This particular article focuses on a company called SpotterEDU, and they are creepy as hell. The main part of their is a quick, easy technofix for taking attendance. Students are required to download the app (this also means, though the article is so tech forward it doesn't even address these issues, that students are also required to carry an up-to-date cellphone and keep it fully charged at all times) which then "checks in" with Bluetooth beacons in classrooms on campus (or anywhere else the beacons are planted).
Bluetooth beacons were supposed to be the Thing Of The Year in 2016, the tech that was going to put coupons on our phones when we approached a certain product and which would unlock doors as we walked closer. As with virtually every big tech promise of the last twenty years, it hasn't exactly arrived yet. If the function of Bluetooth in my home is any indicator, I'm guessing we have a few bugs to work out yet.
That seems to be the case for some students, who report in the article that they get in fights with the tech about whether or not they were really absent or late to class. yay, computer technology-- usually almost doing of what it's supposed to do, sort of. As the SpotterEDU Terms of Service say, its data is not guaranteed to be “accurate, complete, correct, adequate, useful, timely, reliable or otherwise.”
But a professor in the article notes that this method of techno attendance taking has caused more students to show up to class, which raises an important question. Why did they previously think they didn't have to? Because as a lowly high school teacher, I always assumed that if a student could miss my class a whole without it having any apparent effect on what she was learning, then I'm the one who must be doing something wrong. If I can skip your class 50% of the time and still get a great grade, I'm not the one who's screwing up. But the colleges, and some professors, like this tech because it "nudges" students to be more well-behaved and compliant.
If we were just talking about classroom attendance, this would be bad enough, but the SpotterEDU site touts this as "An automated attendance monitoring and early alerting platform." Because our go-to justification for this kind of oppressive tracking, whether we're talking Florida's police state state or Big Brother University, is that This Is For Your Own Good. This is how we'll catch shooters and thwart suicides. We'll just watch all of you young folks all the time, for your own good. Even though there's still not a shred of evidence that this kind of tracking does any good.
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Sadly, Bluetooth-based monitoring isn't remotely this
obvious. Just a little box on the wall, too boring to make a
good pic for a post.
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There are other troubling aspects. Colleges can split the tracked students into sub groups like freshmen or minority students. Where is the data stored, and for how long, and under what sort of security. And always, the usual sort of mission creep-- "We'll collect data to deal with this specific issue" becomes "now that we have this big pile of data, I bet we could sift through it do X" followed by "I see you have a big valuable pile of data sitting there-- can I make you an offer so that I can use it? Strictly for the students's own good, of course..."
At one point, one of the interviewees raises the big question-- who exactly does this serve? What sort of utility do students get from allowing themselves to be tracked, imperfectly, everywhere? How does this help them take their place as educated leaders in an adult world? The answer of course is that it doesn't do any of those things-- it lets a tech company make a sale and some college administrators make their own jobs a bit easier.
Even if you don't have a Washington Post subscription, this is worth using up one of your free reads for. It's alarming and disturbing, not just that this kind of thing exists, but that there are people who think it's a great idea, and that we have an entire generation growing up to think that being tracked 24/7 is perfectly normal and okay.
What floors me is the thought that there is a need to take attendance in a college class. Surely by the time they get to college, students should have learned that going to class is essential to success in the class and is going to benefit their learning and retention and ability to work with the content in their field? If it isn’t, there is either a problem with the class, or the student knew the content and skills already, so to be blunt, they should not be required to waste their time. When exactly are students learning to evaluate their own needs and responsibilities if not by the time they attend college?
ReplyDeleteMy elementary school’s kid has an elf on a shelf. I regularly have conversations with my child about how we behave because it is the right thing to do, not because someone is watching. And furthermore that someone watching you all the time and reporting on you is CREEPY.
I refuse to believe these things aren’t related, just as I believe the rise of standardized testing has led to an entire generation of students who think the score on a test is what tells them what they’ve learned. Argh.
A few years ago, my superintendent proposed investing in technology where every student would swipe their badge at a classroom door for attendance and the system would not only log that, but catch all the tardies and assign consequences. That led me to wonder about a scrum of 30 teens at a door, all desperately trying to swipe and enter before the tardy bell rang despite the fact that all had arrived on time. Oh, and the super's system would also track teachers and their movement around the campus all day long. (Let's see what those lazyacres are getting away with.) My reaction then is the same as now when I read your post: WHY DON'T THEY MICROCHIP US LIKE DOGS AND BE DONE WITH IT?! (Fans of P.G.: please note the sarcasm of this sentence.)
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