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.'"
No!!! (Score:2)
Re:No!!! (Score:4, Insightful)
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Disconcerting? (Score:3)
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?
Re:Disconcerting? (Score:5, Insightful)
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".
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Or even ... printed it.
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The danger here is substituting the easy to measure metric "Pages Read" for the much tougher "Material Understood".
Not only easier to measure, but more "socially desirable". Instead of grading students on whether they've learned the material, you can grade them on whether they've tried to learn the material. This avoids the sometimes embarrassing fact that not everyone can hack certain courses.
At a lower level, I'm not a hard-ass about this. "A for effort" may be appropriate, to a certain extent, in elementary school, where you have to take into account that kids mental abilities may develop at different times, and ca
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The problem with allowing the "A for effort" in elementary education is that this then breeds an expectation in the student and the whole system.
If you cannot read by end of First grade, you should be repeating. Instead today we "A for effort" until 6th grade and then maybe a higher level teacher does more than promote them to get rid of them. The end result is people graduating high school that can't read at a functional level.
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My problem is why does effort matter?
In the real world we care about results not effort. If you have to reduce your department head count by one and your have to to select from the lazy guy who gets all his work or a hard worker bee who never completes his assigned takes, lazy will still be collecting a paycheck while the hard worker will be on unemployment.
Results are what matter, teaching kids any different is a disservice to them and the society they join.
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some kids who didn't receive such things in their childhood may have to put forth a lot of effort to do a particular assignment
So there's the effort that they should be getting credit for.
A related problem is that kids who are bright and/or come from a good environment come to expect to get A's without much effort. That sets them up to be discouraged or poor students as they get older and the going gets tougher. My 4th grade daughter is a bright kid who (I hope) comes from a decent environment. People used to tell her she was smart, which infuriated me, despite (or because) it's true. I've finally gotten them to stop (mostly) and
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If only somebody would invent a way to examine the student's level of understanding. Some sort of "test" if you will. You could call it an "examination", or maybe an "exam" for short.
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Those are difficult to write well, harder to grade well and it is extremely difficult to present that data to others.
Pages read on the other hand is easier in all aspects.
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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 alternativ
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.
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On the other hand, if I go to the professor and am having issues, and he suggest that he monitors m
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Because the student knows the subject already.
I had several university classes that I was able to score a 4 in that I never bought or even saw a copy of the written material. It would have been a waste of time and money for me to buy and read those books.
Re:Disconcerting? (Score:5, Insightful)
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? (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.
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Why would parents hold an adult accountable?
I assume that you mean parents hold me accountable? I get calls on a semi-regular basis from parents. They want to know why Jonny/Jill isn't doing well. It happens. In my class, I publicly berate the student WHO IS AN ADULT for having their Mommy and Daddy call me. It's a matter of time before this gets me fired.
Does your Mommy make sure you go to work everyday?
Nope - she doesn't support my lifestyle at all.
This attitude that these are children to be coddled is not helping.
Why are you not failing these folks?
I think you missed my point. My point is that the attitude that students are there to be GIVEN information, not to earn it, and that EVERYONE is a gen
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My normal experience from trying to actually show knowledge of a subject usually ends up running into an instructor with the attitude that you just presented. Instead of being allowed an opportunity to show/discuss my current understanding, I get treated as if I think I am a special little snowflake. Then I am told to prove it on the test, which I do. And then I am still forced into a bucket with the average groups. It is fun when the instructors are all so pissed off and jaded that they hate trying to pass
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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.
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What kind of class are you in? In science classes the texts are nothing without an explanation or transistion. In social sciences the texts are great but lack the minutia of discussion. I just don't see a class where the professor is just some exam proctor. Maybe you're just conflating your ego a bit too much as if the professor was in the way of your intellect.
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I graduated a long time ago.
Some of these were entry level physics which the textbook and high school more than covered and CS classes. If a science textbook needs explanation then textbook is poorly written.
I would posit that in every 101 level class the prof was just an exam proctor. They were all highschool over again.
Re:Disconcerting? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Get a job at a private university.
Any professor not failing Johnny Baseballhat is doing all its students and former students a disservice. Every time that kind of student gets a diploma all the other diplomas from that institution are cheapened.
