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June 2, 2009

iPhones May Help Japanese University Catch Absent Students

Erica Hendry:

The days of skipping class for students at one Japanese university are over.

At least that's the hope of administrators at Aoyama Gakuin University, in Tokyo, whose School of Social Informatics will give Apple's iPhone 3G to 550 of its students as a way to track attendance with the phone's global-positioning system.

Attendance is an important graduation requirement at the university, the Associated Press reported, and in the past, students would fake attendance by asking friends to answer attendance roll calls or hand in signed attendance sheets with their signatures.

In the new system, students will be required to enter their ID number into an iPhone application at the beginning of class. The phone will pinpoint the students' location when they do, to ensure they are actually on campus.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at June 2, 2009 9:45 AM
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