Stephen Downes

I'm sure some economists will still argue that free tuition doesn't help people, but according to this article, "the Tennessee Promise program - the first of its kind in the country - successfully boosted college enrollment and attainment, analysis showed." What's more, "one of the study's co-authors said the program pays for itself when factoring in the higher salaries that degree holders earn on average compared to their peers who hold just a high school diploma." Given how important education is supposed to be for the economy and for democracy, etc., etc., it has always been a mystery to me why people argue that the people least capable of paying for it - the students themselves - should foot the bill.

I honestly think the view expressed here represents a confusion about how the brain and body interact. Here's the argument offered by Asa Young: "The brain is not simply receiving messages from the body... The heartbeat, breath, and gastric rhythm are regular, predictable signals around which groups of neurons can organize, determining when they become more or less receptive to information." I don't deny any of that. But consider this analogy: "The findings also complicate the familiar image of a brain in a vat," says Young. "This science-fiction brain, kept alive but severed from its body, might still generate neural activity. Yet it would be cut off from the recurring bodily signals that help give experience its visceral character and anchor it to a living self." But the 'brain in a vat' thought experiment postulates a brain complete with input signals exactly like those from the various senses, including bodily sensations, as well as physical parameters, such as blood flow. There isn't some magic non-physical mechanisms through which the body interacts with the brain. And if it's physical, it can be emulated.

My own view on 'viewpoint diversity' is that, while I hold that diversity is a good thing, I don't believe that the proponents of viewpoint diversity actually want diversity; they rather want more support for one particular type of viewpoint. Otherwise, we'd see them advocating for more Marxists in business schools and for progressives to be appointed to corporate boards. My opinion here aligns with thesis number seven in this set of arguments offered by Lisa Siraganian.

Arguably, consent is based at least in part on our preferences. But in some cases those preferences are not really our own. We're not talking about coercion here, but cases whether the preference really appears to be genuine, and yet is created through some indirect mechanism, such as the manipulation of information, or forcing you to pay attention to something. This article discusses the sorts of preference-creation mechanisms that can inform legitimate consent and those which don't. The author finds the difference in "the room these mechanisms leave you for the free exercise of agency." But it's a fine line, and in many ways fuzzy. Image: kleidkunst.de

You might want to read this (7 page PDF) twice: "Recent advances in synthetic biology enable the reconfiguration of neural circuits within live animals, making it possible to reprogram their behaviours, and create animal forms of artificial life. While fulfilling human design goals, such systems actively preserve their autonomy, self-maintenance and self-regulation, which could create a conflict disrupting the functioning and persistence of either host organism or the synthetic module incorporated in the host." In other words, if we rewire a living beetle, what happens if the beetle reasserts its own autonomous behaviour? Note that we're not asking whether we should rewire living neural networks - we're already doing that - but rather, what happens when we do. When you think about it, societies and educators face the same sort of problem with their students - what happens when the student's we've taught begin to assert their own independence (possibly subverting the system that educated them in the first place)?

I may as well offer this glimpse into a whole community of practitioners, promoters and technologies directed toward the U.S. school system. From my perspective it's sort of funny to see that this is where some of the original edubloggers like Vicki Davis (Cool Cat Teacher) and John Spencer ended up. There's a lot of product placement and commercialism wrapped up in all of this, from the podcast sponsor (Experience AI, a free program co-founded by the Raspberry Pi Foundation and Google DeepMind) to the podcast guest A.J. Juliani's ajjuliani.com 'AI-Ready School Leaders cohorts'. None of this is to say there's no value here - the discussion of 'how to build a data dashboard without writing code' is something teachers can actually use. And there are arguments about how AI can be used in the classroom to help students learn: "Last year, when I taught my students spreadsheets, I also taught them to use AI to help them build pivot tables and interpret data, and I was shocked at how quickly they learned and advanced more deeply into data analytics than I could ever get them before." Anyhow, like I say, there's a whole world here, worth watching and, once in a while, linking to.