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Teachers Know If You've Been E-Reading
RougeFemme writes with this story in the New York Times about one disconcerting aspect of the ongoing move to electronic textbooks: "Teachers at 9 colleges are testing technology from a Silicon Valley start-up that lets them know if you're skipping pages, highlighting text, taking notes — or, of course, not opening the book at all. '"It's Big Brother, sort of, but with a good intent," said Tracy Hurley, the dean of the school of business at Texas A&M.' 'Major publishers in higher education have already been collecting data from millions of students who use their digital materials. But CourseSmart goes further by individually packaging for each professor information on all the students in a class — a bold effort that is already beginning to affect how teachers present material and how students respond to it, even as critics question how well it measures learning.'"
I don't want my professors knowing that I am totally using SparkNotes!
Why is it disconcerting?
I mean... yes, it can be mis-used. The data should be used to flag up pupils who may be struggling, but will also flag those who may already know the material, but just because data could be incorrectly used doesn't make it inherently worrying.
Does it?
F that.
I don't care about intent I care about ability. Intent can change unexpectedly.
Aren't all 'big brother' systems put into place "with good intent"?
-- C. S. Lewis
(who, on a side-note, also wrote a snazzy novel which more or less served as the blueprint for 1984
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Thereby forcing everyone to buy an ebook. All Hail
If they pass the test, who cares if they just learned from lectures, knew the material from beforehand, looked it up from another source, or other non-textbook methods of learning? The point is that, at the end of the class, the student can show they learned the material.
I am patenting Pageturner, proven to be the best way to spoof your e-book reading!
This software package turns pages while you drink a beer.
I haven't taken a note in my entire life, and I consider highlighting books to be sacrilege.
Taking notes is overrated. If your brain can't process the information, taking notes won't mean anything in the long run. It's just a exam-passing technique, but it won't help you understand better and certainly will not help you hold on to more knowledge beyond the date of the exam you are studying for.
Read the damn book. Then read some more on the subject, and by all means skip pages and passages if you consider them non-important or redundant. In the real world you will not have time to read 1500 pages of product documentation to understand an API. Learning to skip the irrelevant content and find the relevant information quickly is a fundamental skill.
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
Next up: an app which automatically turns the pages and shares highlighting. (If this is used for grading or implicitly incorporated into paper/project grading).
it's like the saying goes.. "The road to hell is paved with good intentions"
University as a business above all? No way! It's all about learning to think!
The prof should not care, that is not his place. Either you will pass based on your efforts or fail.
If data can be collected someone will collected; once it is collected there is a strong "need" to use. This certainly can be used to help improve coursework; especially if aggregate data shows patterns where material can be improved. If there is correlation between scores and performance than it is worthwhile to see if their is causation as well and use that to help improve learning. OTOH, factoring that into grading would be problematic, since learning styles differ. I took an English Lit class in college and never opened the book and got an A. Why? I had read the book a few years ago and so was familiar enough with the text to discuss and analyze it. Of course, as one of my professors put it" I don't care if you come to class or do any work, we've already got your money. What you get from your investment is up to you."
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
This strikes me as yet another place where today's students, many already low in internal motivation, have that motivation replaced with a Big-Brother-esque all-knowing eye that knows when they haven't conformed. All this does is train the low-motivation students to become mindless robots who just respond to the stick when prodded. We're training away motivated learning and replacing it with a closed loop stimulus-response system where no real learning occurs.
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
Obligatory link.
It turns out this hypothetical scenario actually was too extreme, it was set much too far in the future...
2*3*3*3*3*11*251
Education in 1900: you need to be able to do things.
Education in 1980: you need to be able to know how to do things.
Education in 2000: you need to memorize things.
Education in 2013: you need to have done the reading, been present, breathing and perhaps even conscious.
It's just a exam-passing technique, but it won't help you understand better and certainly will not help you hold on to more knowledge beyond the date of the exam you are studying for.
Maybe for you, but it sounds like you havent taken many notes, and it certainly sounds like you can only speak for yourself.
For me and many that I know, taking notes can be a way of summarizing and processing the information coming in. By restating what the teacher says in a different way, and by taking it down, one is re-committing it to memory in a more lasting way than passively sitting in the classroom.
IIRC its not even up for debate that "active" learning styles are on the whole more effective than passively listening to a lecture.
...what "Big Brother" policies HAVEN'T been motivated by some superficial 'good intent'?
Seriously?
