Stephen Downes

Alex Usher interviews his "favourite commentator on all issues related to educational technology and higher education institutions," Phil Hill. The best bit is this, where Usher comments: "25 percent of post-secondary enrollments in the U. S. are now fully online and another 25 percent or so are at least partially online. I had no idea the market was that big." But they are, and as Phil Hill makes clear, a big part of the reason was MOOCs. "MOOCs, along with 2U's initial business model, those were the two things that forced traditional higher education to get over themselves and say, we need to take online education seriously." The two of them are far more interested in markets and money than I am, but on these they know their stuff. Image: Phil Hill.

Your college degree, sponsored by Google? " Interim (University of Nebraska) President Chris Kabourek announced Tuesday that the university will soon offer Google Career Certificates in a variety of fields... Google experts teach the programs, which are vetted by leading employers. NU students, alumni and Nebraska residents can get a special first-year rate of $20 per enrollment." According to Kabourek, "the new partnership advances a 2022 legislative goal, which NU supported, to increase the percentage of Nebraskans with postsecondary credentials by 2030 to 70%." I'm not sure that's what the legislature meant, but these days, who can be sure? Via The 74.

Offering a little light reading, this report (502 page PDF) "tracks, collates, distills, and visualizes data related to artificial intelligence (AI)." The authors ease you in; you can read the 'top 10 takeaways' (p. 5), chapter-by-chapter 'report highlights' (p. 14ff), or read the chapters themselves - each page is almost like an individual slide with some key points and a graph or table illustration, while some coloured 'highlight' pages (like 'Will Models Run Out of Data?', p. 52) are interspersed. It's worth the time to just flip through this document, where you'll find everything about AI considered, including, for example, "their capacity for moral reasoning, especially moral reasoning that aligns with human moral judgments, is less understood... Of all models surveyed, GPT-4 showed the greatest agreement with human moral sentiments," a statement that is remarkable on several dimensions (p. 122 ).

You may not think of children's vaccines as educational technology, but I think of it as the second educational technology, following only the first: proper nutrition. This tech stuff we do? That only helps once we've addressed the rally major issues created by child poverty and misinformation about health. I'm old enought that I got all the diseases when I was a kid - measles, German measles, chickenpox, mumps. Everybody got them, and a few of the kids died. What would have been better than running that gauntlet? Immunization. "We have forgotten how many children used to die before their fifth birthday," writes Kristen Panthagani. I haven't forgotten. That's why I get a flu shot every year and make sure I'm up on my Covid shots. I've remained flu-free for years and years, and entirely covid-free. I hope to stay that way. Via Robin DeRosa.

It's not that this article is wrong. But as Gerald Ardito comments, "there is more than a little irony in this post, given EdSurge's long time tech boosterism." Tanner Higgin writes, "Within this technocentrist frame, education is sick and edtech is like medicine." How many studies do we see like this, asking "what works?" in education, as though the same goal were shared by all. But as Seymour Papert writes, "The content for human development is always a culture, never an isolated technology." And in particular, "The potential of technology is significantly affected by the humans that use it and their context."

This short article references a 2022 paper that studies how the order of questions in a test impacts how well the test-takers do. "A perfectly logical test-taker should do equally well no matter the order of questions," writes the author, "but research shows that humans are influenced by the order." In particular, "students answered more... questions (correctly) when they began with easy questions compared to when they started with difficult ones." The relevant question to ask here is this: if the result depends so much on the order of the questions, what is it exactly that the test is measuring?