Japan university gives away iPhones to nab truants

Source: Associated Press

TOKYO (AP) — A prestigious Japanese university is giving away hundreds of iPhones, in part to use its Global Positioning System to nab students that skip class.

Truants in Japan often fake attendance by getting friends to answer roll-call or hand in signed attendance cards. That's verging on cheating since attendance is a key requirement for graduation here.

Aoyama Gakuin University in Tokyo is giving Apple Inc.'s iPhone 3G to 550 students in its School of Social Informatics, which studies the use of Internet and computer technology in society.

The gadget will work as a tool for studies, but it also comes with GPS, a satellite navigation system that automatically checks on its whereabouts. The university plans to use that as a way check attendance.



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Faking attendance is not "verging on cheating", it IS cheating!

Plus, as the article points out, students can just give their friends their phones to continue to fake attendance. The school might not think this will happen, but I think it's very possible. After all, can't you lock an iPhone? So why would they worry about having their friend carry it for a few hours?

I thought only secret government agencies would be using cell phones in this capacity for years to come.

Cat's out of the bag and nobody cares. Ho hum. Just another day in the incipient technocratic fascist empire.

Big brother uses that information to check on our whereabouts.

A third party (the school) would not have access to that information without cooperation from the cell service and the student.

Is to take attendance on the phone itself. The student would need to open a location services aware app and tell it which class he/she wishes to be counted present for, perhaps entering a code generated by the instructor's phone so it can validate against the university's servers.

Thinking about it, as a bonus perhaps the app could record that day's lecture and provide an exclusive link to the online portion of the material.

Easier to do it for the Android platform or the Palm's WebOS. Just run the tracking 'attendance' app whenever the student wants to be tracked present and handle the recording and links separately, since they can multitask.