Technology Impacts

The larger issue being overlooked is the growing use of tracking devices in the U.S., and how willing most people are to be tagged and set loose in the “wild” where their movements and spending habits are monitored, recorded and filed away for someone’s future use.

Ann Bibby Care2.com May 5, 2010

Northern Arizona State will soon track class attendance via an RFID (radio frequency identification) chip in student ID cards. The system, which is similar to one used at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, will use sensors to detect students as they enter classrooms. The data collected will be recorded and shared with professors.

Predictably, students are unhappy and, with equal predictability, have taken their discontent to Facebook via the protest group although some of the more energetic have started petitions against the proposed practice.

University officials say their aim is only to increase student attendance and improve performance though, with enough sensors, they could easily track students’ whereabouts on campus at all times. Students counter, correctly, that they are adults and whether they attend class regularly, on time or pass at all is not the university’s business. [More]

Somebody’s fibbing in the case of a Pennsylvania school that using Webcams in loaned laptops, and now the FBI may have to sort out the truth.

CNN reports that federal authorities are investigating the case of 15-year-old Blake Robbins v. the Lower Merion School District in Pennsylvania, a class action lawsuit uncovered by BoingBoing last week. The FBI hasn’t confirmed the investigation; CNN’s report comes from an anonymous police official, who says the feds will look into whether federal wiretap or computer intrusion laws were violated.

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2010/022210-school-spycam-case-raises-fbi.html

It’s been quite troubling that for years various schools have simply accepted propaganda and totally inaccurate “teaching materials” about copyright and used them to teach students. These programs have been created by both the RIAA and the MPAA, at times. More recently, a lobbying organization backed by both of those organizations, the Copyright Alliance (which has a long history of making up the most fantastic myths about copyright) has been pushing a copyright curriculum on schools. Tragically, unsuspecting schools have been using the pure propaganda put out by the Copyright Alliance as if it were some sort of impartial and accurate educational material on copyright. It’s not. Not even close. Last year, one of the world’s foremost experts in copyright, William Patry, took the Copyright Alliance’s founder to task for having “chutzpah in abundance” in basically making up what copyright and fair use is about, and presenting himself as some sort of expert on the subject. Read the rest of this entry »