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Hear, hear. I know a university professor of applied engineering who goes through the same problem with their students in every class. The more you simplify something, the more alcohol the student consumes, believing that this class it really easy. The more complex you make it, the more students group together to complain about the horrible unfairness of the instructor and the misplacement of the students who can follow.
I'm dizzy just thinking about it.
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Is it as efficient as if you could simply test out of the bio credit? No, but I don't believe that's possible with a large number of institutions.
Been some years for me, but as I recall some colleges charge as much to challenge the course as to take it. If you do challenge it, they'll bust your shoes in any way possible. Easier, and no more expensive, to take the class and snooze.
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In mine a test out was free, but it only got you a Pass for the class with 0 credit hours. So if you need 10 Chem credit hours, why test out only to have to still take 10 hours in a now harder class?
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Re:Disconcerting? (Score:4, Insightful)
why test out only to have to still take 10 hours in a now harder class?
Because you would learn more.
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Then it was a waste of time for you to take the class. And depending on the country you're from, you were just wasting your own money if it was a university class. Speaking as someone who's been in academics for decades, I simply asked to move onto a harder class in that case.
And there are classes that I could teach now where, if for some reason I was sitting in, it would still be meaningful for the instructor to know if I looked at the book, and things I could learn even if I know the subject.
In the Florida State University system, if you are in the CIS track and you transfer to another institution within the system, you are required to take their "Introduction to Computers" class again. I did, and by that time, I had 15 years professional experience, and had even taught a programming language at one of the schools within that system.
The cynic in me says that that requirement was just a revenue ploy, but speaking more charitably, it did provide the point at which the students were introduced to
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4 was the maximum possible grade.
4=A
3=B
2=C
1=D
0=F
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Shit, who even needs to grade them on their work? You KNOW whether or not they've read the bloody book with this.
that is awesome because my book will show i read it 432 times, on the first day of class even! so i must be an expert in the material by now!
if they start monitoring page reads, then just wait for someone to make an script to automatically flip the pages for them so it appears they read it.
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that is awesome because my book will show i read it 432 times, on the first day of class even!
And just before grading it will say that you haven't read a single page, just skipped over them all, I'll be sure to leave some people in the class with more read pages so it doesn't seems to suspicious.
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, Insightful)
Re:Disconcerting? (Score:4, Insightful)
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).
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.
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Re:Disconcerting? (Score:4, Insightful)
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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?
But who wants teachers/bosses/whoever prying into everything they do? Those who want to learn will learn, those who don't won't, irrespective of whether someone's spying on them.
Re:But who wants teachers/bosses/whoever prying? (Score:2)
This was the entire point of Freshman year - in return for your tuition (!!) among other things you got to get away from a daily "papers please" mentality of the lower grades, and then you were graded on the fewer metrics for that class, "however you (presumed honestly) got there". Cue the brilliant slackers types having to face their latent tendencies.
This just another sad factor showing that data leads to people getting a carnal lust to control people with.
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Yes, it is inherently wrong, especially in a college setting where the student is paying to attend the classes. Maybe if the tech had proper controls where the student was in charge of what got shared, with whom, and when it could be a positive (ie... struggling and can ask for help, then provide the access for review and suggestions).
Otherwise, it's just an outright invasion of the student's privacy.
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Of course, the article actually makes a point of showing as an example of how it is good by highlighting what I would call a misuse of this technology. A professor noticed that a student, who by every traditional measure of doing well was doing excellent, didn't read the textbook. Instead of concluding that the student was able to learn the material from his lectures and othe
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The data should be used to flag up pupils who may be struggling
IANAT and probably don't appreciate everything that being a teacher entails, but whatever happened to engaging with students and knowing who requires extra attention or some other method of engagement to get them motivated?
I'm all for technology, but some problems are human problems and won't be solved by adding new technology to the mix. If anything it will make some situations worse, as we become lazier (rely on the machines to do our job) and further removed from each other.
Just my 2 cents.
Peace,
Andy.
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We have had a perfectly good system to measure how well people are learning material. It's called a test. You pass it, you know the material. what difference does it matter if the person is good at highlighting? maybe I happen to already know the material but have to take the course because there's no mechanism to allow me to te
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These days, it should be disconcerting whenever people start collecting data which can easily be misused, especially when the valid uses for that data is limited. The reason you should be concerned is that data will almost certainly be used for something, most likely by someone who doesn't really understand how to analyze the data.
