class? It's not as trivial (but still possible) to fake a finger print or decent facial recognition. Or you could drop the requirement for attendance and let the students face he consequences of missing a lesson or the benefits of more time spent on work outside of the class.
The iphone's GPS is pretty inaccurate in my experience. If they wanted to keep it keitai-based they could just have felica readers at the doors and swipe them as you go in, since other than the iphone its basically been impossible to get a phone without felica for a few years now.
Wait, this is university and not preschool we are talking about?
Do they hand out stars for being the teacher's pet in Japanese universities?
If you don't go to class (presumably) as an adult in a university, it's your own damned business. And if you fail your exams, it's nobody's fault but your own. However I never expected that class attendance would be such an important factor so as to justify a heavy investment in labor and capital - do they not have better ways of screening who deserves to graduate and who doesn't in Japan?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
How do they do it? As far as I know, not even the iPhone will tell just anyone where it is.
Custom firmware with GPS reporting? A custom app for signing in to a lecture?
Maybe they have an agreement with the telco for CellID information for all those phones, so they can track them to within a square kilometer at least.
Don't have classes with 100+ students so the professor actually recognizes your face and you can't get away with someone else doing it for you. Huge lecture halls make for a horrible learning experience anyway.
...due to the personal information, such as email
...due to the personal information, such as location
(fixed that...)
I know this article is talking about Japan. I don't know there, but in the USA, public school is voluntary. No one is required to attend public school. Our Constitution wouldn't allow that. So how can they 'enforce' truancy laws/regulations/whatever? It is the parents choice.
The whole University scene is utterly, utterly different than in the west. It's "optional" in the same sense not being homeless is "optional" in the west - you can do it but you are looked down upon mightily. I wouldn't draw any comparisons to anything you know here.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
.... materials, lectures, videos and tests. " (FTA)
Seems to me like there's no reason to show up at all.
I saw this come up on Hacker News yesterday and knew it was only a matter of time before it hit Slashdot, and I'd be typing this (more people read Slashdot, so I thought I would just save my energy).
I am an assistant professor at one of the top schools in Japan (Aoyama Gakuin, by the way, is also in the top 10 for sure). Allow me to explain what sounds like crazy-talk to someone from the Western university system.
Here is the lynchpin for the whole thing. You understand this and you understand everything:
In Japan, it's very hard to get into a good college, but once you do, it is customary to do virtually nothing until graduation. Companies hire people largely on the name of the school on their degree, and GPAs don't even exist at most schools, and are most certainly not given to prospective employers. Furthermore, the employer is actually who does most of the real-world education. When I worked at a foreign-language college, I had students--bright, definitely technically-inclined students--being hired by IBM to be system engineers. Except, our school only offered foreign language and other "international studies" classes. No math, no science, no engineering. I don't even think we had any history professors. (The term "university" here does not mean what it means in the West. It really ought to be translated as "post-secondary school.") But our graduates were (correctly, I think) identified as people likely to succeed in IT by IBM-Japan's entrance examinations, and they were hired. The first few years of their "employment," therefore, will actually be CS classes--but only on what IBM does.
Now, the companies aren't really all that stoked about this, especially companies like IBM, but they have hit their work visa limit and can't bring in any more Indian guys who actually know what they're doing, and besides, it's awfully nice to have native speakers of the local language working at your company. But this is how it is going these days, and how it pretty much has always gone. Universities are finishing schools.
Here's the other point that contributes to rampant truancy: The job hunt is a nightmare over here. Companies only hire once a year. Everything in Japan goes on an April-March schedule. So if you don't have a job lined up by the time you graduate in March, you are screwed until next April. Doubly screwed, in fact, because the lingering question next year when you do the rounds of examinations and cattle-call interviews will be "why didn't this person get a job last time?" So Japanese university students tend to cram all their classes for 4 years into the first 2 and a half years. They literally have classes all day every day. They can do this because there's no homework.
You read that right.
I have taught at every level of the Japanese education system, from primary school through university, and I can tell you this: Homework is an anomaly. Yeah, they have it, but nothing like what I had in the US system. So all this shock and horror over "cram schools?" Guys, if these kids' parents didn't send their kids there, they wouldn't get any studying done. Basically, those places are small-group tutor companies, and they do a really important service. Don't feel sorry for the kids because they have to go to "cram school;" feel sorry for them that their academic and vocational lives are going to hinge on a single, poorly-designed, multiple-choice test designed by professors who don't know that "trick questions" are the worst thing you can put on a test, because all they do is create noise (full disclosure: I design standardized language tests; I actually know what I'm talking about here). Unlike the US, which uses highly-reliable, at-least-arguably-valid standardized tests (SAT or ACT) designed by some of the best psychometricians in the world, people are judged here by whether they can figure out the "correct" answer to an item that someone who knows nothing about test design and implementation penned in his spare time.
The "no homework" culture is exacerb
M2kidz.com asks why not give k12 students NFC / rfid equipped cell phones and free voice /text mins for class performance and inovative learning?
I would go to class if i could get a brand new IPHONE 3g and or a Android 2 phone.
mentatmedia@gmail.com
If the number of courses students attempt to not attend calls for special action it means that the education quality sucks and students feel that attendance is useless. Improve the education, not the detection.
