
School spyware in coursebooks - liotier
http://serendipity.ruwenzori.net/index.php/2014/05/26/school-spyware-in-coursebooks
======
chestnut-tree
I feel we're sleepwalking into a future where all our online or digital
behaviour is tracked in some way. And we're not stopping to think about the
implications.

Our online behaviour is already tracked and recorded to a large degree.
Analytics software is everywhere and growing. The tracking is often not
anonymous either; it's far more valuable to companies and organisations when
tracking can be tied to an account or email address.

More and more companies are encouraging schools and students to use their
digital products and online services. This trend is likely to grow (Google's
presence looms particularly large). Tracking data anonymously and aggregating
it can have benefits. But to evaluate a service properly, we need to know what
is being tracked, how it is aggregated, who has access to that data and how
long that data is kept. These are things that companies simply do not reveal.
And something that a lot of individuals never ask about in the first place.

~~~
atmosx
Imagine a company requesting your digital profile from your school years.

Doesn't look good.

~~~
omarhegazy
If you're afraid of looking silly to the company, just remember that
_everyone_ will be having that fear if their digital profile is requested.
Relatively, your value doesn't change. If everyone has stupid stuff on their
digital profile, well, the company still needs to hire people, they're not
going to reject everyone because _that_ guy posted pics with booze and _that_
guy posted some incriminating status and _that_ guy got in a fight with his
LIT 101 teacher over the legitimacy of the class and nearly got suspended! So
I doubt anyone rational enough is gonna care.

Also, the most successful companies hire the most capable programmers, so the
most successful companies have to be aware of the fact that whatever stupid
status you posted about getting arrested for a night in your freshman year at
college is not at all correlated to your skill as a programmer. So they
wouldn't even bother wasting the legal effort and time to get their hands on
your digital profile from Google or Facebook.

Most of this tracking stuff is just going to be used for targeted advertising.
All this social and personal stuff is pretty much useless for the workplace
unless you're like, a murderer or rapist or something (in which case you're
already in records far different than Facebook's or Google's and it really
doesn't matter what they do). 70K NSA employees aren't going to randomly stalk
the intricate life of some random Average Joe to figure out what color
underwear he's wearing. Another irrational fear is that you're unwittingly
breaking some stupid bullshit tiny law and all this tracking will allow you to
get in trouble with that. howevermanyK Google employees aren't going to hunt
you down and get you in trouble because you did something _technically_
illegal because that costs resources to develop the technology to
automatically detect those crimes and then legal resources to accuse you of
them, and Google really doesn't get anything out of spending those resources
(I doubt the government would pay off Google for that information, either,
because if it's some insignificant, mundane, bullshit traffic violation caught
by a Google Car, the government wouldn't care because they're too busy
spending their resources towards more important stuff, like murders or
kidnappings. Big companies already cooperate with government on large scale
crimes like that, if that qualifies the trend.) No one is going to fucking
make the US into some 1984 clone because that's in _no one 's_ incentive.

All of this data is just going to be sold to advertisers because all of these
companies don't have any other source of revenue because we all decided we'd
rather get ads than directly pay money for Google products. In very rare
cases, the government is cooperating with regards to stuff like murders or
kidnappings or such.

I mean, if you don't like that, fine. Go ahead and petition to get the ability
to pay $30 a year to use Google products (which is the revenue per user per
year that they're making off advertisement). Just recognize that this data
isn't going for some James Bond-villian-esque desire rooted in pure evil. It's
advertisement.

~~~
SiVal
_No one is going to fucking make the US into some 1984 clone because that 's
in no one's incentive._

Many countries---China, Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, North Korea---were
increasingly influenced by fervent advocates of utopian Big Government social
engineering programs and ended up with "1984 clone" governments as a result.
The evil government of "1984" was modeled after real life. Those who brought
these governments to power lived by the theory that further social progress
required a significant expansion of central government control. Their
preferred form of government was Big Government domination of people's lives
as long as the domination favored them and their preferred political identity
groups.

The US has plenty of such people in positions of influence, and the notion
that it is so ridiculous to be concerned about ending up where others have
gone before is unsupported by history.

------
userbinator
In the future, you don't read books; _books read you_.

Presumably there's a requirement to be connected to the Internet for some DRM-
ish thing, which also reminds me of this:
[http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-
read.html](http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html)

(I only hope this doesn't turn into "This student has been accessing his
textbook in a weird pattern... he must be trying to circumvent the DRM!")

