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Ed Webb

Mind - Research Upends Traditional Thinking on Study Habits - NYTimes.com - 1 views

  • instead of sticking to one study location, simply alternating the room where a person studies improves retention. So does studying distinct but related skills or concepts in one sitting, rather than focusing intensely on a single thing. “We have known these principles for some time, and it’s intriguing that schools don’t pick them up, or that people don’t learn them by trial and error,” said Robert A. Bjork, a psychologist at the University of California, Los Angeles. “Instead, we walk around with all sorts of unexamined beliefs about what works that are mistaken.”
  • The brain makes subtle associations between what it is studying and the background sensations it has at the time, the authors say, regardless of whether those perceptions are conscious. It colors the terms of the Versailles Treaty with the wasted fluorescent glow of the dorm study room, say; or the elements of the Marshall Plan with the jade-curtain shade of the willow tree in the backyard. Forcing the brain to make multiple associations with the same material may, in effect, give that information more neural scaffolding.
  • Cognitive scientists do not deny that honest-to-goodness cramming can lead to a better grade on a given exam. But hurriedly jam-packing a brain is akin to speed-packing a cheap suitcase, as most students quickly learn — it holds its new load for a while, then most everything falls out. “With many students, it’s not like they can’t remember the material” when they move to a more advanced class, said Henry L. Roediger III, a psychologist at Washington University in St. Louis. “It’s like they’ve never seen it before.”
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  • An hour of study tonight, an hour on the weekend, another session a week from now: such so-called spacing improves later recall, without requiring students to put in more overall study effort or pay more attention, dozens of studies have found.
  • “The idea is that forgetting is the friend of learning,” said Dr. Kornell. “When you forget something, it allows you to relearn, and do so effectively, the next time you see it.”
  • cognitive scientists see testing itself — or practice tests and quizzes — as a powerful tool of learning, rather than merely assessment. The process of retrieving an idea is not like pulling a book from a shelf; it seems to fundamentally alter the way the information is subsequently stored, making it far more accessible in the future.
  • “Testing not only measures knowledge but changes it,” he says — and, happily, in the direction of more certainty, not less.
  • “Testing has such bad connotation; people think of standardized testing or teaching to the test,” Dr. Roediger said. “Maybe we need to call it something else, but this is one of the most powerful learning tools we have.”
  • The harder it is to remember something, the harder it is to later forget. This effect, which researchers call “desirable difficulty,”
Ed Webb

