Smart Kindergarten

A UCLA professor is working on set of sensors and data-capture applications to record a school classroom in intimate detail. The project webpage has more information; see also an older story. The professor apparently envisions actually deploying these sensors in a classroom next spring, but doesn't mention what school is willing to participate.

Comments

What parent would agree to this?

[Rares Marian]

Wait this is America... it's for the children.

People think if they let fear run their lives willingly it will work out better compared to when governments used to do that forcibly.

Morons.

Re:Oh, great..

[jdray]

"So, Dear, what did you learn in Kindergarten today?"

"I learned that someone named Big Brother is watching my every move, and that it's okay."

Who's being watched?

[jdray]

I wonder if the teacher realizes that he/she is also being watched in this little experiment. I can just see large scale future deployments of these systems, and the resulting end-of-year reviews by faculty management:

"We see, Mr. Smith, that your students are fairly unruly in class, and that they often speak to each other in languages that your resume doesn't indicate that you know. Also, for the 14.6 minutes per hour (average, of course) that your back is to the students, a full 26% of your class cheats on exams and other work. We don't feel that you have effective control of your classrooms, and therefore are choosing to terminate your contract."

Thbbttttt....

A new method for assessing performance

[aligma]

Well, there is one possible positive effect of this system.
Currently when students do badly on exams or assignments, they might miss some of the opportunities other children may have, due to being placed in 'lower' classes. This could be one way of watching how a student works - if they are able to come up with good things in a low pressure environment, perhaps this will allow some of the students who have been previously overlooked to have an opportunity to show what they can too can perform, but only in a less pressure intense situation.

Some of our most promising scientists could be becoming bricklayers because they can't focus properly when they're stressed out, and get bad marks...

Ethics? Where was the human studies committee?

[dpbsmith]

Uh, it doesn't say anywhere in the article that this got a signoff from any human studies committee. Shouldn't it have? It seems to me that this study presents an ethical issue or two

Precisely why is it more valuable scientifically to track kids' classroom interactions than it would be to track the interactions of, say, executives working in a corporation?

My cynical answer: it isn't. They're studying kids because no adult would ever be likely to give permission to be studied in that way.

This is uncomfortably reminiscent of the "Fernald Science Club" of the fifties in which MIT scientists fed mentally retarded kids radioactive tracers in nutritional experiments. It wasn't supposed to harm the kids,and it probably didn't, but it was highly unethical anyway--even by the standards of the time.

In That Hideous Strength, one of C. S. Lewis's characters remarks on the fact that performing experiments on children is considered wrong, yet it's perfectly all right to put the children in an "experimental school."