Video Cameras in Schools

Some notes on video cameras in schools.

First, not only are they becoming more prevalent but as the digital technology improves the feeds from the cameras can be sent to an increasing number of places ... other than just the principal's office. The first step was sending a live feed to district headquarters. Now, some cities are moving toward live feeds to the police station. I noted this last fall in a school in NJ and registered some of my concerns with it. Well, this idea of live feeds to police is expanding. Scott McLeod passes along a link that apparently I missed that Chicago is going to the extreme on this with 4,500 live feeds to their 911 technology center. They say that they are only going to regularly monitor cameras on the outside of the school building, but that in emergencies they will access the live feeds from cameras inside the school. The only good thing about this that I can see is that there is 4,500 feeds. You can't watch them all (see Hasan Elahi's interview on the Colbert Report).

I think we can clearly call this a trend now to send live video feeds to police headquarters ... which can then be fed to squad cars and wherever else the police need it. We need to think about what that means for kids and school administrators and how their role or behavior will/should change. You say nothing changes? .... keep reading ...

Okay, second note. Check out this animation of a story by Chris Ware for This American Life, which apparently is also on Showtime now in addition to its usual NPR slot.

I don't bring up philosophy much on the blog ... but I simply can't help but mention Foucault's Discipline and Punish here. I could go into a whole criticism of the live feeds to police headquarters where unknown people are watching you at unknown times and at unknown locations (sometimes I wonder how far away we are from the Panopticon), but Foucault does a better job than me and I will just reference you to him for further reading.

It is the little things like this where you lose something ... a little here a little there and what's left ... well, what's left?

Comments

[Arnie Kriegbaum]

Interesting that cameras in schools (the ones controlled by the school) are first and foremost a tool of social control. I would like to have a live feed of my room (I don't see this happening soon) for parents to view what is happening with their children in my class. Again, my goal would not be to hightlight the kid trying to sleep in the corner, but to showcase how learning goal and process has changed since they were in school. It has changed.
Great post and stunning video.

[Justin Bathon]

Thanks. Right, just like everything else video cameras can be use for good or bad. It is not the technology that is the problem, it is how people respond to the technology.