Parents demand academic publisher drop Proctorio surveillance tech

Re:Parents demand academic publisher drop Proctorio surveill... by analog31 on Tuesday December 22, 2020 @11:42AM (#25508137)

That's fair, and perhaps I could have described it in a different way, which is that purpose aside, the education system is eminently hackable. One such hack is to let your friends take bird courses while you take meaty courses. Another is to find a way to learn from the bird courses while your classmates sleep through them.

In the same terms, one could say that higher education has emerged to produce empty signaling as a widespread outcome, while allowing itself to be hackable enough to produce other desired outcomes as well. Empty signaling is the prevailing hack, but not the only hack.

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Re:Parents demand academic publisher drop Proctorio surveill... by tw25506007 on Tuesday December 22, 2020 @12:13PM (#25508566)

Indeed, individually your preferences can lead you to make choices that are different from the aggregate, and in so doing your choices marginally contribute to what emerges. Sort of like considering a market price too high, thus not buying.

To be clear, that's distinct from actively attempting to broadly change what emerges, e.g., trying to "fix" the education system to no longer be structured for "signaling". To do that requires affecting the trillions of choices made by billions of people, and one way or another, that often requires violence or threats thereof.

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