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"Looking back on my experience of videoconferencing, I still get an odd emotional pain. The feeling is a kind of shame. Not so much for my own wooden performance and the failure of the technology. But rather a feeling that we have all lost a bit of our humanity through it. My interest in these technologies is ethically motivated. I am not at all happy with the banal dehumanisation that results from bad videoconferencing experiences. If, for example, students and teachers can't express their humanity in education, through its technologies, then we're just not doing it right."

""Our job as teachers and professors is not to surveil and police our students, but it's to educate them," he says. "You are assuming that students are trying to cheat-rather than assuming students are trying to learn and help them learn." He sees the growing adoption of automated proctoring tools as a continuation of a trend started by plagiarism-detection services like Turnitin, which he says were built on the assumption that students want to cheat and must be policed. But despite early pushback by students and some professors, plagiarism detection has become ubiquitous. Parry worries the same thing could happen with automated proctoring."

"The system is called as"Intelligent Classroom Behavior Management System" and it is being used at Hangzhou No. 11 High School. With scanning facial expressions the system has the ability to even analysis six types of behaviors by the students such as standing up, reading, writing, hand raising, listening to the teacher, and leaning on the desk."

"The type of device matters-some are associated with worse student outcomes. Geography matters-technology is associated with higher student outcomes in the United States than in other regions. Who is using the technology matters-technology in the hands of teachers is associated with higher scores than technology in the hands of students. Intensity matters-students who use technology intensely or not at all perform better than those with moderate use. A school system's current performance level matters-in lower-performing school systems, technology is associated with worse results."

"The problem is, a lot of those electronics were being used to monitor students, even combing through private chats, emails and documents all in the name of protecting them. More than 80% of surveyed teachers and 77% of surveyed high school students told the CDT that their schools use surveillance software on those devices, and the more reliant students are on those electronics, unable to afford supplementary phones or tablets, the more they are subjected to scrutiny."

"The debate is whether the ideas noted in an essay or paper come from the student, while the tool can only take credit for the grammar and mechanics of the writing but not the critical thinking. The College Board, which administers Advance Placement (AP) courses, prohibits the use of ChatGPT under any circumstances. On its website, the agency notes, "Like educators across the country, AP teachers are confronting the implications of ChatGPT and other tools.""

"Spyware apps were foisted on students at the height of the Covid-19 lockdowns. Today, long after most students have returned to in-person learning, those apps are still proliferating, and enabling an ever-expanding range of human rights abuses. In a recent Center for Democracy and Technology report, 81 percent of teachers said their schools use some form of this "student monitoring" spyware. Yet many of the spyware companies supplying these apps seem neither prepared nor concerned about the harms they are inflicting on students. "

"A school shooter who went viral on TikTok for talking publicly about his actions is facing backlash from many who believe he should not be on the platform at all. In 2020, Jon Romano was released from prison after serving 17 years out of a 20-year prison sentence for bringing a shotgun to Columbia High School in upstate New York back in 2004. Romano, who was 16 years old at the time, shot a teacher in the leg after the assistant principal attempted to wrestle the gun away from him."

"The use for humans in the world of robotics, even as teachers, is shrinking thanks to AI. NVIDIA Research has announced the creation of Eureka, an AI agent powered by GPT-4 that has trained robots to perform tasks using reward algorithms. Notably, Eureka taught a robotic hand to do pen spinning tricks as well as a human can (honestly, as you can see in the YouTube video below, better than many of us)."

"Now that might be about to change. The arrival of OpenAI's ChatGPT, a program that generates sophisticated text in response to any prompt you can imagine, may signal the end of writing assignments altogether-and maybe even the end of writing as a gatekeeper, a metric for intelligence, a teachable skill. If you're looking for historical analogues, this would be like the printing press, the steam drill, and the light bulb having a baby, and that baby having access to the entire corpus of human knowledge and understanding. My life-and the lives of thousands of other teachers and professors, tutors and administrators-is about to drastically change."

"The premise of the commercial is that Progressive can't prevent us from becoming our parents but can save us money on insurance. In the commercial there was a scene where we're told, "we don't need to print the Internet." The commercial made me chuckle and it inspired this blog post. "