OLDaily

A Field Guide to 'jobs that don't exist yet'
Benjamin Doxtdator, A Long View on Education, 2017/12/20

I found this article via the most recent of Audrey Watters's posts summarizing 2017. It traces the origin of the claim that "We are currently preparing students for jobs that don’t exist yet, using technologies that haven’t been invented, in order to solve problems we don’t even know are problems yet.” It also attempts to debunk it. The claim appears to have its origin in a Bill Clinton speech in 1996. It shows up again in a 2006 speech by former Education Secretary Richard W. Riley. It was repeated by Ian Jukes and cited by Karl Fisch an d put into a video by Scott McLeod. It was also cited for a time by Cathy Davidson and by the World Economic Fourm and attributed to Jim Carroll and to the Innovation Council of Australia (both the report and the Council have disappeared) and to this 1999 report from the U.S. department of labour, which contains the assertion (illustrated) if not the precise number. But is it true? Doxtdator writes that "Andrew Old and more recently Michael Berman and the BBC have provided a solid de-bunking." But do they? Sure, the 65% figure is arbitrary, and depends a lot on how you count jobs. The BBC uses the 600 job titles in government labour surveys, but these are very broad categories, eg. "software professionals" and "IT user support technicians" and don't reflect change within categories.  As Catrhy Davidson says in the BBC interview, "I think all jobs are new jobs." 

[Link] [Comment]

Google Maps's Moat
Justin O’Beirne, 2017/12/20

The 'moat' in the title represents how hard it will be for competitors, like Apple Maps, to catch up. The article as a whole is a detailed analysis of what Google has been doing with its maps service in the last year and especially how it hasd been combining different kinds of data to create new data - such as, for example, shapes of buildings extracted from satellite projections, and business types extracted from street view, combined to form 'areas of interest' featuring clusters of shops and restaurants. From experience I can say that this new data greatly assists tourism and exploration.

[Link] [Comment]

Global education rankings to measure tolerance
Sean Coughlan, BBC News, 2017/12/20

According to this report, the OECD's Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) will be testing students' "global competence" in the next round of evaluations. "It's intended to find out how well young people can understand other people's views and cultures, how they can look beyond the partisan echo chamber of social media and distinguish reliable evidence from fake news." The tests, and the results, could be controversial. "As an example, the OECD suggests a question about different interpretations of evidence for global warming, in which the same information seems to have been used to produce charts supporting and opposing claims about climate change. Students are asked to analyse the evidence and to question how data might be used selectively or how the findings of research can be influenced by whomever has funded it." I can't wait.

[Link] [Comment]

Introduction to Psychology with Professor Paul Bloom
Paul Bloom, Yale University, 2017/12/20

Interesting project. According to the email, "Knowledge 4 All Foundation together with the UNESCO Chair in OER in Slovenia is testing a new machine translation service specifically tailored for educational texts from EN to 11 languages." This is one of two videos they're using as a test case (Physics I: Classical Mechanics is the other). Now they want your feedback on how well the translation worked. "We need your help to answer a short survey that is available under each video and at the top of the course," writes Igor Lesko in the email. "Your answers will help us understand how valuable this product would be to other users. You can select the languages in the video player by clicking on the CC button." Note that you'll need to be able to run Flash; the site refused to run the video for me and suggested I use a "more modern browser."

[Link] [Comment]