We're a society obsessed with metrics. We've had a lot of success with science and automation and statistical analyses, and we've been primed to expect that numbers mean things
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Obvious loophole, obvious issue (Score:2)
Do you really think students will struggle to get used to touching the 'next page' button about every 1-5 minutes, while playing their computer games?
Teachers will only catch the odd unprepared student who honestly did not have time to study. The professional slackers however will walk free.
We should give students the responsibility. It is their life, their responsibility. Takes about 18-25 years on average to grow up. And this kind of thing just is not helping to achieve becoming an adult.
Cramming some stu
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It all depends upon how the data is used. Proper use can suggest where students are struggling, so that in class instruction can be improved. In conjunction with other data, it can be used to identify and help at risk students. Of course, it can also indicate whether a textbook is a valuable resource or otherwise.
On the other hand, it can be abused. I was forced to drop a course back in the days of paper textbooks because I refused to buy a book that the instructor had written. The book that I had from
BB with good intent (Score:5, Insightful)
F that.
I don't care about intent I care about ability. Intent can change unexpectedly.
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So the problem is the good intent here is to help students be responsible. Of course one value of a college degree is that is shows that one c
Aren't they all? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Of course the employees were all basically gaming the system so they appeared to be doing it correctly.
"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]
Make it a criminal act to read someone else's book (Score:2)
Thereby forcing everyone to buy an ebook. All Hail
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...
Just test! (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Well, if they're doing this properly, it shouldn't be about whether the student learnt the material, but how.
It should be used to show:
Students who aren't engaging with the material, and may require early intervention
Levels of interest in the material (would different material suit the learners better?)
Problems with the material (are there particular parts many learners highlight and/or comment on? Could indicate confusion, for example)
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How would you deal with a student that already knew the material?
He will read 0 pages, does not need intervention, has no interest in it or any other material about this topic and cannot tell if there are problems with the material or not.
So long as he knows the material there is no problem to solve.
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I will put even money on it that some will use it to drop students a letter grade or make reading the book X% of the class grade. This sort of thing is much easier than actually doing their jobs.
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You presume it will be used properly - which we both know WON'T BE .
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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.
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Tests aren't always great metrics either. Some people are good at tests, while others are bad. Tests are too easily swayed by stress level, recent sleep patterns, and diet.
Personally, I think teacher should get to know their students and talk to them rather than relying solely on metrics, but I understand that we don't think education is important enough to spend all that time on it.
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Life is full of stress, poor sleep and bad diet.
Tests are better because of those things, not worse.
I agree a teacher doing a one on one evaluation would be even better, but if we spent money on that schools could not have such elaborate sports programs.
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Life is full of stress, poor sleep and bad diet. Tests are better because of those things, not worse.
In my working life, I've never had to deal with an evaluation remotely similar to the SATs. Granted, if you have a job with a bunch of certifications and such, you might need to do some similar testing, but those certifications are also generally very poor metrics for determining competence.
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The problem is, tests become metrics which go beyond the single classroom and teacher - suddenly the school, the district, the national bodies and the PTAs all want access to the testing data, and they start to equate test metrics with teacher quality rather than student effort (when the reality is a mix of both).
I don't see an issue with the features raised in the article, so long as the teachers do not solely rely on it - it does become a good way to ensure that pupils are spending time with the resources
Shows how obsolete the mind of most teachers is .. (Score:2)
I haven't taken a note in my entire life, and I consider highlighting books to be sacrilege.
Taking notes is overrated. If your brain can't process the information, taking notes won't mean anything in the long run. It's just a exam-passing technique, but it won't help you understand better and certainly will not help you hold on to more knowledge beyond the date of the exam you are studying for.
Read the damn book. Then read some more on the subject, and by all means skip pages and passages if you consider th
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It's just a exam-passing technique, but it won't help you understand better and certainly will not help you hold on to more knowledge beyond the date of the exam you are studying for.
Maybe for you, but it sounds like you havent taken many notes, and it certainly sounds like you can only speak for yourself.