Business as Unusual: The New Normal for Online Learning - BCcampus - 0 views

  • One of the most interesting changes that I saw in terms of online learning was the use of WhatsApp, a text and voice messaging app that is very popular in South Africa. Through the app’s group chat feature, instructors can moderate the discussion and students can leave voice notes, which gives them the ability to have their voices heard asynchronously
  • I’ve imagined a north–south dialogue. Now, due to COVID-19, it’s happening organically, and I’m in the process of reimagining the course I would have been teaching in Vancouver this summer as an online course. I need to factor in which apps to use, how to prepare for students who only have cellphones, and the reality that many students come from other countries to study at Emily Carr, and now they’ll be learning remotely. It’s fascinating that the forced global aspect of the classroom will influence the way I design the educational technology for my program
  • In the past, some educators might have been excited to tear everything apart and build it back up with a goal of helping students learn in a better way, but the institutions wouldn’t be able to support it. Not because they didn’t want to, but because it was difficult for them to do it. Now there’s an opportunity for institutions to let the reins go and encourage creative and new approaches. It’s scary, but it’s also inspiring for educators to have that freedom. The research is available, the interest is there, and the resources are open, so now is the time to make it happen
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  • “What surprised me was the resurgence of many of the zombie ideas about online learning creeping into the discussions, such as the idea that online learning isn’t as personal, or that you can’t have interactivity, or that it just doesn’t work. And while it is true you need to change how you think about your course — you can’t just replicate what you used to do in the classroom — there’s an opportunity to evolve your teaching practices and create a better learning experience for your students.”
  • What’s happening now is going to reshape education for years, if not decades.
  • People want the old normal, not the new normal. We will, to some degree, get back to what we know and love, but it won’t ever look like it did before
  • “Like your physical buildings on campus, you also have a somewhat invisible set of resources called your educational technology. If you don’t understand it well and don’t treat it as important infrastructure, your ability to move online sustainably will be challenged. Sometimes institutions see eLearning as a project, not a strategy. Online learning isn’t a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants project; it has to be integrated into your academic plan and institutional strategy. I hope that COVID-19 underlined that for institutions.”
  • “We’ve known for over 30 years now that one-hour lectures are not a great way to teach: you can have a good one-hour session, but can you have 13 over a semester? It’s about cognitive load, and students can’t focus for more than 15 to 20 minutes at a time without being distracted. There’s room for synchronous discussion, but we can do it better. There’s a huge amount of research into online learning and what happens when students have access to online learning whenever they want it. And just like in real life, you have to know how to do both synchronous and asynchronous interactions well.”
  • We need to make space for the voices of communities who haven’t traditionally been heard: non-traditional learners, students who are food or housing insecure, students who are neurodivergent, students of colour, and Indigenous students. We must think of all these populations and the degree to which our educational system — our technology, our platforms — has not been built for them. We do a lot of work to make our methods accessible, but at the core, our systems, institutions, and platforms aren’t really built for — or by — those students
  • s challenging as it is, I’m seeing online pedagogy’s focus on equity and care resonating with many of those new to the medium
  • I’ve used really experimental styles over the past few years, but I won’t be doing that as much over the coming year because I shouldn’t. My classes are traditionally where students get to work with tools and platforms outside of the norm. If everyone moving online treats it that way, the cognitive load on the students will be absolutely overwhelming. My right to flex my academic freedom regarding platforms should be superseded by care and consideration for my students’ cognitive loads across a program. Navigating different platforms and tools is hard and distracting.
  • “One of the most vital tools and resources that I’ve seen people using is their human capacities for compassion and patience — the degree to which faculty are stepping up and approaching their students from a place of care, and a place of genuine desire for students to feel a sense of hope, safety, and flexibility.”
Ed Webb

Top News - What educators can learn from brain research - 0 views

  • neuroplasticity, meaning that the brain can still learn new concepts after various ages, and that every student can be taught many different ways. In a sense, the brain can be rewired.
  • the best research is tied to classroom practice.
  • "Education is an applied field, like engineering," said Atherton. "If there's no connection to practice, then that research is best left to basic researchers in the cognitive neurosciences."
Ed Webb

CRITICAL AI: Adapting College Writing for the Age of Large Language Models such as Chat... - 1 views

