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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.'"
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.
Because it is worthless.
Again the easy thing to measure is the wrong thing. If the student read the material from this ebook has not a thing in a the world to do with the student knowing the material or not. He may have learned it in the past, he may read another book about the subject or hacked the ebook so he could read it on another device.
The danger here is substituting the easy to measure metric "Pages Read" for the much tougher "Material Understood".
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.
Some professors do care if pages are read, or will once they realize that this is an easy metric to gather.
I once got a 3.0 in a class instead of a 4.0 even though I scored a 97% on the Final, a 96% on the tests and a 98% on Labs. I never attended any class meeting other than examinations. For that my grade was docked by a moron who surely would use this pages read metric as another way to be a petty dictator. He could not write a simple sort on the board without consulting his notes, but somehow I was supposed to waste my time in his class.
I don't think knowing the material before is that outlandish, nor is downloading a simple tool to crack an ebook. We did that when I was in university and that was pretty much the beginning of that sort of thing. These were generally PDFs that would only open in some DRMed client.
I would guess that this will be mostly used to protect the professor's back. So what if a student doesn't read the material, when it comes down to it and the student scores poorly on an exam, the professor can bring up their statistics and point out that it's the student's fault, not theirs.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
Maybe your professors should know if there are better options available.
Not a babysitter? I sure wish you'd talk to my department chair, my dean, the Provost and the state legislature. Because they're all convinced I need to be the students' babysitter. Guess what happens to my chances at retention, raises, and promotion if I just treat everyone like adults and fail those who don't do the work? Keep in mind: people who know the material already are the exception to the rule. The ill-prepared and, sadly, indolent student is more common. And I'm expected to babysit those students. Some schools are even requiring faculty to carry cellphones and be on call so that when Little Johnny Baseballhat realizes he needs an answer, we can turn to and present. So, yeah, I'd like to live in your world. It would be nice to have people like yourself who are self-starting and ready to move on to more advanced topics.
I teach in college, and I see this attitude every fucking day.
I have students who will tell me that they already know the subject, that this class isn't giving them anything (entry-level/mid level English), and that they shouldn't have to take it at all. Throughout the course of the semester, almost every student will tell me this.
In the 6 sections I teach, of ~30 students, I would say 2 actually don't need this class. A VAST majority just see stuff like what you say spouted constantly on-line and by there ignorant ass friends. A VAST majority simply over-value their skills and abilities.
I'm not saying that you aren't different, I'm just saying that in a majority of cases where 'the student knows the subject already' it really is 'the student believes that s/he knows the subject already, but really doesn't know his/her ass from a hole in the ground, but because s/he is such an entitled, self-important precious little snowflake, s/he can't make wise decisions'. Believe me when I tell you this - in most cases where the student is acting out because "he is bored with the coursework," in all actuality, "he just has piss-poor self-control and his parents don't hold him accountable." The little geniuses that parents see are really just average kids who are supremely lazy in most cases. (Keep in mind that I acted out in school because I was an advanced learner, they do exist, just not as often as you would be led to believe by parents.)
Somewhere along the way, the attitude in college shifted from the very collegiate ---I'm here to learn--- to the very secondary school ---you have to teach me, good luck---. What you see with this - where instructors can track the number of pages read, is just the simplest form of teacher-student coercion to do actual God Damned work that happens every day in various forms.
If professors need that kind of protection, then something else is very wrong.
Why would parents hold an adult accountable?
Does your Mommy make sure you go to work everyday?
This attitude that these are children to be coddled is not helping.
Why are you not failing these folks?
If a student could test out and get the credit hours, you and your 2 students who don't need it would be much happier.
why test out only to have to still take 10 hours in a now harder class?
Because you would learn more.
At that point, textbooks basically become a reference. That was the case for most of my college courses. Even if I wanted to use them to actually learn something, many of them were so horribly written. I had to look up the "how-to" elsewhere. By college, learning should be self directed anyway. Metrics such as "how many pages read" or even class attendance shouldn't factor into grading at all (ridiculous in the age of distant learning courses).
Professors/teachers do. Our society has moved from a culture that values individual initiative to one that demands everything put on a silver platter and hand delivered. There are various web comics drawn to describe the tendency of our culture from the 50s forward to put more and more burden on the teacher rather than the student. If I teach a lesson with a reading, listening, writing, speaking, building, and acting component, anyone who participates should be able to catch at least part of what I am instructing (I've used nearly every general category of learning reinforcement). Yet I still find many students who do not participate. These students come from good homes, I have positive relationships with their parents and with them and a healthy class environment, AND yet I still have students who have "good days" and "bad days".
Learning is a choice and it does not have to happen even in the best class (and I while I am certainly not perfect, I have one of the best classes I've had in years).
Where I studied getting flunked was quite the norm. The tests were very hard and the professors didn't give a rat's ass about what percentage of the students passed their test. It was tough, disappointing but taught us a thing or two in the long run. Now I heard that a lot of universities check what percentage passed and blame the professor if their numbers are too low. Some professors could use the GP's argument in order to maintain high standards in an exam: Yes, 90% failed the test, but look! Most of them didn't even bother to read the book's cover.