Imagine if there was a technology were you could read a person's emotional state just by the look on their face. You could see the percentage of how happy, sad, or angry a person is by their facial expression. This seems like a technology that would take years to create, but it has already been created. This technology is already being used and perfected as we speak. While creating this technology it was suggested that we should put this into classrooms around the country to read the emotions of the students. I believe that this would be nonbeneficial and a major invasion of privacy for the students.

Thomas Huang, of the Beckman Institue for Advanced Science at the University of Illinois, are experts at developing better ways for humans and computers to communicate. Thomas and his colleagues have created a technology that can calculate your emotional state. This would be expressed by a percentage of the six basic emotions; happiness, suprise, anger, digust, fear, and sadness. However, according to the article in order for this to work,"the computer constructs a 3-D computer model of the face." Therefore this would mean that the students would be watched by a computer or camera at all time for this technology to work. There can be arguements made that students are already watched by a camera or a computer at all times. While this is true, students are only watched to monitor their actions in the school environment to ensure the safety of the students. However, this would be watching more than just the actions of the students. It would be monitoring their body language, facial expressions, and emotional state. This would be a complete invasion of privacy for the students in our schools.

This article also shows how this technology can benefit the learning of the students. The article states, "A classroom computer could recognize when a student is becoming confused or bored. Then it could modify the lesson, like an effective human instructor." This would be a great thing for the students if we already have a human instructer. It is a teachers job to do the tasks that has been stated above. The article supports this by saying, "In fact, we humans perform the same impressive "calculation" every day." If humans already have the capability to perform this task, then why do we need a machine to do it for us.

Therefore I believe that this technology would not be beneficial to students. As stated above, humans already have the capability to read emotional expressions on a day to day basis. This would also be a complete invasion of privacy seeing how the students would have to be monitored constantly in order for this technology to work. When someone asks you if you would want this to be put in the classroom environment. Think to yourself, would I want my child to be watched constantly and envade their privacy to read how they are feeling?