Tyson Balcomb quit Facebook after a chance encounter on an elevator. He found himself standing next to a woman he had never met — yet through Facebook he knew what her older brother looked like, that she was from a tiny island off the coast of Washington and that she had recently visited the Space Needle in Seattle.
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In November, Wolfram Burgard, a professor of computer science at the University of Freiburg, in Germany, administered an online midterm exam for a course in artificial intelligence to 54 students. The test-takers sat in the lecture hall, spaced at least a meter apart, with proctors roaming the aisles to make sure nobody was looking up clues or chatting online with co-conspirators.
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Educators have long held that the interactions between students and professors defy simple reduction. Yet in several areas of campus life, colleges are converting the student experience into numbers to crunch in the name of improving education.
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