Teachers Know If You've Been E-Reading 348
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.'"
"but with a good intent"???? (Score:4, Interesting)
-- C. S. Lewis
(who, on a side-note, also wrote a snazzy novel which more or less served as the blueprint for 1984 [lewisiana.nl]
Re:Make it a criminal act to read someone else's b (Score:4, Interesting)
Obligatory link [gnu.org].
It turns out this hypothetical scenario actually was too extreme, it was set much too far in the future...
Re:Disconcerting? (Score:3, Interesting)
You're making some pretty strong assumptions. First that professors care whether students read the material, we don't. This is big person school and you should be doing what we assigned as it is nominally expected. I'm the biggest giver in my department, if young adults come to me and ask for help or a more thorough explanation I always give it. This is a really great metric to see if assigning a reading is worthwhile as to see if the majority reads it or refers to another source. Second the alternatives you give seem a little outlandish. Hacking an ebook isn't exactly grade school knowledge and at most a kid is more likely to download a PDF of the book from a torrent site than break the encryption on the software.
This is why people get paranoid over nothing. Professors in general are more hurt when you don't read than angry. We wonder why we screwed up more than you.
Re:Disconcerting? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Disconcerting? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Disconcerting? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Disconcerting? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.