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E-Books: How Schools Use Technology to Better Spy on Students
The Truth Behind The News
Susanne Posel
Occupy Corporatism
May 8, 2013
Colleges across the country are adopting a new method for spying on their students.
CourseSmart Analytics has provided a beta version of digital texts with the goal of moving away from traditional textbooks to give professors the ability to know whether or not their students are reading and how much time they spent on their assignments.
Cindy Clark, spokesperson for CourseSmart explains: “Only about 55 percent of college students graduate within six years. This illustrates the demand within higher education for a tool that would help students be more successful in their studies and graduate on time.”
CourseSmart has a dashboard that will monitor sudent’s progress with an “engagement tool” that gives professors an evaluation option with feedback for improvement. The use of metrics will allow the corporation to improve on their digital texts.
Clark points out that CourseSmart provides 90% of the core textbooks to colleges and collaborates with universities to move toward using only e-books.
Arguments for this digital media claim that it is too costly to continue to print actual books for students and publishers can sell chapters through iBooks from Apple or Amazon.
Corporations like Barnes & Noble are partnering with Apple and Amazon to provide electronic versions of books to both public schools and colleges. By making these e-books cheaper than their traditional counterparts, students are expected to jump on the bandwagon for going all digital.
The College Board released a report for 2011 – 2012 that estimated students spend an average of $1,168 – $1,213 on textbooks which a price hike that tripled since 2004.
Tom Malek, vice president of Learning Solutions for McGraw-Hill High Education contends that e-books save money and make it easier for those students who prefer to use with Kindle or Nook to study.
Students have made it clear that using printed books are their preference, regardless of the industry’s push toward digital media. The reasoning by the corporations is that students do not appreciate the ease of digital media and should be convinced of its potentials.
By lowering the price of e-books, the hope is that students will migrate. The flashy, new models that facilitate e-books are being forced upon students until they comply with the trends set forth by their respective schools.
Surveillance on students is not limited to this new scheme. In 2012, a school in Maryland has installed PalmSecure , a biometric scanning system that requires elementary students to place their hand on infrared scanners in order to pay for their school lunch. The unique nuances of each child’s individual hand will be catalogued and the image encrypted with a numerical algorithm that is combined with the cost of school lunches.
PalmSource, a Japanese corporation specializing in biometric technology offers this “authentication system” which is a marketed as a necessity in healthcare, security, government, banking, retail and education.
The corporation also provides an array of RFID chipped tags with memory capacity.
The cost to taxpayers and parents for the installation of this Big Brother surveillance system in 43 schools in Maryland is estimated to be $300,000. PalmSource is being beta-tested in Florida, Mississippi and Louisiana.
In order to check out school library books, register for classes, pay for school lunches, the “smart” ID card is being employed to trace and track students and their movements on campuses all across America. By using leverage of educators to coerce school districts to adopt this method of tracking students, the argument for the use of the RFID technology is campus safety, efficient registration, and food and library programs.
Recently, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) have invested $5 billion into having CCTV cameras installed in all classrooms across the nation allegedly “for every teacher in every classroom in every district to be filmed in action so they can be evaluated and, maybe, improve.”
This initiative would facilitate “videotaped lessons, classroom observations by trained observers, student satisfaction surveys, and value-added calculations based on test scores.”
Gates explained that spending $5 million “is a big number, but to put it in perspective . . . it’s less than 2% of what we spend on teachers’ salaries and benefits. The impact for teachers would be phenomenal. We would finally have a way to give them feedback—as well as the means to act on it. ”
Gates likens public schools to factories: “So imagine, running a factory where you’ve got these workers, some of them just making crap and the management is told, ‘Hey, you can only come down here once a year, but you need to let us know, because we might actually fool you, and try and do a good job in that one brief moment.’”
The way to create a “normal” school is by having a structured surveillance system installed to make sure that the students and teachers obey the rules and regulations. Gates asserts that cameras which were highly visible would keep the student population, staff and faculty in line.
Source: http://www.occupycorporatism.com/e-books-how-schools-use-technology-to-better-spy-on-students/
