Stephen Downes

So of course we want to know what the list is, but by the time we get to it on page 7 we find the list is actually derived from another paper (Liu et al., 2020, which compares them between Chinese and U.S. based instructors) and this paper measures Canadian faculty and student rankings of them (there's also an appendix with each practice described in more detail). At the top of the list is "students' and faculty's shared contempt for disrespect", otherwise, I feel (based on my reading of the two lists) faculty emphasizes unprepared teaching while students stress ineffective teaching. 18 page PDF.

I think this is a useful exercise that should be watched by educators. "We wanted to come up with a method to encourage people watching videos to do what's called 'lateral reading,' which is that you go look at other places on the web to establish whether something is credible or true, as opposed to diving deep into the thing itself," says Amy X. Zhang, one of the authors of a paper (20 page PDF) describing the project. Creating the mechanism is only the first step, though, as the authors need to consider things like bad actors and circular citation networks.

"When will the first American college or university charge $100,000 or more to attend?" asks Bryan Alexander. "What might that mean for higher education?" There's a number of them in the $US 90K range already, so it's probably not long now. The survey paints a picture of an education system that has gone very wrong, and is designed to preserve privilege rather than advance the interests of society.

The gist of the story is this: "Broadcasters have been focused on fitting the streaming TV business into the traditional TV mold. Meanwhile, YouTube has shattered the mold with its democratic approach to TV and is eating the broadcaster's lunch!" Almost all the video I watch online (and I watch a lot) does not fit into the traditional TV mode. "YouTube has figured out how to harness the creativity of anyone with talent and get them onto the TV screens of just about everyone... Disney spends $30 billion a year on content destined for television. YouTube doesn't pay anything for its content. Instead, it relies on many creators to keep viewers coming back." At some point, we'll see educational media follow the same path (things like TeachersPayTeachers were trailblazing in this way).

This post offers an overview of GPT-4o, the new model released by chatGPT. "GPT-4o appears to be a step up over GPT-4 and is the smartest model I have used. However, it does not represent a major leap over the previous version of GPT-4, the way that GPT-4 was a 10x improvement over the free GPT-3.5." That accords with my own experience. Also, "soon everyone, whether they are paying or not, will get access to GPT-4o." I've been paying for GPT-4, and will probably keep paying, but as Ethan Mollick says, "that $20 a month barrier kept many people from understanding how impressive AI can be, and for gaining any benefit from AI. That is no longer true."

"I was at an event recently and a speaker was late so was asked to do a 20 minute slot, unscripted, no props/slides etc.," writes Andrew Jacobs. "If it happened to you, what could you do a tight 20 on?" My answer - and it should be your answer too - would be "anything". That's the different between knowledge as 'remembering' and knowledge as 'learning'. Anything I've ever heard about, I could talk about for twenty minutes simply by organizing and presenting my thoughts on the topic. Do a 'quick three' - past, present or future; my view, your view, synthesis; etc. For each six minute segment, build the case - something concrete, something general, a conclusion to be drawn (or: an odd phenomenon, a general principle, an explanation to be given). Each of these is only two minutes, and you'll be pressed for time to make the point, but try: a couple points of reference or evidence, and the point is made. Anyone can do this about anything - if they've learned how. And if they've learned how, they know how to learn about any new subject they encounter.