I recently read an article a friend posted about her school. Apparently the school bought several iPad’s so that they could monitor who was going to what events. Afterwards, they would work out demographics to see what “kind of people” was going to each event. For some reason that really, really bothered me. I thought that it shouldn’t matter and that these were gathering unnecessary personal information about these students.
On the other hand, I could see how it could be sold that by doing this they will see that a disproportional amount of students is attending one event over another. Or maybe just keeping track of attendance in general will help to allocate funding. Still I can’t help but consider that this demographic profiling is causing us to focus on students as groups and classes of people instead of just people—just students.
What do you say? Am I up to my crazy thoughts again?
In efforts to reflect and decide if funding for an event is worthwhile, I can see why school officials would record the attendance of students at each particular event. I don’t agree however with the necessity to record the demographics of the students who are attending the events. The only reason I could see how that information could be useful is so that school officials could promote these events to certain age groups or certain genders that would otherwise normally not receive the invitation.
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