Stephen Downes

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.

Glenda Morgan desscribes 'casino capitalism' in in EdTech as "when universities try to act quickly and end up investing large amounts of money on risky ventures without engaging in appropriate levels of due diligence." Examples mentioned include Purdue acquiring Kaplan University and the University of Arizona buying Ashford University. Or when universities ("usually a Dean, hence the term 'Deans Gone Wild') signing a deal with an online program manager (OPM). Why does this keep happening? There's the need to raise revenue, suggests Morgan. Also: new money, fear of missing out (FOMO), and secrecy. I'd say the rate of these risks by universities (especially public universities) is much lower than in the private sector generally.

I'm more familiar with the term 'pink slime' but 'slop' is a good name for it too I think. It evokes the same sort of response. "I'm increasingly of the opinion that sharing unreviewed content that has been artificially generated with other people is rude," says Simon Willison. "Slop is the ideal name for this anti-pattern. Not all promotional content is spam, and not all AI-generated content is slop." It's worth noting that the original use of the term referenced the first few links that came up in a Google search (a service that is rapidly becoming irrelevant, sadly). Image generated by AI, naturally.

This paper (38 page PDF) proclaims itself as "the largest survey of its kind" and reports on a survey of "2,778 researchers who had published in top-tier artificial intelligence (AI) venues, asking for their predictions on the pace of AI progress and the nature and impacts of advanced AI systems." If I had to characterize them, the answers are, I would say, 'rapid', 'advanced' and 'mixed'. Also, "respondents were asked when four specific occupations would become fully automatable: 'Truck driver,' 'Surgeon,' 'Retail salesperson,' and 'AI researcher'." The answer? Not long. Have we changed the way we educate people for a world in which this takes less than 40 years? Nope.