~~~
acqq
I remember reading Stallman's "The Right To Read" in 1997 (see the parent for
the link).

It describes the time where a student Dan can't even lend his own electronic
books to another student, Lissa:

"He had to help her -- but if he lent her his computer, she might read his
books. Aside from the fact that you could go to prison for many years for
letting someone else read your books, the very idea shocked him at first. Like
everyone, he had been taught since elementary school that sharing books was
nasty and wrong -- something that only pirates would do."

We're getting closer every day to this dystopia.

~~~
marcosdumay
> We're getting closer every day to this dystopia.

Except that as we approach it, piracy becomes more and more socially
acceptable.

~~~
acqq
Do you think that those students whose reading habits are analyzed (in the
article we all comment here) are allowed to swap their reading devices or
accounts? I guess they'd be punished if detected.

I would also not be surprised that the next step that the authorities invent
is biometrics. Then they can be sure _who_ is being tracked. Which is just one
more kind of DRM.

(I see you are writing this from Brazil. Please note that not every country
favors the same practices as yours.)

~~~
marcosdumay
They will probably get punished. They would be punished here too, and we'd
have the exact same discussion about privacy and everything. Also, police and
law systems are punishing piracy in several different ways.

Yet, do you disagree that piracy is getting more socially acceptable, not
less?

It's a complex scenario, not a simple descend at absolutism.

~~~
acqq
When have you last time bought some video content? The last blue-ray I've
legally bought first informed me that if I copy it I can get X _years_ "in
federal prison" then forced me to look at the ads lasting more minutes. On my
new TV device, just to download the free apps I have to make an account by the
manufacturer. Where I live piracy is actually always harder to be done, and
that state doesn't even make life easier.

------
atmosx
Are students families aware of this?

That's kind of scary because kids are learning to be _policed_ from a young
age. Might be easier to convince them in the future that it's an _acceptable
behavior_ to be officially profiled by third parties. Even if this third party
is a school teacher, it's absolutely NOT okay.

I understand the eagerness to monitor and try to help the student as much as
possible, but a teacher or a school committee should understand the
repercussions of this kind of monitoring, no matter what the results are.

~~~
Jormundir
So now we're going to call grading "policing"?

I'm not sure what line I crossed to get so many downvotes, but I really don't
understand why this is outrageous.

Can someone please explain for me why we're fighting a school for measuring
user interaction and adjusting based on that data?

~~~
marcosdumay
There is a huge difference between "discovering if the student learned the
lesson" and "verifying that the student behaves in the school aproved manner".
The first is named "grading", and the last "policing".

Both must be done for some degree, but that degree vary widely.

------
Jormundir
After brewing on this for longer, I think I have a better perspective than my
initial posting.

Monitoring student behavior, engagement, studying techniques, etc., is going
to be very important for improving our education system. We need more
quantitative data to be able to adjust the system based on what's working and
what's not. However, monitoring students gives schools the tools they need to
force students to behave the way they want, and punish when they don't. This
is where the program described in the article crosses the line. Student
behavior is being policed in order to corral them into a narrowly defined
"acceptable" behavior. This is why it's going to be extremely important for
monitoring to happen transparently, and for these monitoring programs to be
very open to scrutiny, and we should all rightly shun a program and especially
its implementors for crossing the line into policing.

