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."
The Japanese don't see their university students as grown-ups, not yet 'shakai-jin' or part of society. So university kids are still... kids. Even more frustrating is; grades are more about attendance than performance.
- These characters were randomly selected.
Attendance is no measure of academic ability.
No. However not every student can realistically gauge the complexity of the course, especially when he does not attend. Then some weeks later he comes (or reads a book) and can't understand the material. Recovery could be painful, or even impossible if the student discovers the problem a week before the exam. If the university is treating students as children it's probably because, on average, they are.
Correct me if I'm wrong: The iPhone doesn't have background applications, so the student has to go to class, sit down, run the app to locate his or herself. Couldn't they then could quit the app, get up and leave?
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.
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