  • In the long run, we believe, teachers need to help students develop a critical awareness of generative machine models: how they work; why their content is often biased, false, or simplistic; and what their social, intellectual, and environmental implications might be. But that kind of preparation takes time, not least because journalism on this topic is often clickbait-driven, and “AI” discourse tends to be jargony, hype-laden, and conflated with science fiction.
  • Make explicit that the goal of writing is neither a product nor a grade but, rather, a process that empowers critical thinking
  • Students are more likely to misuse text generators if they trust them too much. The term “Artificial Intelligence” (“AI”) has become a marketing tool for hyping products. For all their impressiveness, these systems are not intelligent in the conventional sense of that term. They are elaborate statistical models that rely on mass troves of data—which has often been scraped indiscriminately from the web and used without knowledge or consent.
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  • LLMs usually cannot do a good job of explaining how a particular passage from a longer text illuminates the whole of that longer text. Moreover, ChatGPT’s outputs on comparison and contrast are often superficial. Typically the system breaks down a task of logical comparison into bite-size pieces, conveys shallow information about each of those pieces, and then formulaically “compares” and “contrasts” in a noticeably superficial or repetitive way. 
  • In-class writing, whether digital or handwritten, may have downsides for students with anxiety and disabilities
  • ChatGPT can produce outputs that take the form of  “brainstorms,” outlines, and drafts. It can also provide commentary in the style of peer review or self-analysis. Nonetheless, students would need to coordinate multiple submissions of automated work in order to complete this type of assignment with a text generator.  
  • No one should present auto-generated writing as their own on the expectation that this deception is undiscoverable. 
  • LLMs often mimic the harmful prejudices, misconceptions, and biases found in data scraped from the internet
  • Show students examples of inaccuracy, bias, logical, and stylistic problems in automated outputs. We can build students’ cognitive abilities by modeling and encouraging this kind of critique. Given that social media and the internet are full of bogus accounts using synthetic text, alerting students to the intrinsic problems of such writing could be beneficial. (See the “ChatGPT/LLM Errors Tracker,” maintained by Gary Marcus and Ernest Davis.)
  • Since ChatGPT is good at grammar and syntax but suffers from formulaic, derivative, or inaccurate content, it seems like a poor foundation for building students’ skills and may circumvent their independent thinking.
  • Good journalism on language models is surprisingly hard to find since the technology is so new and the hype is ubiquitous. Here are a few reliable short pieces.     “ChatGPT Advice Academics Can Use Now” edited by Susan Dagostino, Inside Higher Ed, January 12, 2023  “University students recruit AI to write essays for them. Now what?” by Katyanna Quach, The Register, December 27, 2022  “How to spot AI-generated text” by Melissa Heikkilä, MIT Technology Review, December 19, 2022  The Road to AI We Can Trust, Substack by Gary Marcus, a cognitive scientist and AI researcher who writes frequently and lucidly about the topic. See also Gary Marcus and Ernest Davis, “GPT-3, Bloviator: OpenAI’s Language Generator Has No Idea What It’s Talking About” (2020).
  • “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots” by Emily M. Bender, Timnit Gebru, et al, FAccT ’21: Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, March 2021. Association for Computing Machinery, doi: 10.1145/3442188. A blog post summarizing and discussing the above essay derived from a Critical AI @ Rutgers workshop on the essay: summarizes key arguments, reprises discussion, and includes links to video-recorded presentations by digital humanist Katherine Bode (ANU) and computer scientist and NLP researcher Matthew Stone (Rutgers).
Ed Webb

The trouble with Khan Academy - Casting Out Nines - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 1 views

  • When we say that someone has “learned” a subject, we typically mean that they have shown evidence of mastery not only of basic cognitive processes like factual recall and working mechanical exercises but also higher-level tasks like applying concepts to new problems and judging between two equivalent concepts. A student learning calculus, for instance, needs to demonstrate that s/he can do things like take derivatives of polynomials and use the Chain Rule. But if this is all they can demonstrate, then it’s stretching it to say that the student has “learned calculus”, because calculus is a lot more than just executing mechanical processes correctly and quickly.
  • Even if the student can solve optimization or related rates problems just like the ones in the book and in the lecture — but doesn’t know how to start if the optimization or related rates problem does not match their template — then the student hasn’t really learned calculus. At that point, those “applied” problems are just more mechanical processes. We may say the student has learned about calculus, but when it comes to the uses of the subject that really matter — applying calculus concepts to ambiguous and/or complex problems, choosing the best of equivalent methods or results, creating models to solve novel problems — this student’s calculus knowledge is not of much use.
  • Khan Academy is great for learning about lots of different subjects. But it’s not really adequate for learning those subjects on a level that really makes a difference in the world.
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  • mechanical skill is a proper subset of the set of all tasks a student needs to master in order to really learn a subject. And a lecture, when well done, can teach novice learners how to think like expert learners; but in my experience with Khan Academy videos, this isn’t what happens — the videos are demos on how to finish mathematics exercises, with little modeling of the higher-level thinking skills that are so important for using mathematics in the real world.
  • The Khan Academy is a great new resource, and it's a sign of greater things to come... but it's much more akin to a book than a teacher.
Ed Webb

