In a children's literature class at Texas A&M University this summer, a student interrupted the professor as she began to recap some of the previously covered material, "remarks on gender and sexuality we bring from the last class." "I just have a question,
A couple of weeks ago, Ed Zitron published one of his epic rants -- the kind that, as he warned newsletter readers, is probably better read on the web than via email: it’s 16,000 words long; so long that he added a Table of Contents to aid navigation.
Humans have always invested great meaning in birds. No surprise, what with the feathers, the flight. Each week, when I look at all the stories that've been told about education and technology and try to figure out some coherence to the chaos, I think about what bird might
Last week, Max Read asked "Is the 'AI' 'bubble' 'bursting'?" – those scare-quotes strategically deployed to encourage readers to question what we mean when we talk about "AI" or "bubbles," when we predict the technology's devaluation or
If you were to tell the story of the end of public education in the US, you wouldn't begin with the Trump Administration's bluster about closing the Department of Education. You wouldn't begin with Trump Administration policies at all – as awful and destructive as
[Depending on your geographic location] It's almost/already back-to-school season, which always means a flurry of aspirational, inspirational stories (and their opposite) about ed-tech gadgetry, along with a fair amount of sponsored content and affiliate marketing. ("You're Probably Wearing Your Backpack Wrong" in The
In their bestseller AI Snake Oil, Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor open their chapter on "How Predictive AI Goes Wrong" with a story from Mount St. Mary's University: how, in 2015, the school had conducted a survey of freshmen to identify ones who were struggling – an
No one likes to be wrong. But perhaps what bothers people even more than making a mistake is being made a fool, being tricked or duped. It's no surprise then that many folks bristle at the assertion that "AI" is a con. They stamp their feet
Math teacher Michael Pershan wrote an excellent newsletter this week, and I'd like to start there rather than with the ubiquitous stories about the underwhelming roll-out of OpenAI's latest GPT. Michael's insights are interesting and important; OpenAI, not so much – unless you want to
Raymond Callahan's 1962 book Education and the Cult of Efficiency remains a classic study of public education in the US, chronicling how in the early twentieth century schools' goals became business goals. "The procedure for bringing about a more businesslike organization and operation of the schools
Simon Ramo published his essay "A New Technique in Education" in 1957 in Engineering and Science, a journal published by Caltech to showcase the institution's research. "A noted scientist proposes some radical changes in our educational system to bring it in line with our increasingly
Sometimes you have to repeat yourself. Sometimes you didn't say things clearly the first time. Sometimes your intended audience didn't hear you or they didn't listen. Sometimes there were louder voices, different messages that drowned yours out. Sometimes you need a do-over. Sometimes you
Although I linked to it in Friday's newsletter and even embedded the Instagram clip, I have not been able to stop thinking about Ocean Vuong's remarks on how social media has shaping students' thoughts about "effort." Vuong says that, Our students… are more
Over a decade ago, at the height of the MOOC madness, many people crowed excitedly about "the end of college" – not because the various technologies they believed would enable this were any good (by "good" I mean either "pedagogically sound" or "at all
Abetted by technological and military might, finance capital has achieved its hegemony over the Earth by annexing the core of human desires – Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics Last week, METR released the results of a study into how "AI" affects the productivity of open-source software developers – results that certainly run