I remember how it was -- JR
Harvard students seek to revoke Trump graduates' diplomas
Harvard University students started to circulate a petition that seeks for revoking degrees from President Trump’s aides and supporters who attended the institution.
The initiative “Revoke their Degrees” points to three Harvard graduates, all described as “violent actors”: White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany, Senator Ted Cruz, and Representative from Texas Dan Crenshaw. None of them are being investigated for inciting last week’s riot in D.C.
The letter—disclosed by FOX Business—argues that Trump’s supporters were involved in spreading the “disinformation and mistrust” that lead to the assault on the US Capitol.
The campaign—started by five students who attend Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government—calls on the university to be “prepared to take a stand for representative democracy and against violent white supremacy.”
These students consider that “a Harvard degree is a privilege, not a right.”
As a precedent for revoking degrees, they cited Harvard’s decision in 2010 to revoke a degree from a Russian spy, Andrey Bezrukov.
Remote Learning Companies Are Endangering Student Privacy
Colleges and universities nationwide are failing to safeguard the digital safety and privacy of their students. At the outset of the coronavirus pandemic, schools faced new challenges when they were thrown into remote learning because of shelter-in-place orders. Now, running predominantly online classes, schools are relying on remote computer access and similar applications to proctor exams online. These arrangements constitute both an invasion of privacy and a possible cybersecurity risk; the schools are overlooking better alternatives.
A wide variety of online proctoring methods is available. Common options include taking a full view of a student’s monitor, disabling web browsers, disabling copy-and-paste functions, or some combination of these.
Some of the most commonly used methods are the most invasive, however. ProctorU, one of the largest online-proctoring vendors, drew criticism for using facial-recognition technology, controlling mouse movements, and retaining the ability to disable background apps, which could cause a computer to operate in an unintended manner. Examus claims to employ eye-tracking, scans of other people in the room, and “emotion detection.”
Students should not be expected to hand over this kind of access to their computers or be subject to this scrutiny, especially when they do not know what else the software has access to. Some remote setups, similar to those that IT technicians use, give proctors access to various connections on a student’s computer.
A student at Boise State University discovered that the proctoring software knew how many monitors he had connected; he had to disconnect his second monitor just to access the test. Such problems turn out to be commonplace, indicative of a high degree of surveillance. How could the student know whether his information was being viewed or even recorded—with someone perhaps waiting to breach it? What were the retention policies for the recordings? These details were not disclosed to this student’s class.
Earlier this year, an executive at the online proctoring service Proctorio released the private-chat support logs of students and got Twitter to take down a student’s critical tweet about the company. Proctorio is now suing a security researcher at the University of British Columbia who tweeted negative views of its product.
Some recommend removing the testing software after exams are completed—but students trying to do so have reported that their completed tests were canceled after uninstalling the software.
In defense of the invasive proctoring, an article published by eLearning Industry argues that students taking classroom tests are usually observed—so they should also be remotely observable. The situations are not analogous, though. Computers contain troves of personal information. A proctor watching students take tests in person cannot see what a remote proctor might see, such as private communications and files.
In contrast to overreaching e-proctoring efforts, reasonable anti-cheat measures are available. For example, Florida State University issued best practices for anti-cheating measures that focus on security within the test itself.
For example, the school can turn off the setting that immediately tells students whether their answers to test questions are correct. This prevents students from sharing confirmed answers with others.
Another innovative strategy, used by a University of California, Berkeley, computer science class, is to issue students a decryption key for the exam separate from the exam. This can prevent unintended recipients from viewing it. After decrypting the exam, the student then joins a private Zoom meeting, at which point they share their screen, which is recorded. A proctor can then periodically join the Zoom meeting at his discretion to check on the student and can review the recording to ensure academic honesty. This private meeting keeps students separate and shields them from seeing one another’s environment. The Berkeley instructor told students that all recordings of their displays would be purged after grading the exam. That practice should be standard.
One reason that recording screen sharing is superior to remote access is that it lessens proctor surveillance of the students’ personal effects. Viewing the names of files, picture thumbnails, sticky notes containing passwords, and desktop shortcuts is over-intrusive, potentially embarrassing to students, and does not provide additional security. We shouldn’t be making desktop peeping easy.
These invasive practices led the UC Santa Barbara Faculty Association to issue a warning about ProctorU last May. “This service ... mines the data of our students,” the group declared, “making them available to unspecified third parties, and therefore violates our students’ rights to privacy, and potentially implicates the university into becoming a surveillance tool.”
https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=13358&omhide=true
High School Principal Placed on Leave After Speaking Out Against CensorshipA high school principal in Tennessee has been placed on paid leave after reportedly speaking out against censorship in the wake of last week's riot at the U.S. Capitol.
In a message to students, Cordova High School Principal Barton Thorne condemned last week's riot at the U.S. Capitol before speaking out against censorship. Still, Thorne was placed on paid leave pending an investigation of his comments to students.
WREG obtained audio of Thorne's message.
"It’s what’s going on with Twitter and Facebook and Google and Apple, and their decision as private companies to filter and to decide what you, you hear and know about," Thorne said to students.
According to WREG, Thorne, who's been the principal at Cordova High School for about three years, denounced the violence that took place at the U.S. Capitol and stressed that his comments weren't in defense of President Trump but in freedom of speech in general.
"Because there have been times even in American history where a small group of people decided what you could hear," Thorne continued. "You think about McCarthyism. If you don’t know about that, you can Google that or talk to your Social Studies teacher."
The principal is now on paid leave following an investigation of his comments.
A public school teacher in Allentown, Pennsylvania, was relieved of duty pending a formal investigation into his attendance at the pro-Trump protest in Washington, D.C. last week.
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