Last time I checked, the pavement on the road to Hell was still the same as it always was.
-Styopa
The Aggies can read!
The real: Teachers are rated based on how much time their students spend reading at home.
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Students in that article complained that the CourseSmart assessment software unfairly judged their "engagement level" as low if they took class notes on a different software package/editor or even if they took handwritten class notes which were not even considered by the software: At a recent session here of a management training class, Mr. Guardia addressed how to intervene efficiently with underperformers. The students watched a video of a print shop manager chewing out an employee without knowing the circumstances. The moral: The manager needed better data.
. . Then Mr. Guardia discussed with his students the analytics of their own reading, which he had e-mailed to them. The students suggested that once again better information was needed. Several said their score was being minimized because they took notes on paper.
. . Others complained there were software bug
And as to the question of whether these analytics mean anything, the software developer had this to say:
CourseSmart says the data it collects now is a beginning. "We'll ultimately show how the student traverses the book," Mr. Devine said. "There's a correlation and causality between engagement and success."Note the phrase "ultimately show", which means that this is still an experiment. And note the jumping to a conclusion about correlation and causation between engagement and success. While that conclusion may be warranted by other studies, and depending upon the definitions used for "engagement" and for "success" (you can always game the definitions too), the problem is that the monitoring systems way of numerically evaluating "engagement" may be all fucked up if you use handwritten notes or read auxillary works (other textbooks, older classes' texts, or even "outlines" of texts).
She recently was reprimanded for taking 29 minutes to move a load of boxes; the boxes were much heavier than usual, but the numbers didn't show that, she said..
The worst uses of these metrification analytics was highlighted in a Los Angeles Times article yesterday called "Monitoring upends balance of power at workplace, some say". That article had some examples of over-monitoring and over-detailed "supervising" with bad or partial numbers:
Or the example of how to read in what you want:
One major retailer, for instance, started measuring its employees, only to discover its most productive workers were part-timers who had been there less than a year. It then began to focus on hiring short-term part-timers, said Ed Frauenheim, a senior editor at Workforce Magazine.Shouldn't it have focussed on finding out the things that made those workers more productive, and wouldn't it have made more sense to have turned those very productive part-time employees into full time employees with better compensation? Having analytics just gives you/the teacher/the supervisor one extra checkbox to check-off as the supposedly valid reason for giving someone a bad evaluation / a bad or failing grade / a demotion or firing. It creates fake evidence or fake justification which can be fallen upon as a crutch or "just cause" for the action which the person in power may have already wanted to take.
This was the entire point of Freshman year - in return for your tuition (!!) among other things you got to get away from a daily "papers please" mentality of the lower grades, and then you were graded on the fewer metrics for that class, "however you (presumed honestly) got there". Cue the brilliant slackers types having to face their latent tendencies.
This just another sad factor showing that data leads to people getting a carnal lust to control people with.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Do you really think students will struggle to get used to touching the 'next page' button about every 1-5 minutes, while playing their computer games?
Teachers will only catch the odd unprepared student who honestly did not have time to study. The professional slackers however will walk free.
We should give students the responsibility. It is their life, their responsibility. Takes about 18-25 years on average to grow up. And this kind of thing just is not helping to achieve becoming an adult.
Cramming some stupid facts into their heads is only one of the task of schools. Making adults out of them is another. Sometimes those conflict. Deal with it.
Some aspects of education are more important than privacy?
And you can speak only for yourself. Each person's brain works differently.
In my case, I'm not strong on "I/O", so if I'm taking notes, I'm clogging up channels that would be better used to absorb the lecture in the first place.
I figured this out gradually during college. The first year, I took copious notes and filled thick notebooks. After realizing that the note taking was counterproductive for me, the last couple of years, I took essentially no notes. My GPA remained the same, but my stress level dropped.
For people like myself, "active" learning is best kept to lab experiments and writing papers.
For me and many that I know, taking notes can be a way of summarizing and processing the information coming in.
In other words, everybody learns in a different way. All the more reason this Big Brother software is a bad idea. The worst possible thing would be to try to force everyone into a standard way of studying.
The prof should not care, that is not his place. Either you will pass based on your efforts or fail.
Two issues with your assertion... well, three.
First, maybe the e-book may have been written by that very professor. The class may even be a test sample for how readable and engaging the ebook is. "Publish or perish"
Second, If enough students consistently fail the classes, someone's going to wonder if the professor should be teaching it.
