Harvard University is under fire from faculty and students for secretly photographing about 2,000 undergraduates in 10 lecture halls last spring as part of a study on classroom attendance.To me this is much ado about nothing.
The experiment was disclosed at a faculty meeting Tuesday and first reported in The Harvard Crimson student newspaper.
Harvard computer science professor Harry Lewis asked administrators about the study during the meeting, saying he learned about it from two colleagues...
Students and teachers were not notified because researchers did not want to introduce potential bias into the study, Harvard administrators said. The cameras took pictures every minute and a computer program used them to count empty and occupied seats.
The study was done by Harvard's Initiative for Learning and Teaching, overseen by Vice Provost Peter Bol, and authorized by the school's Institutional Review Board.
Professors whose lectures were monitored were told in August and all gave permission for the data to be used in the study, he said. Students were not told and the images themselves were destroyed, he said.
Thursday, November 06, 2014
I Actually Support Harvard Here
This isn't some nefarious surveillance, this is doing a study on attendance:
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2 comments:
Let me guess some of the results: science classes for majors had high attendance, everything else did not.
"The cameras took pictures every minute and a computer program used them to count empty and occupied seats."
If the experimental data was simple counts and the photo evidence was destroyed afterwards (though even that seems unnecessary ...) then there isn't anything here. A human watching the class and counting would be fine.
Note that there is some back-story here, though, for Harvard: "Harvard in March 2013 was criticized for secretly searching the university email accounts of 16 deans to find out who leaked information about a cheating scandal to the media. That led to new privacy policies on electronic communication this past spring." This isn't "electronic communication," but I can imagine folks being more than usually sensitive about this.
-Mark R.
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