That being said, lets be careful about over-punishing the practice of
monitoring, as it is the best tool we have today for meaningfully improving
education. I'm very excited about the new advances in ed tech, almost all of
which include monitoring, and I really don't want them to be slowed or stopped
because we as a community overreacted to the concept as a whole, rather than
focusing on the misuse of the data collected from monitoring.

~~~
analog31
In my view, reducing poverty and improving teacher training are probably the
best tools we have for improving education. Monitoring behavior seems like a
gratuitously technological solution.

As for policing, kids take a quiz or exam on the material at some point. Maybe
that's enough. It provides a way to know if kids learned the stuff, while
providing reasonable flexibility for kids to come up with their own ways of
learning it.

And at least for younger kids, what I've observed is that the school already
has a way of policing their behavior at home, simply by assigning a sheer
quantity of homework that commands every waking hour.

~~~
atmosx
Yes, that's another huge problem. Kids shouldn't study _that much material_
IMHO. The studying hours required should be limited, I don't know how or why,
but it's incredible the amount of a work a _good student_ must put up at the
age of 9-17 to get through school successfully[1].

[1] I'm referring to the average kid, not people who _things came easy at
school_ [...].

~~~
gcr
Why do you advocate punishing the average case?

------
c16
I don't see why schools should be able to tell if a student is revising last
minute. Why should they care? Pass the exam is all that's required. No
revision method is perfect, and being dyslexic I know the way I work differs
from how my friends work. Scary is what this is.

~~~
jib
Like everything else - used right it is an aide, used wrong it is a negative.

If your goal is to pass tests you're missing out on the point of education.
Which is to learn stuff (usually, at least).

The tests are the metric that we measure success with, they are not the goal.
Confuse the two and you will most likely continue to confuse the two and you
will find yourself writing extra lines of code or whatever metric you're going
to confuse for a goal in your professional life as well.

Used right, this could replace part of the focus of tests and instead put the
focus on learning. Which is way better. Used wrong, it could become another
metric that people want to maximise, because they've confused the metric with
the goal.

Metrics are indicators of success/failure, they are not success/failure, so if
you try to optimise towards metrics you ultimately just screw yourself.

Use quantitative metrics to identify areas of greatest opportunity,
qualitatively inspect and analyse to improve. Repeat. That's the most
effective way I know of learning. Used that way, metrics are useful, and
having more metrics is good, not bad.

~~~
zimbatm
Except for the parents, it's nobody's business what the children do after
school. How can children learn about freedom when all their movements are
scrutinized and analyzed all the time.

Plus it's really not a good metric. There are many ways to learn a topic.
There's fast learners, those who gather information trough other sources,
those who like to work in groups. Inevitably these approaches to learning will
get hindered by myopic interpretation of this metric.

~~~
grkvlt
> Inevitably these approaches to learning will get hindered by myopic
> interpretation of this metric

I really don't understand this attitude. Of _course_ this will not work if it
is used incorrectly. Why would you expect any different? However, the same can
be said for normal course work. What if the teacher gets the students to read
only the first word of each sentence? This shows books will never work, and
lecturing is the only way to teach.

Putting that aside, the point is that as you say, there are many ways to learn
a topic. Asking children how they best learn things is not going to get useful
answers most of the time, but analysis of reading and research patterns using
sophisticated data mining or ML software will allow teachers to segment their
students into groups that all learn in a similar way. So everyone benefits.

As I suggest above, I'd go further than instrumenting the ebooks. If they are
on a tablet device using the Internet, then instrument the browser too, and
you can correlate Wikipedia and Google searches with whatever page of the
textbook they were on, and see what topics are unclear and always need
additional research. You would also find out which students are deeply
interested in the topic, as they read on past the end of the assignment, and
download extra information or search for related topics. And you can
discipline those who never open the book a all, and spend all their time
looking at amusing cat pictures.