Reflections on open courses « Connectivism - 0 views

  • There is value of blending traditional with emergent knowledge spaces (online conferences and traditional journals) - Learners will create and innovate if they can express ideas and concepts in their own spaces and through their own expertise (i.e. hosting events in Second Life) - Courses are platforms for innovation. Too rigid a structure puts the educator in full control. Using a course as a platform fosters creativity…and creativity generates a bit of chaos and can be unsettling to individuals who prefer a structure with which they are familiar. - (cliche) Letting go of control is a bit stressful, but surprisingly rewarding in the new doors it opens and liberating in how it brings others in to assist in running a course and advancing the discussion. - People want to participate…but they will only do so once they have “permission” and a forum in which to utilize existing communication/technological skills.
  • The internet is a barrier-reducing system. In theory, everyone has a voice online (the reality of technology ownership, digital skills, and internet access add an unpleasant dimension). Costs of duplication are reduced. Technology (technique) is primarily a duplicationary process, as evidenced by the printing press, assembly line, and now the content duplication ability of digital technologies. As a result, MOOCs embody, rather than reflect, practices within the digital economy. MOOCs reduce barriers to information access and to the dialogue that permits individuals (and society) to grow knowledge. Much of the technical innovation in the last several centuries has permitted humanity to extend itself physically (cars, planes, trains, telescopes). The internet, especially in recent developments of connective and collaborative applications, is a cognitive extension for humanity. Put another way, the internet offers a model where the reproduction of knowledge is not confined to the production of physical objects.
  • Knowledge is a mashup. Many people contribute. Many different forums are used. Multiple media permit varied and nuanced expressions of knowledge. And, because the information base (which is required for knowledge formation) changes so rapidly, being properly connected to the right people and information is vitally important. The need for proper connectedness to the right people and information is readily evident in intelligence communities. Consider the Christmas day bomber. Or 9/11. The information was being collected. But not connected.
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  • The open model of participation calls into question where value is created in the education system. Gutenberg created a means to duplicate content. The social web creates the opportunity for many-to-many interactions and to add a global social layer on content creation and knowledge growth.
  • Whatever can be easily duplicated cannot serve as the foundation for economic value. Integration and connectedness are economic value points.
  • In education, content can easily be produced (it’s important but has limited economic value). Lectures also have limited value (easy to record and to duplicate). Teaching – as done in most universities – can be duplicated. Learning, on the other hand, can’t be duplicated. Learning is personal, it has to occur one learner at a time. The support needed for learners to learn is a critical value point.
  • Learning, however, requires a human, social element: both peer-based and through interaction with subject area experts
  • Content is readily duplicated, reducing its value economically. It is still critical for learning – all fields have core elements that learners must master before they can advance (research in expertise supports this notion). - Teaching can be duplicated (lectures can be recorded, Elluminate or similar webconferencing system can bring people from around the world into a class). Assisting learners in the learning process, correcting misconceptions (see Private Universe), and providing social support and brokering introductions to other people and ideas in the discipline is critical. - Accreditation is a value statement – it is required when people don’t know each other. Content was the first area of focus in open education. Teaching (i.e. MOOCs) are the second. Accreditation will be next, but, before progress can be made, profile, identity, and peer-rating systems will need to improve dramatically. The underlying trust mechanism on which accreditation is based cannot yet be duplicated in open spaces (at least, it can’t be duplicated to such a degree that people who do not know each other will trust the mediating agent of open accreditation)
  • The skills that are privileged and rewarded in a MOOC are similar to those that are needed to be effective in communicating with others and interacting with information online (specifically, social media and information sources like journals, databases, videos, lectures, etc.). Creative skills are the most critical. Facilitators and learners need something to “point to”. When a participant creates an insightful blog post, a video, a concept map, or other resource/artifact it generally gets attention.
  • Intentional diversity – not necessarily a digital skill, but the ability to self-evaluate ones network and ensure diversity of ideologies is critical when information is fragmented and is at risk of being sorted by single perspectives/ideologies.
  • The volume of information is very disorienting in a MOOC. For example, in CCK08, the initial flow of postings in Moodle, three weekly live sessions, Daily newsletter, and weekly readings and assignments proved to be overwhelming for many participants. Stephen and I somewhat intentionally structured the course for this disorienting experience. Deciding who to follow, which course concepts are important, and how to form sub-networks and sub-systems to assist in sensemaking are required to respond to information abundance. The process of coping and wayfinding (ontology) is as much a lesson in the learning process as mastering the content (epistemology). Learners often find it difficult to let go of the urge to master all content, read all the comments and blog posts.
  • e. Learning is a social trust-based process.
  • Patience, tolerance, suspension of judgment, and openness to other cultures and ideas are required to form social connections and negotiating misunderstandings.
  • An effective digital citizenry needs the skills to participate in important conversations. The growth of digital content and social networks raises the need citizens to have the technical and conceptual skills to express their ideas and engage with others in those spaces. MOOCs are a first generation testing grounds for knowledge growth in a distributed, global, digital world. Their role in developing a digital citizenry is still unclear, but democratic societies require a populace with the skills to participate in growing a society’s knowledge. As such, MOOCs, or similar open transparent learning experiences that foster the development of citizens confidence engage and create collaboratively, are important for the future of society.
Ed Webb

