Researchers Wanted Preschool Teachers to Wear Cameras to Train AI
404media.co
404media.co
That labeling I'm sure would have social consequences- singling out people and giving them a label is a path toward exclusion in other activities and make wearing a sticker a sigma... :(
edit: fixed piratical typo
> The University of Washington today announced that it is part of a multi-pronged grantmaking strategy from Ballmer Group aimed at drawing more people into careers in early childhood education in our state — including by providing more than 1,500 scholarships over the next eight years.
> Ballmer Group is providing a set of gifts totaling more than $43 million to fund scholarships, leadership development and advocacy across multiple organizations, reducing the financial barriers that prevent talent from entering the early childhood workforce. The gifts ensure Washington can successfully implement the Fair Start for Kids Act and build racially diverse leadership in the broader policy field.
https://www.washington.edu/news/2023/03/16/43-million-set-of...
> The Ballmer Group has quietly emerged as a major player in the world of education venture-philanthropy, committing more than $250 million to K-12 related efforts during 2017 and 2018. As a limited liability corporation, the group is free to make charitable donations and for-profit investments—none of which have to be publicly disclosed.
> The Ballmers have also gotten on board with the trend of merging charitable giving with venture-capital investments and calling it all philanthropy.
> Those elements of the couple’s approach are reflected in their hefty investment in Social Solutions Global, to help the for-profit company develop nonprofit case-management software that will be able to integrate with the student information systems used by most K-12 school districts.
> By structuring the Ballmer Group as an LLC, the Ballmers have certainly given themselves more levers to pull in service of their goals, said Reckhow, the Michigan State professor. But they also seem to have embraced the notion that billionaires working to reshape public policy and service delivery don’t need to be transparent about what they’re doing.
> Officials from the Ballmer Group, however, told Education Week they would not commit to publicly disclose all the organization’s grants, investments, lobbying work, or support for elected officials and campaigns.
https://www.edweek.org/leadership/ex-microsoft-ceo-no-not-th...
This..feels like a worthy goal. Just switch the study to opt-in instead of opt-out and 404media can't get the "ER-MEH-GERD AI" click bait. This is not generative AI and the lead-researcher is an early-childhood education specialist [1].
My kid went to a UC Berkeley adjacent pre-school and had researchers come by all the time, filming and taking notes (after consent forms were signed). They would share their studies with us later, it was very illuminating.
Where was there any indication this was that?
Does it though? Do you really want everything, including caring for young children, to be quantified into metrics assessed by a computer?
I think to pre-emptively disregard research like this because “well it could be misused” is folly
AI makes it even easier while simultaneously removing accountability to the managers using it. And there will always be managers who will use such tools. Couple this with AI vendors and their cash piles lobbying every public and private institutions like crazy and the foreseeable is easy to foresee.
My undergrad had something similar. I took a class through it for some general credit. For one of our assignments we'd observe and take notes, sitting in the gallery space, which was a sort of catwalk above the classroom hidden behind a one way mirror. The whole classroom was microphoned and we could tune in to certain areas of the room to listen in. I am not sure if the preschoolers themselves were aware of the surveillance as probably that would influence their behavior.
Just a good faith attempt.
Again just want to point out this is a university researcher trying to measure better ways to teach kids not Flock trying to get started early on their school to prison pipeline. I feel like we’ve lost the plot here.
We haven't lost the plot. How do you think things like Flock came to be? Incrementally or all at once?
And there is no indication that the professor here planned to violate any of them.
“How do you think things like Flock came to be?”
Not from a benign study about better teaching methods, or of anything akin to it. Video is a rich data source. I hope researches get to use it more. I’m not selling all that out just because one completely unrelated private company misuses data.