Stephen Downes

"AI-generated avatars that look and sound like deceased relatives are increasingly popular to console those in mourning, or to hide the deaths of loved ones from the elderly and young children," Viola Zhou reports. What's interesting is the variety of reasons people want the avatars - not just for remembrance, but also to hide the death of relatives from young children. Also: "Lin hopes the bot will become his immortal doppelgänger, speaking on his behalf after his death. 'If my descendants ask 'What was Grandpa Lin Zhi like?' they could just talk to the AI version of myself to find out.'" It's not immortality, exactly; it's more like publishing an interactive autobiography. I need to get around to setting my own up.

This post references some good conference coverage by Phil Hill and considers the question of whether institutions are ready for the collapse of online program management (OPM) services. "Leaders in the sector, including 2U, Coursera and Keypath, never made a profit on the activity, and Pearson and Wiley sold off their OPM offshoots in recent months." The revenue-sharing model was never profitable, according to the articles. Moreover, as colleges acquired the relevant skills (especially during the pandemic) the need to outsource abated. The tech is complex enough that, if you're large enough, you want to do it in-house, if only to stay on top of features and costs.

According to this article, "Post News, a Twitter alternative run by the former Waze CEO Noam Bardin, is shutting down. Bardin says the platform 'is not growing fast enough.'" It was backed by venture capitalists Andreesen-Horowitz. It was "a social platform that also offers users ad-free access to paywalled content from publishers such as Fortune, Business Insider, Wired, The Boston Globe, and others." What they missed, I think, is that people not only want to read, they want to share, but they only place users could share was on Post News itself; otherwise, you'd just be sharing a paywall, and nobody wants that.

"The time has come to break free from the shackles of 'best practices' and embrace the power of effectiveness driven by the true experts in education—the schools and educators who implemented these strategies consistently and with a high degree of fidelity." Certainly there has been criticism of the idea of 'best practices' over the years for precisely this sort of reason. But are 'the schools and educators who implemented these strategies' really 'the true experts'? Certainly they would have valuable feedback, as would any practitioner. But they do not assess their practices scientifically, and they are unable to view outside their own context. The problem with 'best practices' isn't that we're talking to the wrong people - it's that we're asking the wrong question. Image: Perceptyx.

This is just a note to remind readers in Canada that graduate students - who teach a significant proportion of university classes - are expected to live on roughly $15-$25 thousand dollars a year. The explanation is that 'work' is 'capped' at 10 hours a week, so it's a good hourly rate, but nobody believes people teaching university classes are actually working only 10 hours a week. You can read about the strike at Western University here and here. As a graduate student association president some 25 years ago I worked actively on this very issue, and it's disappointing to see it persists to this day.

This post is directed toward ed tech companies and makes the point that "in a fragmented impact ecosystem, ed-tech needs collaboration to prioritize education over technology." In other words, "for a technology to count as educational, the market needs to be run as a partnership industry, where developers, educators, researchers, and students actively work together to develop, implement, and scale what works." The article makes four specific recommendations that seem reasonable to me (though I word them a bit differently): first, the company's self-interest needs to be subordinate to "the 5Es of impact, efficacy, effectiveness, ethics, equity, and environmental impact"; second, "focus more on the quality of evidence rather than solely on the type of evidence"; third, "contribute new ideas for impact measurement and understanding", and fourth, do more than just query practitioners for new ideas.