Finally, although it is not their place to care, a professor that does care will be a better instructor.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Ah. Your anecdote contradicts all the research. I hasten to adjust my pedagogy!
First, Conflict of interest. No prof should be making money using his own books in his own class.
Second, maybe the students are just idiots.
Third, I disagree.
My favorite and probably best prof, honestly did not care about students who did not care about his class. He failed 75% of the people who took one class with me. He put the goals on the board, handed out readings and answered questions. If you did not ask questions of him during class or office hours odds are you failed. If you showed up to the lab without your work completed and ready to be tested, odds are you failed. He openly mocked students who failed to live up to his expectations. This was a 500 level class, so there was no reason for anyone unprepared to be there.
Students deserve academic freedom too. Maybe they're learning the subject via library books on their own time, and have no use for ebooks. The goal of the professor (at the end if the course) is to determine how much a student knows, not to enforce that the professor's method of learning was used.
I think this is more of a matter of the education level at which this is implemented: High School vs. Junior/Community college vs. University undergraduate. Except at the college level, where you need to be able to "push back" at administration to say why you gave a student a poor grade. If a student fails, they might have to take the class again. At a community college, this means more income for the college. Your comments about cheating upward is true for high-school, junior high-school, and middle school. (My god, are they going to do metrics and standardized tests for elementary school students next?) /. article was going to be about software used to assess high-school students, where sometimes teachers do need to babysit and handhold and push them to do the reading and assignments. I thought that in college, it was accepted that you "have to be a big boy / big girl now" and become responsible for your reading habits and study habits. If you don't get around to your homework in high-school, your teacher gets in your face. The college level experience is supposed to be different. Perhaps community college requires professors to be in the students' faces. I thought that research-level university professors were too busy with research to deign interacting with students at this level of detail. Maybe the grad students or TAs would have to deal with undergrad students this way.
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I thought that this
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Are students getting stupider? Are grad students being treated the way undergrads used to be? And are undergrads being treated and micromanaged the way way high-school students used to be? And does this mean that high-schoolers like me are being treated like Jr high or middle school kids of the past?
To this bad idea, I say no thank you. Why don't we actually treat college students like adults.
Fast forward 25 years...
"Mr. President, we have here a log of your reading of your 'systems of government' textbook and you underlined all these passages about communism, would care to respond to the claim that your actually a communist?!?"
Nothing about this idea is evenly remotely good. It's so bad that who ever thought it up should be fired along with the manager who approved it.
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
This is fucking bullshit, and why I don't e-read to begin with FUCK IT ALL!
I think that's all true, but originally in 1900 or so, students were expected to know how to do things: they had to have abilities, outside of special disciplines. Since that time, education has been moving more toward having them memorize steps through specific tasks, which makes them good cogs (true, true) but unable to act outside of that narrow framework. Students today lack the ability to go into an unknown situation and reason it out; what they have is the ability to, given a known situation, repeat a series of steps, with no real connection to the desired consequences of those steps.
The problem is Professors want you to read the book as enrichment, but don't actually teach from the book, or test from the book. My last few years of college I stopped buying the textbooks (as the professor would put one on hold at the Library) and found that not opening the book didn't reduce my grades. Now they can reduce your grade for not reading. This is similar to homework, which I found no link between that and understanding homework. I had classes where I performance with excellence on the testing, but the lack of my homework reduce my grade to unsatisfactory.
Most Colleges subscribe to the theory there is one way to learn, which is not true. I've been in classes where they berate the class for not taking notes. I've never take notes as I found they actually reduce learning for me. They way I learn is listening to lecture, walking around and thinking about them, and then a good night sleep. Most of the other methods of study lead me to temporary remembrance of the subject matter. I stand by my methods of learning as I find that I'm able to recall facts and apply them to subject matter I learned in High School and my peers who sometimes performed better than me on tests appear to have no memory of ever learning the topics.
Some classes just have dry reading material. Some classes, you're required to take and have no interest in the subject. Having big brother watch you to make sure you do the required reading isn't the answer. The student can blankly stare at the pages long enough to "read" the words to promptly forget them. With a little effort from the teacher, a bit of interest can be developed and more will be learned and retained past the end of the page.
IIRC its not even up for debate that "active" learning styles are on the whole more effective than passively listening to a lecture.
Simply writing something down is not "active". Thinking about it is active. Writing notes takes time away from thinking.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I already patented it while you were drinking your beer.