With such power there is also a responsibility to manage the student's privacy
appropriately, bout with a school-provided device, similar to a work laptop,
they should have no expectation of absolute privacy anyway. I think any
worries about monitoring pale into insignificance against the powerful
augmented learning regimes that can be created, and a suitable auditing and
management routine will prevent any abuse.

~~~
zimbatm
I think because we're addressing a different point. Of course it's good to
learn more about how humans work and help students to learn but there has to
be a scope in it. Hopefully learning is about being curious, discovering new
things, playing with the mind. Metrics won't help bored students, they'll just
learn to flip the pages at the right time while watching TV. And now
interested students get distracted by the same concerns of being over-watched
and not doing the same thing. It's really a terrible solution.

If you want to collect metrics then make them as a personal tool. Make a
utility for the student, that only him can access, that helps him learn about
his studying patterns, give him hints, ... If they want to share them it's on
their own term.

------
TravelTechGuy
This technology has been around for a couple of years now. 2 years ago, I was
working for a video platform company, installing our product at few of the
top-tier universities. Some courses required watching videos of recorded
lectures and external material, as part of the syllabus. Our system reported
back the watching habits of the students: did they watch all the videos? Did
they watch the entire thing, or just scrubbed to the end? Did they watch at
the assigned time, or wait till the day before finals to cram them all?

We could provide very good statistics. An algorithm could predict the
student's chance of success in the course, based on his watching habits, way
before the course ended.

To the best of my knowledge, the data from the algorithm was never factored
directly into the course's grade, but rather was used to counsel students on
their studying methodology.

~~~
oakwhiz
Interestingly, this sort of tracking can come up with false negatives. Imagine
a situation in which multiple students are studying together in a group, and
they decide to watch the videos together, on one computer. Only the student
that is logged in will be tracked, and the other students might appear as
though they haven't watched any videos at all.

------
616c
As an IT guy in a university (a satellite campus of US university to be more
specific), this shit would not be kosher. We evaluate crap for our people
because this school is far from a tech school, and we would never be able to
get this out the door to students lest one of them or their professor(s) found
out, and the shitstorm would be enormous.

We cannot even reliably monitor computers or remote into them, as the
perception of monitoring in a poli sci school has caused so many fights in the
past, no campus of the university has the balls to even try.

But good luck to the IT group that gets away this. They will have a fun time
explaining it to the angry students or their guardians who foot the bill for
this horseshit.

But since the author quotes Neal Stephen, who cares, right? We teach kids the
ideals of society in class and school policies (at least for us, won't speak
to others), then the ideal society lacks them altogether and government
agencies violate the very same trust in society and established protocol, lie
about, and probably gloat in their office how stupid these kids are with their
monitored engagement.

I give everybody a F, personally.

------
raverbashing
And the universities are charging how much for this "education" again?

Plagiarism software, auto-marks software, now this BS

Where are the real Professors? Where's the real education?

People are leaving "university" with nothing but debt.

------
greenyoda
Recording students' activities in their own homes seems unacceptably
intrusive. If people think this is acceptable, would it also be OK for the
software to sample ambient sound to insure that the student isn't watching TV
or talking on their phone while they're supposed to be studying? Or how about
requiring students to periodically perform some kind of dexterity test on
their computer to prove that they aren't drunk or stoned or sleepy? Or maybe
requiring them to see a psychiatrist if their studying profile fits the
software's criteria for ADHD or depression?

At what point does student monitoring cross the line and become NSA-style
surveillance?

------
Aardwolf
What if the student printed out the books and studied it from there?

What if the student blocks it with firewall or has no internet or breaks the
assumption like by running it on Wine or whatever?

What if they simply don't read the coursebook because they can do without?

~~~
liotier
> What if the student printed out the books and studied it from there?

Printing ? But that would mean circumventing DRM to produce an illicit copy -
surely an honest student would not do that !

