Facial Coding: Valuable or Not

There is a new emotion reader out there, called FACS, short for the Facial Action Coding System. This new application has a bunch of cool features and innovations that can have some pretty practical applications. However, this essay is only focused on one application; is this system beneficial for reading human emotions in a classroom setting? People have mixed feelings about this, but this essay will focus on why this new FACS is not extremely valuable for reading emotional expressions in a classroom setting.

First, what can this new emotion reader do? Well, this thing can read all of the emotions on the face of the Mona Lisa. Not just one or two, but four emotions at once, and balance the percentages for each emotion, to let you know exactly how much of each emotion the person is feeling. This could have some really cool applications, like being able to tell what emotions someone was trying to convey in a drawing, or being able to tell what kinds of things you like or dislike, based off your expressions when you are shown different advertisements. There is so much you can do with this new technology, and there is a lot of uses that it has. However, the things you can do in a school setting are just mediocre.

There is a lot that sounds like cool things you can use this application for in school. In the text it says, "A classroom computer could recognize when a student is becoming confused or bored" The text also says,"Then it could modify the lesson, like an effective human instructor." This sounds like a really good thing. However, instead of a computer system having to recognize when a student gets confused or bored, the student can just speak up and say something about it. That is not all, though. The computer system could either, one, misread a student's expression and make the lesson harder to understand or take a lot longer, or two, the student might just start drifting away and thinking about something else that is really confusing, like Einstein's theory of relativity. The computer, in turn, would make the lesson modified when it doesn't need to be, and have so many modifications that the student gets completely lost and doesn't understand anything that is happening in the lesson, just because he or she started to think about something else for a couple of seconds.

Lastly, this facial recognition system could seem like a pretty big invasion of privacy. Do people want everyone to know every single emotion they ever feel? Do they want all their teachers to know that they find what they are talking about boring? No, they do not, at least for the most part. Systems like these are getting pretty close to almost being able to know what someone is thinking, and most people don't want everyone to know what they are thinking about. The text says, "The new emotion-recognition software tracks these facial movements-in a real face or in the painted face of Mona Lisa. By weighing the different units, the software can even identify mixed emotions." This text says that the system can detect your emotions, but also your mixed emotions. Going back to the Mona Lisa example, the software can track the exact amount of emotions that you have, and the percentages of the emotions that you are feeling. This seems way too much like an invasion of privacy, given that people are giving what their feeling, and all of it too, away to a computer system, that can be tracked or looked at by anyone. Now maybe the system will only give what you are feeling to a teacher, or maybe it will not even do that, and function as a one-on-one learning guide. Even still, their are various ways to get into computer and technological programs, and forcing kids to give away all their emotions just for a possible improved and modified lesson seems like way too much to force someone to do, for that amount of a reward.

So, the FACS could have numerous practical applications for entertainment purposes and other purposes too. However, putting it at use to read emotional expressions of students in a classroom isn't one of them. In conclusion, the use of FACS in a classroom isn't worth the value that comes out of it, as it could have better applications elsewhere, it could glitch out or misread emotions, it could read emotions that the student is feeling about something else rather than the classroom, and finally, an appliclation that can read all of your expressions and convey them to other people is a pretty huge invasion of privacy, and forcing people to use this program is not worth the value of a slightly modified lesson for each individual. In the end, FACS is more useful as an entertainment device rather than having a school setting application. This technolgy has great value in so many areas, but schooling just isn't one of them.