Want Big Brother To Keep Track of You? There’s An App For That

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Photo courtesy of Jacob A. Steinerman 5/18/09

At first glance the 550 students and staff at the University of Aoyama Gakuin’s School of Social Informatics in Tokyo who received free Apple iPhones last Friday seemed very lucky. Their iPods came preloaded with applications that allow them to watch and upload recordings of their classes, do homework and even take tests. That would definitely entice me to do homework and get me somewhat “excited” to take tests.

There’s also an application on their iPods called “Big Brother is Watching You.” No, I’m kidding, it’s not actually called that. But that is essentially what it does. It appears to work in sync with the iPhone’s GPS chip so that the university can monitor where students are on campus (if they’re on campus at all). The main purpose of the program is to prevent students from cheating during attendance. As a student at a major university, I can tell you this is on university’s minds. A few of my larger classes (150 to 250 students) require students to bring a “Quizdom” with them to class. This device logs students into the system when they turn it on in the classroom and allows them to answer in-class questions, which can get factored into a student’s final grade, depending on the professor’s policy. Students have of course found ways to cheat the system, the easiest way being to give your Quizdom to a friend who is going to the class and have them answer the in-class questions for you.

Now, the iPhone seems to act in nearly the exact same way as the Quizdom. So what’s the benefit of the iPhone? The Quizdom’s one and only purpose was for class attendance and questions. You would use it in whichever class required it (many don’t) and then shut if off and put it away. The iPhone presents an entirely unique opportunity as it can become the center of a student’s life. Thousands of applications for the iPhone allow students to email, find apartments on campus, buy textbooks, watch classes (uploaded by professor’s as podcasts), read books (via Amazon’s free Kindle application (and many others)) and study with flash-cards. They can do all of that as well as listen to music, surf the internet and make calls (duh). With the iPhone at the center of a students life, it is almost guaranteed to be with them at all times, making it an ideal way to track students, both in and out of the classroom.

This “Big Brother” approach doesn’t only have to be used for attendance. It can be used constructively to help the students themselves. My idea involves tracking students movements over a certain period of time (say, 3 months) and building patterns based on their movements. These patterns could help universities identify popular places on campus, where students prefer to study and, on the flip side, what parts of campus students generally avoid (with the time of day and year being taken into account). You heard it here first.

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