The Ed-Tech Imaginary - 0 views

  • We can say "Black lives matter," but we must also demonstrate through our actions that Black lives matter, and that means we must radically alter many of our institutions and practices, recognizing their inhumanity and carcerality. And that includes, no doubt, ed-tech. How much of ed-tech is, to use Ruha Benjamin's phrase, "the new Jim Code"? How much of ed-tech is designed by those who imagine students as cheats or criminals, as deficient or negligent?
  • "Reimagining" is a verb that education reformers are quite fond of. And "reimagining" seems too often to mean simply defunding, privatizing, union-busting, dismantling, outsourcing.
  • if Betsy DeVos is out there "reimagining," then we best be resisting
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  • think we can view the promotion of ed-tech as a similar sort of process — the stories designed to convince us that the future of teaching and learning will be a technological wonder. The "jobs of the future that don't exist yet." The push for everyone to "learn to code."
  • The Matrix is, after all, a dystopia. So why would Matrix-style learning be desirable? Maybe that's the wrong question. Perhaps it's not so much that it's desirable, but it's just how our imaginations have been constructed, constricted even. We can't imagine any other ideal but speed and efficiency.
  • The first science fiction novel, published over 200 years ago, was in fact an ed-tech story: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. While the book is commonly interpreted as a tale of bad science, it is also the story of bad education — something we tend to forget if we only know the story through the 1931 film version
  • Teaching machines and robot teachers were part of the Sixties' cultural imaginary — perhaps that's the problem with so many Boomer ed-reform leaders today. But that imaginary — certainly in the case of The Jetsons — was, upon close inspection, not always particularly radical or transformative. The students at Little Dipper Elementary still sat in desks in rows. The teacher still stood at the front of the class, punishing students who weren't paying attention.
  • we must also decolonize the ed-tech imaginary
  • Zuckerberg gave everyone at Facebook a copy of the Ernest Cline novel Ready Player One, for example, to get them excited about building technology for the future — a book that is really just a string of nostalgic references to Eighties white boy culture. And I always think about that New York Times interview with Sal Khan, where he said that "The science fiction books I like tend to relate to what we're doing at Khan Academy, like Orson Scott Card's 'Ender's Game' series." You mean, online math lectures are like a novel that justifies imperialism and genocide?! Wow.
  • This ed-tech imaginary is segregated. There are no Black students at the push-button school. There are no Black people in The Jetsons — no Black people living the American dream of the mid-twenty-first century
  • Part of the argument I make in my book is that much of education technology has been profoundly shaped by Skinner, even though I'd say that most practitioners today would say that they reject his theories; that cognitive science has supplanted behaviorism; and that after Ayn Rand and Noam Chomsky trashed Beyond Freedom and Dignity, no one paid attention to Skinner any more — which is odd considering there are whole academic programs devoted to "behavioral design," bestselling books devoted to the "nudge," and so on.
  • so much of the ed-tech imaginary is wrapped up in narratives about the Hero, the Weapon, the Machine, the Behavior, the Action, the Disruption. And it's so striking because education should be a practice of care, not conquest
Ed Webb

William Davies · How many words does it take to make a mistake? Education, Ed... - 0 views

