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.
I have mixed feelings about a system like this one. On one hand, knowing more about the habits of a student (or of students in general!) is very helpful, but when it goes wrong, it can have very bad results, and I find it hard to weigh the benefits and the risks.
Even with monitoring happening transparently and open to scrutiny, the damage it does in such contexts is typically irreversible. GPAs usually don't get revised and, when they do, it's hard to revise them objectively, retracted disciplinary actions don't give students their time back, and most people usually get exactly one chance at going through a stage of the educational system (especially the early ones).
This is especially scary and open to misinterpretation because, like anything that gathers only a small, well-defined subset of data (for privacy concerns, ironically!), it's bound to paint an incomplete picture. High school me would have been fucked if cramming had been actively discouraged or penalized; but not because I was lazy! I actually had trouble sleeping (and still do). This would regularly kick my life into zombie mode starting Wednesday or so during busier weeks, so if I had a test on Monday, Sunday evening was literally the only time when I could study (after recovering all the lost sleep on Saturday). Working around cases like this would get complicated once the bureaucracy kicks in, and we'd have kids like I was having to produce medical papers that certify they have a condition which sometimes makes it acceptable for them to cram. This is ridiculous.
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.
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 [...].
Is some of the monitoring negativity in this thread a result of the Snowden leaks and changing attitudes?
From my POV - as a developer at a university - this seems to go with 2 of the "hot" trends in education.
1. Personalization - Monitoring reading habits will allow other software / professors to tailor material to individual student needs. Any slightly decent professor would presumably factor in exam results and not solely rely on this indicator. (e.g. student is reading some other material, already knows the material).
Of course, we should demand privacy rights. They should already be covered under FERPA, perhaps that needs to be modernized to cover all cases (not just this one)?
2. Getting graduation rates up and students out in (close to) 4 years. If a student is getting bad grades on exams, and not reading (as this software might indicate) the professor can talk to the student and see if they really have the resources/time to successfully finish the class. If not, perhaps the seat can be opened up for another student.
It sounds harsh, but why should a student occupy a seat and then blow off the course? Shouldn't (at least state) schools be able to prioritize resources effectively?
I think you're way off with your point that we can't (or shouldn't) shun these based on the principle that monitoring is wrong. There is nothing to gain from having kids expect to be monitored and being ok with being monitored.
Educational systems shouldn't rely on the students to be working hard or work right; they should clearly be relying on the teachers and the school to set up a good environment for the students to _want to learn_. Monitoring students will give nothing. Maybe monitoring the teachers would, though, if that's the route you want to take. Something tells me they wouldn't like it that much.
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.