Oh boy. The Chronicle of Higher Education reports:
CourseSmart, which sells digital versions of textbooks by big publishers, announced on Wednesday a new tool to help professors and others measure students’ engagement with electronic course materials.
When students use print textbooks, professors can’t track their reading. But as learning shifts online, everything students do in digital spaces can be monitored, including the intimate details of their reading habits.
Ack. It’s one thing to have homework, it’s another to have the professor be aware of what I read, how long I’m reading, what I underline, when I take notes. That’s just creepy.
Those details are what will make the new CourseSmart service tick. Say a student uses an introductory psychology e-textbook. The book will be integrated into the college’s course-management system. It will track students’ behavior: how much time they spend reading, how many pages they view, and how many notes and highlights they make. That data will get crunched into an engagement score for each student.
This kind of makes me glad I attended school when we used old fashioned paper books that smelled so interesting.
But reading surveillance raises privacy issues. The American Library Association, for example, recently raised alarms about efforts by libraries to lend e-books on Kindles, which exposes their patrons’ reading behavior to monitoring by Amazon.
Isn’t it a bit creepy to have textbooks watching their users?
Mr. Devine’s answer: “Not if it helps you succeed.” But he also points out that students will be able to opt out if they don’t want their data shared.
“We do understand the Big Brother aspects of it.”
Big brother? Perhaps. I suppose there could be benefits, but this old school gal has mixed feelings on this one.
