Listing of events related to the Learning Observer
View the Project on GitHub ETS-Next-Gen/learning-observer-events
There is a trade-off between the benefits of analyzing data and the risks to student. At the core, this is a question of values, and the answer varies by culture. Coarsely speaking, in many Middle Eastern countries, simply taking photos without permission is considered rude, while China has a growing ecosystem for monitoring students (see e.g. Under AI’s Watchful Eye, China Wants to Raise Smarter Students).
Understanding these differences is hard. If we ask, of course everyone cares about privacy, and everyone cares about students learning. However, diving into concretes, different individuals and different cultures land in very different places. These differences manifest, often vicerally, when comparing classroom practice. Ripley describes the experience of an American exchange student in Poland:
After the first test, the teacher announced the scores in front of the class, so everyone could hear. As a new exchange student, Tom had been exempt from the test himself. But listening to the grade announcements, he felt intensely uncomfortable. Like Eric in Korea, he couldn’t imagine such a public reckoning in his American classroom.
Nor could he imagine everyone doing so poorly: In Poland, the lowest grade was always one, and the highest was five. After each test, he waited to see if anyone would get a five; no one ever did. No one seemed surprised or shattered, either. They shouldered their book bags and moved on to the next class. He tried to imagine no one ever getting an A in Gettysburg. Would they give up, or would they try harder?
Kids in Poland were used to failing, it seemed. The logic made sense. If the work was hard, routine failure was the only way to learn. “Success,” as Winston Churchill once said, “is going from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm.”
Tom had failed in math, too, back in eighth grade in Pennsylvania. But he hadn’t experienced that failure as normal or acceptable. He’d experienced it as a private trauma. Failure in American schools was demoralizing and to be avoided at all costs. American kids could not handle routine failure, or so adults thought.
Source: Smartest Kids in the World
Take some time to explore these sorts of difference. There are no right or wrong answers here, but there is a question of how we develop systems – both technological and organizational – which work for diverse students, whether from global classrooms, or kids from diverse cultures within one classroom.
This is hard as every culture will say they believe in privacy, in education, and in many other values. However, when given concrete, difficult situations, the tradeoffs they will make will often be very different. Identifying these differences will be especially hard in an all-Polish group, as we’re likely to have here.
For the second portion, take the perspective of a family on the fringes of mainstream culture (e.g. an immigrant to or from Poland from a very different culture), where values misalign.