~~~
total
I'm not entirely sure on the specifics of what is allowed, but I know
MathXL/MyMathLab has a button for printing when one is reading the textbook
online through their site.

[Edit] Cleared up some confusing stuff in there.

~~~
wyager
>MyMathLab

Oh god, MyMathLab. The second shittiest piece of software I was ever forced to
buy. And at $120, it may have been the lowest value/dollar of any software
I've ever interacted with.

Shout out to all the professors who either A) don't use textbooks, and only
use free online resources or B) don't make us buy the textbook's shitty online
service, so we can just go out and rent/borrow the textbooks for cheap.

------
readme
Bring it on, there's money in selling mouse macros to kids.

------
RaSoJo
The only lessons and areas that i ever remember from my youth, or any other
time, has been when: 1) I was given the freedom to take my time and play
around with the ideas for however long i wanted 2) Had no one breathing down
my neck

Having to adopt such tools shows the failure of the education system in
keeping students interested.

With the lack of freedom goes the willingness to explore and with that goes
innovation.

I am feeling quite frightened for my kids right now.

------
socrates1998
Scary.

The number one thing our education system teaches is compliance and obedience.

This is just an extension of that.

~~~
saraid216
Absolutely agree. That's why people who disagree with this only have appeals
to fear in response, rather than having the capability to make a substantive,
reasoned argument.

The compliant and obedient understand fear.

------
freditup
My 'biggest' technological nightmare in the latter years of high school was
that regular schools would have enough online presence that snow days would
become mandatory 'learn from home' days. Teachers would still hold classes,
students would still have to attend (virtually), do work, etc.

However, teachers tracking my studying would have been just as bad I think.

~~~
Crito
The way to combat that is to very vocally accuse anybody trying to institute
those sort of policies of being an evil classist who is keen on neglecting the
education of families who cannot afford reliable internet access, or computers
for each school-aged child. The more vitriolic the better; the idea is to
catch them off guard such that the fastest way for them to combat the
accusations is to backtrack completely.

Some schools may get around these accusations by doing shit like providing
each student with computers/tablets with cell cards. That's when you start
beating on the privacy drums. Most public schools do not have anywhere near
the necessary resources to do that though.

------
VLM
The discussion seems to be drifting into the positives and negatives of the
morality of the technique without discussing the rather more important
critique of one-size-fits-all techniques, pounding down any nail that stands
up, and shoving every peg thru the round hole, no matter if round or square.
If a school is trying to do something good, giving them an evil tool doesn't
matter, and if they're trying to do something evil, then the presence or
absence of tools isn't going to matter much.

------
mediumdave
First of all: I think the US education system (at both K12 and
college/university levels) is deeply disfunctional.

However, I can understand and sympathize with a teacher's desire to understand
how his or her students are using their time outside of class. In particular,
knowing that a student who is struggling is not studying or is only attempting
to cram at the last minute could be useful information for finding a strategy
to help that student to improve.

I think the real problem is that many of the students I see (I teach CS at a
small college) are focused on the external artifacts of education --- grades,
a degree, etc. --- and not the actual learning. If students don't see an
intrinsic value in what they are doing, they will try to game the system by
cheating, memorizing instead of learning more deeply, etc. Over time I have
come to realize that one of my duties as an educator is to try to motivate
students to learn. As such, any information available to me that will help me
understand whether or not a particular student is using his or her time
effectively outside the class is valuable.

