Stephen Downes

During the playoffs I like to keep track of the scores, so I do a search. P{roblem is, there are four games, but Google only displays three results. It's so frustrating. I have to scroll way down to get a link to the actual website that displays all the scores. If Google has its way, I might never get to that website at all. As Kottke summarizes, "it's better/cheaper to provide potentially wrong answers to keep you clicking within Google than it is to send you away for the right answers." And an answer doesn't have to be incorrect to be wrong. It just has to be something I don't want. Like incomplete scores. Or summaries instead of sources.

I agree with this part of the post: "There is a tendency here to imply a zero-sum principle to humanness: the more the tech can do the less it means to be human. This feels wrong to me and isn't helpful in an educational context." But I don't agree with what I think is the main point, which is to focus on human creativity as the differentiator. We'll find, I think, that we can't think of human activity in the age in a nice neat Bloom's taxonomy package. We'll be looking at completely new human activities outside the domain of the taxonomy - valuate, maybe. Or obviate. Whatever. When it's not zero sum, it means we're adding something that wasn't there before. And that's what I expect.

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).