  • The problem waiting round the corner for universities is essays generated by AI, which will leave a textual pattern-spotter like Turnitin in the dust. (Earlier this year, I came across one essay that felt deeply odd in some not quite human way, but I had no tangible evidence that anything untoward had occurred, so that was that.)
  • To accuse someone of plagiarism is to make a moral charge regarding intentions. But establishing intent isn’t straightforward. More often than not, the hearings bleed into discussions of issues that could be gathered under the heading of student ‘wellbeing’, which all universities have been struggling to come to terms with in recent years.
  • I have heard plenty of dubious excuses for acts of plagiarism during these hearings. But there is one recurring explanation which, it seems to me, deserves more thoughtful consideration: ‘I took too many notes.’ It isn’t just students who are familiar with information overload, one of whose effects is to morph authorship into a desperate form of curatorial management, organising chunks of text on a screen. The discerning scholarly self on which the humanities depend was conceived as the product of transitions between spaces – library, lecture hall, seminar room, study – linked together by work with pen and paper. When all this is replaced by the interface with screen and keyboard, and everything dissolves into a unitary flow of ‘content’, the identity of the author – as distinct from the texts they have read – becomes harder to delineate.
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  • This generation, the first not to have known life before the internet, has acquired a battery of skills in navigating digital environments, but it isn’t clear how well those skills line up with the ones traditionally accredited by universities.
  • From the perspective of students raised in a digital culture, the anti-plagiarism taboo no doubt seems to be just one more academic hang-up, a weird injunction to take perfectly adequate information, break it into pieces and refashion it. Students who pay for essays know what they are doing; others seem conscientious yet intimidated by secondary texts: presumably they won’t be able to improve on them, so why bother trying? For some years now, it’s been noticeable how many students arrive at university feeling that every interaction is a test they might fail. They are anxious. Writing seems fraught with risk, a highly complicated task that can be executed correctly or not.
  • Many students may like the flexibility recorded lectures give them, but the conversion of lectures into yet more digital ‘content’ further destabilises traditional conceptions of learning and writing
  • the evaluation forms which are now such a standard feature of campus life suggest that many students set a lot of store by the enthusiasm and care that are features of a good live lecture
  • the drift of universities towards a platform model, which makes it possible for students to pick up learning materials as and when it suits them. Until now, academics have resisted the push for ‘lecture capture’. It causes in-person attendance at lectures to fall dramatically, and it makes many lecturers feel like mediocre television presenters. Unions fear that extracting and storing teaching for posterity threatens lecturers’ job security and weakens the power of strikes. Thanks to Covid, this may already have happened.
  • In the utopia sold by the EdTech industry (the companies that provide platforms and software for online learning), pupils are guided and assessed continuously. When one task is completed correctly, the next begins, as in a computer game; meanwhile the platform providers are scraping and analysing data from the actions of millions of children. In this behaviourist set-up, teachers become more like coaches: they assist and motivate individual ‘learners’, but are no longer so important to the provision of education. And since it is no longer the sole responsibility of teachers or schools to deliver the curriculum, it becomes more centralised – the latest front in a forty-year battle to wrest control from the hands of teachers and local authorities.
  • an injunction against creative interpretation and writing, a deprivation that working-class children will feel at least as deeply as anyone else.
  • There may be very good reasons for delivering online teaching in segments, punctuated by tasks and feedback, but as Yandell observes, other ways of reading and writing are marginalised in the process. Without wishing to romanticise the lonely reader (or, for that matter, the lonely writer), something is lost when alternating periods of passivity and activity are compressed into interactivity, until eventually education becomes a continuous cybernetic loop of information and feedback. How many keystrokes or mouse-clicks before a student is told they’ve gone wrong? How many words does it take to make a mistake?
