Stephen Downes

Scott McLeod writes, "The traditional grammar of schooling (TGOS), a term popularized by Tyack, Tobin, and Cuban (1994; 1995), refers to the taken-for-granted structures, practices, and routines of schooling that have remained largely consistent over time." In this post he offers a breakdown of that grammar divided into five major elements (educators love a taxonomy!): structural features, institutional practices, assessment and accountability, culture and social norms, and institutional and policy features. I think it's a good way of looking at things, but it's one-dimensional. Continuing with the 'grammar' theme, it seems to me that this is a good way to model schooling using my own 'critical literacies' framework. So I took his breakdown and added the elements of semantics (values), use, context, inference and change to it. You can see my analysis in this 1 page PDF.

The missing middle, according to Glenda Morgan, is the course. Most studies of student success, suggests Morgan, look at the causes of failure, and they tend to focus on factors related to the student, for example, motivation, preparation, or time management. Even when we look at courses, we tend to look at the course contains (video, interactions, active learning?) rather than to how they work together to create a learning experience. With the onset of AI, there i an increasing need for course redesign, writes Morgan, which means there is an opportunity to link course design explicitly to student success.

It would be good to have benchmarks for AI performance, says Hollis Robbins, but "benchmarks are a little like learning outcomes, I am sad to say."They are also very conservative. "The downside (of benchmarks) is that they can organize (and limit) learning around performance recognized in advance. The system can be gamed." Again, just like learning outcomes.  "All the hundreds of thousands of American college students in pre-packaged online classes are similarly getting only consensus thinking. These are the next generation of AI users. It could be consensus + consensus + consensus all the way down." That would indeed be sad.

Reddit is shutting down its RSS feeds today, blaming scrapers. That's almost certainly not the real reason. According to Reddit's CEO, "Reddit will become a mostly logged-in site, starting with tests outside the US. On the earnings call that day, he laid out why. People who are logged in can be shown better-targeted ads, they're harder to scrape, and they already bring in more than 80% of Reddit's revenue." It's all about the money, which is always the risk when you depend on a commercial platform to form community. "It's you, signed in, looking at an ad." This post links to a number of actual sources for popular Reddit feeds (after all, a lot of Reddit posts are just copypasta from the original source).

This policy paper (40 page PDF) makes the case that a graduate tax would be a better alternative that student loads for higher education funding. I can see the logic - as the report says at one point, students who earn less, and therefore received less benefit from their higher education, end up paying more money, because their repayment periods are longer. That makes sense to me. But what I wonder is, why create a special tax at all? Surely, if a person is making more money, then a progressive form of income tax (or even, to a lesser extent, sales taxes) would result in them paying more taxes, and even enough, presumably, to cover the cost of educating them in the first place. Indeed, how is it even fair to require that students assume the risk in funding their education when students have the least ability to repay and when their education is in fact a wider social benefit?

This link points to the University of Calgary download page for this article (because we can't have just a plain download, that would be too easy). The article itself reports on the results of a three-year visualization exercise. The authors argue that "reflective visualization practices offer opportunities for (1) deepening the role that value systems play in visualization teaching, research, and practice (including ethical, cultural, and personal values), (2) developing pedagogical activities in which diverse approaches to data visualization are used to acknowledge the role of values, and (3) nurturing critical reflective practices." I found it interesting that the learning process involved 'practice and reflection' (which probably shouldn't be noteworthy, but so much learning is done differently). And I do appreciate a good visualization. That said, I didn't link to the main page for this exercise because I found it basically unusable - not all visualizations work.