Ready For A Sensor-Equipped Classroom?
from the watching-every-move dept
Roland Piquepaille writes "This experiment, described by the Daily Bruin Online, the newspaper of the University of California (UCLA), Los Angeles, reminds me of the famous Michael Powell's movie, "Peeping Tom." A UCLA professor, Mani Srivastava, wants to outfit an entire first grade classroom with minuscule sensors, from the students to the physical room. The project is sponsored by the National Science Foundation for $1.8 million. Students will wear special caps tracking their location while cameras and microphones will record their activities. And all the data gathered will be processed by a data-mining software. My overview contains some more details about the project." Sounds a bit more advanced then just putting webcams in the classroom, and most parents found that to be too intrusive. I doubt many people want such a thing - least of all the kids themselves. It sounds like, thanks to cheap, tiny sensors, some people are trying to go back to a world of Taylor time-and-motion studies - a concept that was discredited a century ago. Constant monitoring doesn't make people work up to their best level. It makes them feel annoyed, angry, and mistrusted.
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Office Move Business Theory
In my experience, The Office Move(tm) is the primary method of utilizing the observation motivation effect. I have been places where managers moved people as many as 5 times in one year... and I'm not talking about moving people to do growth or attrition. I'm talking about mindlessly moving people between offices in the same section, sometimes even having them move back into and office they moved out of a few months ago.
Of course, rather than instrumenting the students to the point where they even know if the kid's got a boner, they could try evaluating homework and getting that returned to the student on time.
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A foolish consistency...
If you want to figure out what goes on in a classroom, the best thing to do is observe. Sure, homework is important, but homework reports, for example, that boys are "better" than girls at math and science, and fails to capture a tendency on the part of teachers to favor boys over girls in class participation, etc.
I did not understand, either from the article cited or Roland's summary, that the intent was to "improve" the performance of the kids in the classroom under observation (though certainly there will be some degree of Hawthorne effect), but rather to leverage technology to improve data collection and analysis in the area of educational research.
While it might be possible, I doubt that NSF has funded this without requiring the usual human subjects protections, IRB review/approval, and the like. Certainly, there have historically been people who are willing, even eager, to have their children participate in "laboratory schools" - presumably thinking that there will be some benefit.
I guess that the leaps that the Techdirt report and commentors (myself included) have taken from what is a very limited description of the planned effort (I'd bet the proposal was at least 100 pages) are what trouble me -- we're all jumping to conclusions on the basis of inadequate evidence.
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Re: A foolish consistency...
You miss the point... The technology itsel is neutral. The use of that technology is not.
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Some more information for Bob Bechtel 'and others)
If you need more information from the NSF about this project, you can check their Awards greater than $500K page for Information Technology Research projects.
Move to item #18 and you'll discover this:
Technologies for Sensor-based Wireless Networks of Toys for Smart Developmental Problem-solving EnvironmentsPI: Mani Srivastava
Institution: University of California-Los Angeles
Est. Award Amt: $1,841,143
Duration: 36mos.
State: CA
This will lead you to the NSF Award Abstract #0085773. The abstract of the project is there and you're free to read it, even if it's written in such a way that it's hard to understand it: "paradigm shift," "smart kindergarten," "focus on highly unstructured, dynamic, and dense networks of embedded devices," etc.
Anyway, I still think that these experiments are more dangerous than beneficial for the students involved.
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