  • This vision of language as code may already have been a significant feature of the curriculum, but it appears to have been exacerbated by the switch to online teaching. In a journal article from August 2020, ‘Learning under Lockdown: English Teaching in the Time of Covid-19’, John Yandell notes that online classes create wholly closed worlds, where context and intertextuality disappear in favour of constant instruction. In these online environments, readingis informed not by prior reading experiences but by the toolkit that the teacher has provided, and ... is presented as occurring along a tramline of linear development. Different readings are reducible to better or worse readings: the more closely the student’s reading approximates to the already finalised teacher’s reading, the better it is. That, it would appear, is what reading with precision looks like.
  • Constant interaction across an interface may be a good basis for forms of learning that involve information-processing and problem-solving, where there is a right and a wrong answer. The cognitive skills that can be trained in this way are the ones computers themselves excel at: pattern recognition and computation. The worry, for anyone who cares about the humanities in particular, is about the oversimplifications required to conduct other forms of education in these ways.
  • Blanket surveillance replaces the need for formal assessment.
  • Confirming Adorno’s worst fears of the ‘primacy of practical reason’, reading is no longer dissociable from the execution of tasks. And, crucially, the ‘goals’ to be achieved through the ability to read, the ‘potential’ and ‘participation’ to be realised, are economic in nature.
  • since 2019, with the Treasury increasingly unhappy about the amount of student debt still sitting on the government’s balance sheet and the government resorting to ‘culture war’ at every opportunity, there has been an effort to single out degree programmes that represent ‘poor value for money’, measured in terms of graduate earnings. (For reasons best known to itself, the usually independent Institute for Fiscal Studies has been leading the way in finding correlations between degree programmes and future earnings.) Many of these programmes are in the arts and humanities, and are now habitually referred to by Tory politicians and their supporters in the media as ‘low-value degrees’.
  • studying the humanities may become a luxury reserved for those who can fall back on the cultural and financial advantages of their class position. (This effect has already been noticed among young people going into acting, where the results are more visible to the public than they are in academia or heritage organisations.)
  • given the changing class composition of the UK over the past thirty years, it’s not clear that contemporary elites have any more sympathy for the humanities than the Conservative Party does. A friend of mine recently attended an open day at a well-known London private school, and noticed that while there was a long queue to speak to the maths and science teachers, nobody was waiting to speak to the English teacher. When she asked what was going on, she was told: ‘I’m afraid parents here are very ambitious.’ Parents at such schools, where fees have tripled in real terms since the early 1980s, tend to work in financial and business services themselves, and spend their own days profitably manipulating and analysing numbers on screens. When it comes to the transmission of elite status from one generation to the next, Shakespeare or Plato no longer has the same cachet as economics or physics.
  • Leaving aside the strategic political use of terms such as ‘woke’ and ‘cancel culture’, it would be hard to deny that we live in an age of heightened anxiety over the words we use, in particular the labels we apply to people. This has benefits: it can help to bring discriminatory practices to light, potentially leading to institutional reform. It can also lead to fruitless, distracting public arguments, such as the one that rumbled on for weeks over Angela Rayner’s description of Conservatives as ‘scum’. More and more, words are dredged up, edited or rearranged for the purpose of harming someone. Isolated words have acquired a weightiness in contemporary politics and public argument, while on digital media snippets of text circulate without context, as if the meaning of a single sentence were perfectly contained within it, walled off from the surrounding text. The exemplary textual form in this regard is the newspaper headline or corporate slogan: a carefully curated series of words, designed to cut through the blizzard of competing information.
  • Visit any actual school or university today (as opposed to the imaginary ones described in the Daily Mail or the speeches of Conservative ministers) and you will find highly disciplined, hierarchical institutions, focused on metrics, performance evaluations, ‘behaviour’ and quantifiable ‘learning outcomes’.
  • If young people today worry about using the ‘wrong’ words, it isn’t because of the persistence of the leftist cultural power of forty years ago, but – on the contrary – because of the barrage of initiatives and technologies dedicated to reversing that power. The ideology of measurable literacy, combined with a digital net that has captured social and educational life, leaves young people ill at ease with the language they use and fearful of what might happen should they trip up.
  • It has become clear, as we witness the advance of Panopto, Class Dojo and the rest of the EdTech industry, that one of the great things about an old-fashioned classroom is the facilitation of unrecorded, unaudited speech, and of uninterrupted reading and writing.
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