{"id":27099,"date":"2019-12-25T17:20:01","date_gmt":"2019-12-25T23:20:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/?p=27099"},"modified":"2019-12-25T17:20:01","modified_gmt":"2019-12-25T23:20:01","slug":"and-what-are-the-long-term-effects","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/2019\/12\/25\/and-what-are-the-long-term-effects\/","title":{"rendered":"And What Are The Long Term Effects?"},"content":{"rendered":"

WaPo<\/strong><\/em> has a fascinating article<\/a> on technology intersecting with college campus life:<\/p>\n

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When Syracuse University freshmen walk into professor Jeff Rubin\u2019s Introduction to Information Technologies class, seven small Bluetooth beacons hidden around the Grant Auditorium lecture hall connect with an app on their smartphones and boost their \u201cattendance points.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

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And when they skip class? The\u00a0SpotterEDU<\/a>\u00a0app sees that, too, logging their absence into a campus database that tracks them over time and can sink their grade. It also alerts Rubin, who later contacts students to ask where they\u2019ve been. His 340-person lecture has never been so full.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/section>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cThey want those points,\u201d he said. \u201cThey know I\u2019m watching and acting on it. So, behaviorally, they change.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

It sounds like a classic case of mistaken metrics: attendance as a proxy for learning, doesn’t it? I have to wonder if the goals of the universities utilizing this technology, which reaches beyond Syracuse to Virginia Commonwealth University, University of California San Diego, Auburn, and a number of others, are being redefined by these educational institutions by adding attendance to modify the grades of the students, negative or positive. But how is attendance related to grades? What if the student is asleep, daydreaming, or otherwise preoccupied? If I were a college administrator, I’d be looking at this technology and wondering if we were being led astray. And is the technology guaranteed?<\/p>\n

SpotterEDU\u2019s terms of use say its data is not guaranteed to be \u201caccurate, complete, correct, adequate, useful, timely, reliable or otherwise.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In other words, SpotterEDU<\/strong><\/em> is saying Aren’t we cool? Keep your eyes on the cool-ness!<\/em> But the article notes that sometimes it’s indeed not working properly (and as a professional data pusher myself, I’m appalled that those stories exist), and I cannot decide if this is bad or good, since such problems are good preparation for students to learn the world is a lot more uncertain than some might realize.<\/p>\n

But this analysis isn’t going to be as clean-cut as one might expect. Consider this:<\/p>\n

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But the company also claims to see much more than just attendance. By logging the time a student spends in different parts of the campus, Benz said, his team has found a way to identify signs of personal anguish: A student avoiding the cafeteria might suffer from food insecurity or an eating disorder; a student skipping class might be grievously depressed. The data isn\u2019t conclusive, Benz said, but it can \u201cshine a light on where people can investigate, so students don\u2019t slip through the cracks.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

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To help find these students, he said, his team designed algorithms to look for patterns in a student\u2019s \u201cbehavioral state\u201d and automatically flag when their habits change. He calls it scaffolding \u2014 a temporary support used to build up a student, removed when they can stand on their own.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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At a Silicon Valley summit in April, Benz outlined a recent real-life case: that of Student ID 106033, a depressed and \u201cextremely isolated\u201d student he called Sasha whom the system had flagged as \u201chighly at-risk\u201d because she only left her dorm to eat. \u201cAt every school, there are lots of Sashas,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd the bigger you are, the more Sashas that you have.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

There is definitely something to be said for providing help to students who are often away from home for the first time. For the non-gregarious, trying to tough it out may work, but then again you may end up with suicidal students.<\/p>\n

But I still find this addition to campus life ominous and unsettling. Part of college life is learning what works and what doesn’t. The closing of the opportunity to make mistakes and learn from them means diminished results for those who come out of that school, with or without a degree.<\/p>\n

Some of this is justified as a way to baby-sit “student-athletes,” but to my mind that’s simply admitting that it’s very inappropriate for educational institutes to host the minor leagues of football. We’d be better off dumping the entire NCAA Football program and get back to education<\/em>.<\/p>\n

So it’ll be interesting to watch how higher education changes as students, who are not criminals, are more closely monitored than criminals.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

WaPo has a fascinating article on technology intersecting with college campus life: When Syracuse University freshmen walk into professor Jeff Rubin\u2019s Introduction to Information Technologies class, seven small Bluetooth beacons hidden around the Grant Auditorium lecture hall connect with an app on their smartphones and boost their \u201cattendance points.\u201d And \u2026 Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-27099","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27099","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27099"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27099\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27101,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27099\/revisions\/27101"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27099"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27099"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27099"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}