Okay, so I have posted a few blogs about the galvanic skin response monitors that measure one’s physiological level of engagement, and now I am getting into the swing of things. I understand that this “engagement pedometer” will be strapped to my wrist and called a bracelet. I understand it will know me better than I know myself, and it will communicate that information to nameless others. They will find things out about me. Like what makes me happy, what makes me sad, what makes me angry. But most important, they will find out what I want to buy!
So here is a website that says the future is not so far away. It says that in the not distant future, I will learn to communicate with products and they will communicate with me. Products will learn to be social, and I (or you, probably not I) will talk to the products. I would not need to know my own mind, because my bracelet will make sure that the products know my mind. What a relief! At first, I wondered if this website was a parody, but given the techie ads all over it, I assumed that it is for real.
My friend Diana Senechal figured all of this out, and I am guessing she never saw the Salesforce-Biometric website just mentioned. Read her side-splitting account of the day she spent with her galvanic bracelet and her fruitless efforts to get free of it.
There are times when the best response to crazy stuff is to laugh.
Diane
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Diana’s salon post was a much-needed tonic! I’m getting the sense this is all about selling stuff, right? Selling the bracelets, which require non-union consultants and would indicate which ed-industrial products (clickers, buzzers?) to purchase more of.
Funny, as a teacher, I know when my lessons are doing well: I’m old-school, can monitor engagement the organic way. Experienced teachers know when their kids are turned on by learning — not just excitedly raising hands — you can see it in their faces, affect — but sometimes, you can see they just need time to process the material, which might be quite profound, and therefore demand quiet reflection. (Diana S has written eloquently about the need for quiet space and reflection) Sometimes a student who appeared quiet and low-key the whole period will ask me a clarifying question when class is over, or just to express that he was surprised to hear I was alive during the Cold War. (Then it’s my turn to be astonished — imagine being born during the 1990’s!).
I guess what I’m saying is I feel we can do without the brave new world bracelet-thingy.
Skilled educators don’t need to invade their students’ privacy to run a classroom — we are doing quite well on our own, thank you. As long as we are bombarded with gimmicks, we will be thinking less about how to encourage deep learning, and more about bringing in silly distractions (and in my opinion, some of these gadgets, which just facilitate mult choice question tests do just that).
We aren’t salespeople, and we don’t want to cheapen the profession
Sadly, Diane, they do not require the bracelets. Unless you never use a supermarket discount card, do all your purchasing in cash, and never use the internet (too late for the last for both you and me), they already know more about you than you could ever imagine. And that includes the government. Congress may have put the kibosh on John Poindexter’s Total Information Awareness, but there is no ban on private companies collecting such data on you and Donald Rumsfeld went ahead and purchased it for the Department of Defense.
Each week I get an email from my supermarket with the specials, including “my” specials based on my previous purchases.
If you have a spam filter and check your spam, you might be able to figure out why some of it seems to have found you based on previous browsing.
We take advantage of the technology, we become addicted to it in certain ways. You are able through blogging to reach more people more quickly than you ever could if you had to go through a publisher. It is the ability to produce your own broadside and post it on a public wall. I serve as a peer reviewer for books and journal articles, and nowadays I almost always receive them electronically. Word Processing programs have tools that expedite the processing of editing someone else’s written work. I can easily communicate with groups of people directly via email or chat groups, and I can comment and disseminate using twitter.
Like it or not, while the walls might not yet be talking to me, the stores already are, albeit in electronic messages. Orwell could not imagine what technology already offers.
Thank you, Diane, for recommending my story! I’m glad you enjoyed it.
I had indeed seen the Salesforce-Biometric website. (I don’t want to claim credit for prescience that I don’t have.)
Inverness, I agree with you. We know when our students are interested and paying attention, and we recognize different forms of this. Sometimes we can be mistaken or surprised, but that’s an essential part of education in itself: recognizing and correcting errors of judgment.
Some will say, “Why, then, would teachers reject a device that added to the information that they already had?” Well, as you say, it’s both an intrusion and a distraction. What’s more, it’s part of a large and troubling trend.
We have entered an era where data-gathering is both a sales strategy and a way of life; everywhere we go, we see statistics on ourselves and others. (Even Facebook “likes” fall into this.) We hear over and over that this is “information” that we should welcome–but it really comes to specks of information gathered up into a mass. Amazon may know which books I have purchased, but it has no clue how I responded to those books. It doesn’t know why I love Saul Bellow’s Seize the Day. Even Kindle, which tracks the passages that people underline, has no idea why they underlined them. (I have been told that Kindle users have the option of seeing what their “friends” have underlined–as though that would be anything but distracting.)
One day this trend will hit its limits, and there will be a resurgence of humanism. That day seems far away, though.
This is certainly a case of “TMI.”
While there’s something to be said for technology in the school (and I’ll let someone else say it), there’s certainly a cost incurred as relationships between teachers and students are increasingly mediated. It violates the private lives of children as well. I think about this every time a staff member wishes for more surveillance cameras in our school.
Laughing always seems to take the pain, frustration, stress and anger away. Thanks so much for sharing Diana’s blog link. I truly did get a laugh out of it. Humor is good medicine!
Welcome to George Orwell’s “1984” (a few years late) but sounds like this may be where the country is headed if these bracelets become the new “fad.” As I was reading Diana’s account of the day, I sat here having regularly use my hand push my chin up to close my hanging open mouth. I can tell you this though. It will be a cold day you know where before I will put one of those on or require my students to wear one.