I think someone upthread mentioned that a blue LED lights up when Glass is recording, much like the light next to a laptop’s webcam. Of course, it would probably not be too terribly challenging to disable or obscure such an indicator.
I’m old enough to remember when consumer-grade camcorders got cheap enough to start popping up all over the place. Some people were so excited about them, they’d bring them along everywhere, often to some shockingly inappropriate places and situations. Of course, they weren’t particularly subtle, certainly not as much as current technology permits. But even though ordinary janes and joes have had access to portable camcorders for a generation or two (and Super 8 cameras before that), there has formed an unspoken consensus that you don’t go around filming willy nilly everywhere you go. A kid’s birthday party? Sure. A wedding or some other family-memorable event, knock yourself out. But you don’t stroll into a bar or restaurant or classroom or grocery store or meeting hall with a camera held up to your eye. It’s Simply Not Done. It’s gauche. It’s rude. You can do that with a buttonhole camera or some other stealth device and get away with it, but if you’re discovered, people will get bent outta shape.
The social norms for this kind of wearable technology are still being worked out. It could very well be that as a society we’ve become so used to photographing and being photographed everywhere we go that we might one day start simply recording everything that happens before our eyes all day long, a la the dashboard cameras in Russia, just to have a record in case we ever might conceivably need or want one. Or it could be that the norms might more closely follow those surrounding the camcorders of the last century, where if you don’t want to be considered pervy or invasive for using them you’d better make sure it’s obvious when you are recording and when you are not, and that you’re not recording at socially inappropriate times.
As for the lecture-recording use, well, I’m always going to assume that that’s a policy that should be set by the professor or institution. Some teachers think that it’s perfectly sensible and legitimately useful to record lectures for later review, some find the practice distasteful or lazy or opportunistic or whatever. I know I personally wouldn’t do it without express invitation by the prof, simply because I understand and respect the arguments against it.
No, probably not. Taking notes and summarizing what is said and maybe distilling it into your own words on the fly can be a valuable part of the process of learning and understanding a concept. Maybe your intent would be to record the lecture so you can do the note-taking and lecture-reviewing later at your leisure, maybe taking the opportunity to re-listen to make sure certain passages weren’t misheard, and that’s all a good-faith effort to learn, which is laudable. But if the teacher is genuinely concerned about plagiarism or other forms of copyright violation, or if they genuinely believe that their course is best taught without recording (as might be the case if your typical Jeff Spicoli character records a lecture because he’s too hung over to pay proper attention at classtime), then I think they should be able to set the policy that fits their teaching style best.