...and assign everyone a fixed seat in the lecture room, then take a photo at the start of each class.
There's just no way the average teenager could not find a means of disabling the GPS feature, or befriending a nerd capable of accomplishing the same.
Still, nice work if you can get it.
Not a Jew
...I'll have two cellphones! What do I care if I temporarily have someone else hold on to the one you gave me? All my stuff is on the other phone, or on both!
This article is bullshit. Japanese kids don't care about the iphone, there are way cooler devices available to them. Besides, spoiling kids with tech gadgets will make them learn that everything is handed to them in life.
all comments are about whether attendance should be obligatory. no one seems to be concerned about students' privacy? they force them to carry a tracking device!!
...which isn't GPS at all when you're inside a building without a broad line of sight to the sky, so the best resolution they'll have is based on cell information, perhaps refined somewhat by triangulation, but there's limited resolution with that. I'm pretty sure that every last one of my lecture halls in college was within 30 meters of both a lab full of nice gaming boxes (err, CAD workstations) and a lounge with comfy couches.
There's no failure quite as dissatisfying as a complete and total solution to the wrong problem.
Could you rephrase this in something approaching normal English? Thanks.
is the University paying the forced data bill and voice bill?
if not then this is just more carp like over priced books that are forced on to people going to University.
Terrific way to educate students. Bribe them to show up to class.
I assume you're pushing that "Why the Japanese Hate the iPhone" blather without having read a word of it. It must be of the most lambasted stories WIRED has ever coughed up. The author did no actual research on the topic; he pulled some comments out of context from Japanese blogs to say "See? The Japanese hate the iPhone" - after which *those bloggers* responded to say "Huh? My iPhone and I said no such thing". Most damning, the author presented ZERO data. Not one piece of sales info to show whether iPhone reception in Japan has been normal, miserable, or earth-shaking. Nothing. Read the scathing comments under that article. The piece is lazy nonsense, and the author was rightly raked over the coals for it.
I skimmed it but didn't read the comments at bottom.
It's true that I don't have sales data, and I'd be curious to see it if anyone does. Fair point.
The article mentioned that some handsets in Japan have capabilities that iPhones don't. It also mentioned that some of those handsets have initial usability issues. But that spoke (however well or poorly) to nairbv's point about Japan having some "better" handsets available.
The article also pointed out various aspects of the iPhone that might not appeal to some elements of the Japanese consumer market. They seemed plausible to me.
Finally, I'm guessing that *you* may not have read the editor's note about how the article changed after its initial publication (I read only the updated version):
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/02/why-the-iphone/#editnote
Reading through the article I suspect there's more to this than the summary says. It's a particular school at the University that is involved with how computers affect society. They are also using the Ipod for much of the communication between the students and the professors. So the professors have a sure way of communicating with the students, and the students have a sure way to reply back to the professors. Also there's a built in way to see how having such a device affects their lives (which is part of what they study.) Finally the article also points out that they are hoping this will lead to the students developing more apps for the Iphone which might be useful for the University as well as good practice for the students. So it appears the attendance taking application is a small part of how they intend to use the Iphones.
The iPhone is already free in Japan and nobody wants it:
http://www.crunchgear.com/2009/02/26/iphone-not-selling-well-in-japan-now-available-for-free/
never seemed to work in japan. It was all about the appearance of working hard. Buddies of mine's bosses were astonished at how much they got done during the day(american japanese or americans), but were flumoxed that they would not stay afterwards as part of the work culture.
Bring back the old version of slashdot.
If they dont want to show up to class, let them fail. If they really want them to be there, have there be a short quiz at the beginning of class. At any decent university, if you have someone else take a quiz for you, you'll be suspended or expelled.
Oh, I'd read it all right - both versions. I had forgotten to mention WIRED's apology at the end! The incredible thing is simply a lack of ANY sales data in the article - not the old version, not the new version. No numbers have been released (AFAIK) by Softbank or Apple, so I can't blame the author for not *having* the numbers. Who knows, it just may be that the iPhone isn't selling in Japan. But with NO data upon which to make any claim whatsoever... Wow, journalism can't get much worse than "create a headline and then make up a story to go with it"!
someone should warn them that iPhones don't have gps, only location detection based on cell signals which can be turned off.
'students currently fake attendance by having other students answer for them during rollcall' ...this is easily done because we Asians all look alike.
While I understand that attendance is compulsory at this particular university, the courses I took that required attendance here in the states were, with a few exceptions, generally a complete waste of time.
Funny that none of my major or minor courses required attendance (except for project presentation days; my project and other people's), and nearly all of my general education courses did.
And the gen-ed classes were definitely not college level courses. They seemed designed only to help the DIV I athletes float a passing GPA and to keep students in school longer. Most were taught exclusively from the texts (or a book the instructor wrote), and were often taught exclusively by GAs.
While I believe in educational access for everyone, we really need to stop lowering the bar educationally to make 4 year university available to everyone.
If these gen-ed courses were more interesting and challenging, I would have been much more willing (or at least compelled) to attend. Instead, I generally showed up on the first day along with all the Family Sciences majors and football players, and never returned until midterms and finals.
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Still won't solve the problem..,what a waste