~~~
gress
With all due respect, students are not the ones gaming the system. If you make
the system into something that functions like a game, then it will be played.

~~~
VLM
What you call a game, is also called operant conditioning and some other
google terms to research are "B F Skinner".

It works really well for mere vocation training, habits, etc. Doesn't work
very well for education.

There can be some disturbing introspection involved WRT the purpose of the
organization, is it vocational, educational, or merely a financialization
scam. This also gives an thin smear of "icky" across the whole discussion of
the merits of expensive spyware.

Another game theory topic not yet discussed is the classic writing prof
problem of how a prof spends her time. Would a prof be better served at
whatever goal by spending 15 minutes thinking about improvement of the next
lecture, analysis of errors in latest quiz to respond at next lecture, or
analyze the gathered stats to hurry along the primate dominance ritual game of
rating and classification of students by an arbitrary reward structure?

------
total
I'd be highly interested in knowing how exactly it goes about showing these
metrics:

* By class: The defense would probably be that it helps the teacher get a better understanding of the class and how to change tactics.

* Per student: The defense here would probably be that it helps the teacher target a particular student for the purpose of individualizing the support they provide.

The 'per student' method is far more open to abuse in that it would also allow
the teacher to pick out students that didn't match what they believed to be
'appropriate' studying. Both opens are open to abuse, though, as a 'by class'
metric would show them that _some_ students study in a way that does not align
with the teacher's belief(s); they might have their opinions about some
students slacking off or what have you and decide that they are the ones
pulling down the stats and single them out as a result.

Either way, this amount of surveillance opens up the door for a good deal of
abuse and there should be a good amount of discussion regarding it before it
is thrust upon unknowing student.

------
malisper
A lot of teachers give an effort grade as well as an achievement grade.

One of my high school teachers gave a whole lecture on how even though Usain
Bolt is the fastest man alive, he probably isn't the one who trains the
hardest. He believed the person who does try the hardest still deserves an
award for their effort. Applying this idea now to students, some are able to
not study at all, yet get an A. At the same time there are others who study
all the time and get a C. At this point the students grade is based largely on
talent, which can only get one so far in life.

Looking at this from the school's perspective they are only trying to measure
what they want to measure. Does the student have the necessary skills to help
them succeed in life. While spyware may not be the best way to go about it, it
certainly makes sense to the schools.

~~~
aianus
What are the bright students supposed to do to earn a good grade then? It's
not their fault the material is too easy and they don't have to study to do
well.

~~~
pjscott
Jump through all hoops, however meaningless and soul-killing. This will result
in good grades.

(I wouldn't actually _recommend_ this, but it's the answer to your question.
And, as far as I can tell, it's the only answer to your question -- the system
_does not care_ about students more than about a standard deviation above the
mean.)

------
liotier
In a cute attempt at defusing this interesting PR situation, Coursesmart
attempts to talk to its detractors individually instead of participating in a
public discussion:

[https://twitter.com/liotier/status/471308846749982720](https://twitter.com/liotier/status/471308846749982720)

[https://twitter.com/liotier/status/471307993850859520](https://twitter.com/liotier/status/471307993850859520)

------
liotier
Lovely quote in a New York Times article about Coursesmart: “It’s Big Brother,
sort of, but with a good intent” - of course, it always starts with a good
intent ! [http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/09/technology/coursesmart-
e-t...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/09/technology/coursesmart-e-textbooks-
track-students-progress-for-teachers.html?_r=0&pagewanted=all)

------
gyardley
You could write an article about digital resources adapting themselves to
match individual students' ability and learning speed, allowing every student
to receive activities most likely to put them in a state of 'flow' \-- and
most everyone would think the monitoring required to do _that_ was awesome.

Like most things, it's not the monitoring that's objectionable, it's how that
monitoring is used.

~~~
wyager
>Like most things, it's not the monitoring that's objectionable

I _vehemently_ disagree.

~~~
ivan_ah
What about self-monitoring?

Imagine a reader with reading analytics stored in localStorage, generating a
"your progress" view?

There could be an opt-in "share my anonymized stats" option, with the
anonymization being done on the client. As an author, I can say that such
"reading stats" would be very useful for content-dev purposes, but it should
be up to the reader to choose whether they want to share them with the author.

~~~
wyager
>What about self-monitoring?

Self-monitoring is awesome, but that's definitely not what's happening here.