'"It's Big Brother, sort of, but with a good intent,"
Said every dictator, thug, and authoritarian ever...
Seriously, how can someone say this with a straight face? Oh, wait, I forget...this is a college campus.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
It did at my university. We had a professor cut each student a check when it happened. She should have provided the books for free if she wrote them. This rule was designed to stop that.
I don't think social punishment is an Aspergers thing. Pretty much all societies have some form of it, from the stocks to making people carry placards announcing what they did wrong.
I just had to write a fifteen page essay with well-research references (not wikipedia or purely internet based sources), so I'm still stuck in my weekend writing habit of including the citation (url link to L.A. Times) and short snippet in-line quotes from the source material ! Term-paper writing habits seem to carry over into every day activities and writing projects, even /. comments. I do notice that I've written "essay length" posts a bit in the last two days. That's probably also from the paper writing habit of putting my thoughts into a coherent and structured format. How very un-slash-dot-like, eh? :>)
Simply reading the text doesn't mean you understand it or can apply what you've learned. And what if it the teacher discovers that most of the class skipped a few pages? Will he put a question on the test that can only be answered if you've read that page? How will that help? And what if you're not a fast reader and simply can't get through dull-as-dishwater prose by some undeservedly famous author? Or what if you're a wicked fast reader but the teacher doesn't believe you and downgrades you because you didn't spend as much time reading as he thinks you should? And what if you read the book before? Do you get downgraded because you didn't read it again?
I'm sure they're all just sitting around saying they want more work to do, like seeing if students open their books or not. If a student doesn't want to follow along in class, the teacher isn't going to turn into a nanny and start investigating them.
I wasnt saying that "all note taking is active", i was saying that active styles are more effective and that for many (such as myself) the note-taking is a way of thinking about and engaging with the lecture.
Yes, it is possible to passively take notes, and for me it is not very helpful to do so. But (for me and for many I've talked to) taking notes while thinking on what the professor / speaker / preacher is saying is a strong way of thinking about, reflecting on, and committing to memory what is being said.
What if the student does not engage at all, but aces the tests? Or what if he spends the most time reading it but fails all the tests?
In neither of those cases does this metric offer any insight.
The biggest failing in secondary education is the lack of failing. This does not address that. The second is the replacement of actual teachers knowing and analyzing their students with pointless metrics, like this one.
I had a professor that allowed cheat sheets on exams. The requirements were that it was a letter sized sheet maximum and hand written. Turns out it was an indirect way to force everyone to read the materials (books and provided lecture outlines), filter out the cruft, and write down the important bits. Students in his class learned and retained more material making cheat sheets then by taking traditional notes. If you give something that appears to be a reward or bonus (a cheat sheet), people tend to put more incentive into doing the work.
I wasn't particularly a fan of teachers that refused to give class notes/outlines to students, Many times it was the ONLY material that would be on the tests and copying stuff off those scribbles they drew on an overhead projector or chalk/dry erase board was painful. When it came time to study, those who didn't have the notes perfectly written down were in a bit of a bind.
'"It's Big Brother, sort of, but with a good intent," Bahahahahaahaa......
So those college students that have read loads of other material on a particular subject get viewed as cheaters because they didn't read enough pages of the college's e-book yet still got an A?
You have to read ONLY what the college says you need to read, and read all of it or you're an oddball? WTF? The education system gets more and more lost as time goes on.
They're trying to pull an Apple and make textbook sales and use a walled garden, and to that I say "Fuck no." ...
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Ahhh, now I understand their true motivation. Good point. I emphatically agree with what you say.
The issue isn't what the teachers are doing with the data. That's a grease stain from the real horror here.
The issue is, as we go forward, ebook readers will be pretty much the only way kids read library books and any other words, for that matter. When the libraries slowly shut down the paper stacks, we will be looking at a system that as a matter of course tracks every word that a human child, or adult, later, will input into their skulls.
This means: tracking for seditious or suspicious writings. Personality analysis, broken down by year, type, and growth of particular concentration of interest. I'm not saying they will be correct analyses - but they don't have to be, as credit scores and polygraph use attests.
Our society shows, doubtlessly, that such metrics will be undertaken for "security" reasons. Mostly, really, it will be done "because power". Power is all the reason they will ever need. The ability to track not only location, associations, but the very thoughts you, as a kid and beyond, are reading and processing to make you, you.
