Stephen Downes

"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.

Meta (aka Facebook) has just released its new AI assistant, Meta AI, Built With Llama 3. Time Bray asks it a simple question, which it gets very wrong. "The problem isn't that these answers are really, really wrong (which they are). The problem is that they are terrifyingly plausible, and presented in a tone of serene confidence." I asked it a question about myself and got a short answer that wasn't wrong so much as very misrepresentative of my actual beliefs (see the image). Note that I didn't need to sign in to Facebook to use it (though I'm sure this will change).

Though this is mostly an exercise in taxonomy, and though it is also badly titled, this post on what Carlos Ortegon, Matthias Decuypere, and Ben Williamson call 'edtech brokers' is an interesting glimpse into an infrequently-discussed branch of the field. Edtech brokers position themselves between educational institutions and the (usually commercial) vendors and services that support them. The authors identify three types of edtech brokers: ambassadors, which act as representatives for specific brands; service engines, that function as search portals offering such things as 'what works' indices; and data brokers, that manage data flows between institutions and vendors. They mediate edtech in three ways: by supporting infrastructure building and standards development, by producing evidence of 'impact' and 'efficacy', and by 'professionally shaping' via development and training programs. I think both taxonomies could be extended with a little thought. See the full paper, Mediating educational technologies (17 page PDF).

According to the authors, "studies on teacher-student interaction (TSI) support tools often focus on teacher needs while neglecting student needs and autonomy." This raises the question of how to enable student needs to be expressed during a class session. They describe the development and testing of a tool called NaMemo2 (built on NaMemo, a tool for remembering student names) to address this need. In so doing they propose a TSI framework called STUDIER (i.e., Sparking, Targeting & Understanding, Designing & Implementing, Evaluating & Refining). NaMemo2 is based on an augmented reality (AR) tool "that allows students to convey their willingness to interact to the teacher as well as show their names to the teacher in physical classrooms." 36 page PDF.