Stephen Downes

I thought this would be a paean to the joys of cognitive science in education, but surprisingly this short article (based on a longer research paper) not only describes some of the principles they authors applied but also the difficulties they faced while applying them. For example, they discuss the concern that the 'coherence principle', which "recommends avoiding redundant visuals or information", stands in the way of clarity, "where improving clarity meant making explanations longer, presenting ideas in more than one way."

This report speaks more to the broader futurist ambitions of this newsletter than to educational technology (EdTech) specifically. Apparently there's a brach of the Canadian government called Policy Horizons Canada (who knew?) and this report reflects what they see as potential disruptions, both in terms of projected liklihood as well as potential impact. The most likely risk is that "people cannot tell what is true and what is not", and it is projected as a short term and high impact risk. Another likely disruption? "Billionaires run the world". This is not surprisingly correlated with "democratic systems break down" and eventually "world war breaks out," which is the highest impact projection on the board. Also very likely in the medium term: biodiversity breaks down. None of this is particularly good, and if you're designing technology, it really is necessary to take all these risks into consideration. Also available as a 37 page PDF.

This article raises more questions than it answers. Questions like: why doesn't the author remind the reader that AI-detection algorithms are not reliable? Or, why are institutions still assigning essay assignments when it's so easy to use AI to complete them? Or, why do they continue to hand over student work to a third party that extracts value from this work for its own purposes? The article is just uncritical posting of Turnitin talking points. Why even bother with this?

It's almost everything I've disliked about Apple over the years crushed into one advertisement. "You can imagine the pitch: 'All of human creation compressed into one impossibly sleek tablet.' But the end result feels more like: 'All of human creation sacrificed for a lifeless gadget.'" Others have commented, It's almost the exact opposite of the original Apple 1984 ad. The great thing about the internet has always been the way it allows for a flowering of creativity, but today's internet seems to speak in so many ways against that.

This whole article is definitely worth a read (or a listen, if you prefer the podcast form) but I want to highlight one point: "we are now moving past mass higher education to universal higher education. The expansion continues. We're up to at least 60 percent now of an access rate, and there's no slowing down on that." Now it's not a race, of course. But I would suggest that there is a very large difference between a society that has achieved universal higher education and one in which higher education is reserved for a smaller population, even a minority of the population. Image: People's Daily.

This article points to what they call a 'report' (it's not a report, it's a web presentation) from an organization called Basta that offers (what it says is) "a free program for first-generation college students and recent graduates to land their first job" (keep in mind "Basta... had $3.9 million in annual revenue"). Mostly, though, it seems to be a recruitment network through it's Seekr program. And the article is basically one big advertisement for them. But. This is true: "social capital — or who you know — is key for first-generation college graduates searching for their first job." Actually, it's key for everyone. It's just that less wealthy students are less likely to have a network of friends and contacts. The trick for the rest of us (who are not funded by The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Carnegie Corporation of New York, Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies and Heckscher Foundation for Children) is how to make networking opportunities to everyone, that is, to render quaint the social networking opportunities of the (elite) university system.