Teacher Tracking with Integrity: What Indoor Positioning Can Reveal About Instructional Proxemics

Abstract

Automatic tracking of activity and location in the classroom is becoming increasingly feasible and inexpensive. However, although there is a growing interest in creating classrooms embedded with tracking capabilities using computer vision and wearables, more work is still needed to understand teachers' perceived opportunities and concerns about using indoor positioning data to reflect on their practice. This paper presents results from a qualitative study, conducted across three authentic educational settings, investigating the potential of making positioning traces available to teachers. Positioning data from 28 classes taught by 10 university teachers was captured using sensors in three different collaborative classroom spaces in the disciplines of design, health and science. The contributions of this paper to ubiquitous computing are the documented reflections of teachers from different disciplines provoked by visual representations of their classroom positioning data and that of others. These reflections point to: i) the potential benefit of using these digital traces to support teaching; and ii) concerns to be considered in the design of meaningful analytics systems for instructional proxemics.