Stephen Downes

Good article that says a couple of important things. The first focuses on how deeply the idea of 'what school is' has been internalized across cultures. "Whatever else school teaches, the one lesson it delivers to every student without exception--more reliably than reading, more durably than mathematics--is what school is... You acquired the grammar of your native language in childhood without anyone teaching it to you explicitly. It runs below your awareness. You cannot state most of its rules, yet you follow them perfectly." The second addresses the function school serves - not simply as a mechanism for passing on knowledge (though it does that) but also as a place to keep children during the day. "The entire adult economy is built on that fact. Every workplace schedule silently assumes it. This is one of the quiet reasons the grammar cannot change: proposals that touch the school day or calendar collide not with pedagogy but with the labor force." 

Good observations on what 'engagement' means and doesn't mean in a learning context. Simply being in the room and staring at the instructor does not equate to engagement; often, it's the opposite. By contrast, "When classes went back to on-campus after emergency remote teaching, the one thing that most learners expressed missing was the chat. They wanted a real time way to express and engage that didn't necessarily involve raising hand and speaking because that felt too high stakes." I have always preferred a backchannel, and tried to incorporate it in many of my talks. It's hard to do, often because the opportunity to participate this way is still novel to many audiences.

I like the concept. As Dave Winer says, "We're bootstrapping a network of twitter-like systems built out of components of the web and nothing more. Every part replaceable." It's based on a 'source' namespace that "is a collection of add-ons to RSS 2.0 that provide information about where the content in the feed comes from, so it's possible that aggregators can provide a richer experience for readers." He explains more in this blog post. "There's no mystery to this. The fact that our text can't go everywhere is because the big networks don't want to be compatible with each other. Bad for business. The right way, the way the web would do social networking: Every part is replaceable. Interop everywhere." I'm on board with this philosophy. Anyhow, the demo server is open for public registration. It works well enough. You can run your own instance, and there's an API. You can find me there as Downes. 

This is an interesting framework representing how systems become less connected with reality over time. "Reality becomes compressed into metrics, optimization systems, representations, and narratives..." writes A. Jacobs. "Representation and optimization make reality easier to use while weakening semantic fidelity... reality is compressed through science, institutions, media, public narrative, and individual belief... systems become more internally consistent as contact with original conditions weakens." I think there's something to this; certainly the emphasis on formal metrics obscures complexity, which results in increasing abstraction away from that complexity. Whether we're talking about 'reality' and 'systems', or just a formal property of abstraction, could be a matter for debate.

Audrey Watters asks the right question here, and after spending 25 years working in a government research organization I can confidently state the answer: whoever will pay for it. Because that's the focus, right? The way we've set up our economy as a whole: the product is designed for the customers, and the customers are those who pay the bill, which is why social media and television are designed for advertisers, and edtech is designed for institutions, governments and enterprises. Now Watters asks this in the context of Anthropic's announcement of 'Claude for Teachers', asking "why bypass district decision-making and district governance" and market directly to teachers? The answer is, they're not marketing to teachers; they're still marketing to the boards and institutions that will pay for the software. Because while edtech (including Claude for Teachers) should be designed for students, or maybe teachers, the main lesson I learned in those 25 years is that there is no market for that.

The university environment is ripe for this sort of attack despite its baseless generalizations ("nobody checks quality", "most college courses in America are knockoffs of some original", "no faculty member ever... goes back and looks at the learning outcomes") and loopy proposals ("I would be thrilled to have more conservative and libertarian professors scheduled to teach small seminars simply refuse to list learning outcomes"). The suggestion is that learning outcomes are intended to standardize courses, degrading from some idealized version (a.k.a. the Cheesecake Factory principle). This eliminates the differentiation that 'quality' programs institutions can establish "non-fungible with the rest"... "to build a new, valued brand." Where is this quality? It is found, according to Hollis Robbins, in the professors. "Professors are the quality product." My counterpoint: what is the response to the objection that 'conservative professors' are of lower quality than 'progressive professors'? That would explain (if it were a fact) why universities select the professors they do. That would explain why some sort of 'equal opportunity program' is required to ensure otherwise unhirable 'conservative professors' are awarded professorial positions. That would explain why students need to be enticed or even forced to take courses from these professors. Now I agree - learning outcomes and associated assessment practices are a weak point in the system. But replacing the entire system with conservatives is (giggle) hardly the answer.