[Infowarrior] - Teacher Knows if You’ve Done the E-Reading

[Richard Forno]

When do we let students (regardless of age) learn about 'consequences' for decisions that they make?  You don't do the readings, you fail the exam, you fail the course.  Do that a few times and hopefully the student will realise what they need to do in order to pass it.

The idea of college e-books monitoring and tracking student 'engagement' seems like a money-grabbing idea being pitched to university administrators in their quest to develop ever-more 'metrics' about stuff.  Not to mention, IMHO it further conditions people to either live in a panopticon or try to game the panopticon they're forced into while constantly second-guessing their own performance, efforts, and routes to success as individuals and how they're perceived by external monitors.   --rick


Teacher Knows if You’ve Done the E-Reading

By DAVID STREITFELD

Published: April 8, 2013

SAN ANTONIO — Several Texas A&M professors know something that generations of teachers could only hope to guess: whether students are reading their textbooks.

They know when students are skipping pages, failing to highlight significant passages, not bothering to take notes — or simply 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.

The faculty members here are neither clairvoyant nor peering over shoulders. They, along with colleagues at eight other colleges, are testing technology from a Silicon Valley start-up, CourseSmart, that allows them to track their students’ progress with digital textbooks.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/09/technology/coursesmart-e-textbooks-track-students-progress-for-teachers.html

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Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it.