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.
----
Go canucks, habs, and sens!
Depends how you define 'better'. Japanese phones are certainly more feature-rich than the iPhone. However, they aren't always more elegant or usable (some of the interfaces on Japanese phones are pretty awful, to be honest).
Besides, even if I had a 'better' phone, I still wouldn't refuse another phone for free!
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.
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?
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...
assuming they're dumb enough to store such information on a device owned by a third party...
They'll tell the students that they're going to do random spot checks on the phones and if there isn't any personal information on them they won't graduate.
My point is that attendance is irrelevant as long as the student learns the material (measured by testing and finals).
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." --Mark Twain
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.
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?
Dear slashdot, why am I seeing an advertisement for scientology on the slashdot front page ?
Because they can't advertise on Wikipedia anymore?
coding is life
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!
As a Navy veteran, I'd like to add the usual caveats:
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.
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
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
I'm an assistant professor at one of the top universities in Japan. Check out my ridiculously-long post above. I forgive you if you skim it. I had a lot to say.