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.'"

BB with good intent

[Anonymous Coward]

F that.

I don't care about intent I care about ability. Intent can change unexpectedly.

Aren't they all?

[fox1324]

Aren't all 'big brother' systems put into place "with good intent"?

Just test!

[White Flame]

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.

Re:Disconcerting?

[h4rr4r]

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".

Re:Just test!

[h4rr4r]

That is a hard metric, this is an easy one. People love easy metrics, never mind if they are actually worth anything. With this you can make spreadsheets and powerpoint slides, those allow you have meetings and pretend to be important.

The dumbing down continues

[concealment]

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.

Re:Disconcerting?

[h4rr4r]

In some of those cases I did ask, and was promptly denied for that class was a prereq for the next class. I tested out whenever possible in that type of situation.

The instructor does not need to know, if it is meaningful to him, he is a poor instructor. His job is to present the class, offering the readings and hold tests. Not to be your babysitter.

Re:No!!!

[orthancstone]

Maybe your professors should know if there are better options available.

Re:Disconcerting?

[supercrisp]

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.

Re:Disconcerting?

[__aaeihw9960]

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.

Re:Disconcerting?

[nine-times]

If professors need that kind of protection, then something else is very wrong.

Re:Disconcerting?

[ShanghaiBill]

why test out only to have to still take 10 hours in a now harder class?

Because you would learn more.

Re:Disconcerting?

[NJRoadfan]

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).

Re:Disconcerting?

[eleuthero]

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).