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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"?
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".
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
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.