For me and many that I know, taking notes can be a way of summarizing and processing the information coming in. By restating what the teacher says in a different way, and by taking it down, one is re-committing it to memory in a more lasting way than passively sitting in the classroom.
IIRC its not even up for debate that "active" learning styles are on the whole more effective than pa
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And you can speak only for yourself. Each person's brain works differently.
In my case, I'm not strong on "I/O", so if I'm taking notes, I'm clogging up channels that would be better used to absorb the lecture in the first place.
I figured this out gradually during college. The first year, I took copious notes and filled thick notebooks. After realizing that the note taking was counterproductive for me, the last couple of years, I took essentially no notes. My GPA remained the same, but my stress level dropp
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For me and many that I know, taking notes can be a way of summarizing and processing the information coming in.
In other words, everybody learns in a different way. All the more reason this Big Brother software is a bad idea. The worst possible thing would be to try to force everyone into a standard way of studying.
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IIRC its not even up for debate that "active" learning styles are on the whole more effective than passively listening to a lecture.
Simply writing something down is not "active". Thinking about it is active. Writing notes takes time away from thinking.
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Start the countdown (Score:3)
Not surprising (Score:2)
The dumbing down continues (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Education in 1900: you need to be able to do things.
Those who do not know history are doomed to make shit up about it which is demonstrably false and look silly on the internet.
Rote memorisation used to be HUGE.
2x2=4 2x3=6 2x4=8 2x5=doodles on exercise book.
Kept in check for years (Score:2)
I think that's all true, but originally in 1900 or so, students were expected to know how to do things: they had to have abilities, outside of special disciplines. Since that time, education has been moving more toward having them memorize steps through specific tasks, which makes them good cogs (true, true) but unable to act outside of that narrow framework. Students today lack the ability to go into an unknown situation and reason it out; what they have is the ability to, given a known situation, repeat a
I'd like to know... (Score:2)
...what "Big Brother" policies HAVEN'T been motivated by some superficial 'good intent'?
Seriously?
Last time I checked, the pavement on the road to Hell was still the same as it always was.
This is news (Score:2)
Metrics are usually used to push down and back (Score:3)
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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:
. . 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:
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).
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The worst uses of these metrification analytics was highlighted in a Los Angeles Times article [latimes.com] 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:
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.
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High School vs. Junior/Community college vs. Uni. (Score:2)
Academic Freedom (Score:2)
The road to hell is paved with good intentions... (Score:2)
Fast forward 25 years...
"Mr. President, we have here a log of your reading of your 'systems of government' textbook and you underlined all these passages about communism, would care to respond to the claim that your actually a communist?!?"
Nothing about this idea is evenly remotely good. It's so bad that who ever thought it up should be fired along with the manager who approved it.
fuck it all (Score:2)
Different Learning Styles (Score:3)
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.
Good intent? (Score:2)
'"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.
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The prof should not care, that is not his place. Either you will pass based on your efforts or fail.
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The prof should not care, that is not his place. Either you will pass based on your efforts or fail.
Two issues with your assertion... well, three.
First, maybe the e-book may have been written by that very professor. The class may even be a test sample for how readable and engaging the ebook is. "Publish or perish"
Second, If enough students consistently fail the classes, someone's going to wonder if the professor should be teaching it.
Finally, although it is not their place to care, a professor that does care will be a better instructor.
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First, Conflict of interest. No prof should be making money using his own books in his own class.
Second, maybe the students are just idiots.
Third, I disagree.
My favorite and probably best prof, honestly did not care about students who did not care about his class. He failed 75% of the people who took one class with me. He put the goals on the board, handed out readings and answered questions. If you did not ask questions of him during class or office hours odds are you failed. If you showed up to the lab wi
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I am patenting Pageturner, proven to be the best way to spoof your e-book reading!
Perfect! Between the Big Brother software and the anti-Big Brother software, at least it'll get the economy moving. Keynes (cue conservative and libertarian rants) once opined that in a recession you could help the economy by paying group A to dig holes and group B to fill them in. Certainly a good example of pointless for that era, but I doubt he realized how amazingly good computers would be at doing pointless things.
While you were drinking (Score:2)
I already patented it while you were drinking your beer.