Billions of paper books will still exist, of course, and smart people will read those to keep their reading habits off the radar, but for the most part, people will accept the monitoring. Watch what you say, watch what you do, and of course watch what you read. And you have nothing to worry about, naturally, if you don't read the wrong things, we will say.
This is hell.
I teach in college... ...and by there ignorant ass friends.
C- See me after class.
Thereby forcing everyone to buy an ebook. All Hail
...a more expensive eBook with monitoring attributes attached. Oh, and ya gotta pay (think of it as a tax) for instructor monitoring. It's to Keep America Safe.
How it should be used: "This section here doesn't seem to provide value to our students"
How it will be used: "You read the book, but your page rate was excessive in parts, so the computer gave you a reading score of 87%."
Some of my classes were like this, and it was astounding how many people at the '500' level (at my U they were 4000 or 5000-level classes, I think we both mean 'final year, pinnacle of your education' classes) were completely worthless at their chosen major. I couldn't believe some of those people had not been flunked out of the program before getting that far along.
The other issue though is that when you hit those senior-level courses is that group projects start showing up, where each person really needs to pull their weight for it to work out. Or all of the work gets dumped on the one person who doesn't want to fail and the slackers still skate through...
Mon chien, il n'a pas du nez. Comment scent-il? TrÃs mauvais!
I like the positive way of looking at this that you've chosen. However, I also mourn the loss of what college should have been, could have been, etc.
Do you also use lots of bold in your essays? Because that's a big part of what makes your post look "apk-ish".
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
I never did homework until I got to college. Especially Math homework. I had D overall averages in most of my Math courses, I never did the homework, never showed my work on the tests, never picked up a calculator, had an A test average. My stepmother was a Math teacher and assumed I was cheating, especially after talking to my teachers. So she sat me down one night and forced me to do my homework, and I was going to do it right there at the table in front of her. She was shocked when 15 minutes later I was done and had a page full of "Question number: Answer". Fuck, high school Math was easy.
It was until I started taking college level Math that I learned the value of homework and showing your work step by step. Sure I still come across a few problems in the homework that I can look at and solve without picking up a pencil, but those are usually only a handful of the problems in the section (the ones that are intentionally simple).
FTFA: "Published: April 8, 2013"
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
So, how does the person(s) monitoring this know how *I* learn? Lots of learning and reading styles out there, this is just an effort to give them another meaningless metric to rate students on. Bah.
Organization? You must be joking..
'"It's Big Brother, sort of, but with a good intent,"
...it's called grading the students on what they have learned. And I can't believe such an inane comment came from a dean. Of course, it is Texas, land of the dumbed-down and incorrect textbooks, so maybe we shouldn't be that surprised....
DNA is a Turing machine. You, however, being dynamic and emergent, are not.
"It's Big Brother, sort of, but with a good intent"
Isn't it always? Who or what defines "good"?
It gripped her hand gently. 'Regret is for humans,' it said.
No, I copied that style from the A.P. news or the editorial commentary writer's techniques of quoting other documents or statements and bold-face highlighting a portion of it with the statement "[emphasis mine]" to point out that the bold-face was not in the original. It sort of matches my best-friend's speaking style, which I copy from time to time. It helps to show cadences in poetry or indicates deliberate mispronunciations like "putting the em-phaa-sis on the wrong syl-lahb-ull" on purpose. (when they really are correctly pronounced em-phu-sis and syll-a-bul (and correctly spelled "emphasis" and "syllable", just in case you thought I didna know that right spellin' thar, laddie)
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The bold highlights what I really want to quote and reply to; the rest of the un-bolded text maintains the context of the snippet I quoted. The snippet by itself without its surrounding context often does not carry the same connotation that the context helps to provide. I keep the bold out of my essay except as needed in the reference citations. I don't want to lose any "form" points (or any "content" points, either!) on my essay grades.
Education researchers will be able to gather huge amounts of data and we will be able to find optimal teaching and study methods much more easily. Wait, teachers are using this? Oh crap, here comes more heading unrelated to understanding.
Taking notes is overrated. If your brain can't process the information, taking notes won't mean anything in the long run.
I'm not a big note taker, but taking notes isn't overrated. First of all it can help you process the information. JUST that alone is probably worth taking notes. But it also can help you review the material later. You are given a LOT of material in a short amount of time. Rereading the notes helps you remember the big points. And they are big points that you came up with, not someone else.
Most of my college books were never even opened. Sucked it all in from the classes. Then when I really had to study I was screwed. Toughest course I ever took.