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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.'"
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.
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.
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).
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.
.
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.
Maybe your professors should know if there are better options available.
This is fucking bullshit, and why I don't e-read to begin with FUCK IT ALL!
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.
'"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