------
snomad
From the educators point of view, it might be helpful to know if a student is
struggling because they are not doing nightly reading.

~~~
liotier
Is the additional knowledge worth scarifying the trust relationship ?

~~~
clarkm
Trust, but verify.

------
davidbauer
This is exactly the kind of observation I've built the Dystopia Tracker for.
So far, there's no entry for Snow Crash – somebody care to add it?
[http://www.dystopiatracker.com/E?t=Snow%20Crash](http://www.dystopiatracker.com/E?t=Snow%20Crash)

------
liotier
This reminds of the Robbins v. Lower Merion School District WebcamGate
scandal:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robbins_v._Lower_Merion_School...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robbins_v._Lower_Merion_School_District)

------
Jormundir
I think outrage at this is a little unjustified. Monitoring user interaction
is how you get data to effectively improve your platform. In the case of
schools, they should be monitoring student interaction in order to gain
insights in how to improve their system, just as any website does. How are we
supposed to improve the education system if getting quantitative data is
outrageous?

If you're outraged at this software are you also outraged at all of the
awesome new developments in ed tech to create self-paced curriculums? Those
involve plenty of monitoring as well.

When I went through the education system, I was seen as a genius in elementary
school. I scored in the 99th percentile in math on the standardized tests, and
participated in the advanced math tracks two years early. I was on track to be
very successful. Then middle school came along.

First half of sixth grade, I continued my performance from elementary school,
doing extremely well. Then I started with the destructive questions I'm sure a
lot of HNers are familiar with: "Why do I need to learn this?", "Am I ever
going to use this in real life?". This is when the grades started tanking, and
I basically didn't participate in my education. I didn't recover from this
terrible attitude until I entered college.

I never really established any study habits, and it's something that still
weighs me down now, graduated from college and in the workforce. To relate to
the story, I wish these sorts of programs were available when I was a student.
I wish I was graded on my study habits even in elementary school.

I don't really understand the defense of cramming. The goal of school is not
to pass all of the tests with high scores, the goal of school is to establish
strong habits that will optimize your education and your effectiveness in your
future profession.

I think the best way to help our kids develop these skills is going to be
through lots of monitoring. It's certainly good to question the effectiveness
of monitoring, and what it's encouraging, so I respect that sentiment of the
other posters, but really? Outrage?

Lets encourage our school system to try new things, measure the effectiveness,
and readjust based on data. I would really love to steer this debate away from
whining about being free to choose less effective study techniques and
monitoring. Monitoring is essential to providing adjustments on a per-student
basis, allowing highly customizable content for the most efficient education.

Edit: I guess I should have known better than to make a dissenting comment on
this type of article.

~~~
null_ptr
> _I think outrage at this is a little unjustified. The whole schooling system
> is built around monitoring student progress. > I think the best way to help
> our kids develop these skills is going to be through lots of monitoring.
> It's certainly good to question the effectiveness of monitoring, and what
> it's encouraging, so I respect that sentiment of the other posters, but
> really? Outrage?_

I don't think you realize the damage all this pervasive monitoring will do to
warp and stress people's minds, being subjected to it 24/7 from early
childhood. It will take away all awareness that _they_ are the directors of
their own life. It will condition them to constantly act for the benefit of an
unseen observer instead of living their life for themselves and being unafraid
to walk off the beaten path. And yes that includes being able to cram for a
5th grade history test the night before, it's not like they're handing in
their Master's Thesis.

~~~
Jormundir
I'm not claiming this monitoring is effective, I'm saying: "Don't get
outraged, let them run a test of the program and see if it's effective".

I just don't think it makes sense to get mad at a school for trying to use
data to improve their effectiveness.

~~~
DasIch
Whether or not this program is effective is irrelevant to the question of
whether the program should be used or even tested. You don't restrict someones
freedom without a very good reason. This program fundamentally cannot provide
any benefit that should make anyone even consider this as a reason.

