OLDaily

Flavors of Group Consciousness: Vanilla, Strawberry, and Chunky Monkey with Extra Nuts
Eric Schwitzgebel, The Splintered Mind, 2019/05/03

It's common to talk of group consciousness in education, the hive mind, emergent knowledge, and the rest. But what does that mean, exactly? This article explores some of the possibilities. Maybe this: " Conscious experience is still the province of individual people. What Pettit adds is only a somewhat more complex way of picking out which individual conscious experiences count as the group's shared conscious experience." Or.... maybe not.

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CEO update: Answering the questions about FutureLearn’s new investors
Simon Nelson, FutureLearn, 2019/05/03

As the subhead says, "Simon Nelson, FutureLearn's CEO, addresses your main questions surrounding the announcement that SEEK is joining The Open University as 50/50 shareholders in FutureLearn." Says Nelson, " FutureLearn was never set up as a charity or not-for-profit organisation: it was established as a commercial arm of The Open University." Though he hastens to add, " t’s important to say that we’re focused on making a profit in line with our values and those of our partners and owners, driven by our purpose to transform access to education." I wonder whether the OU's new partners see it that way. I wonder how OU employees feel about being engaged in a commercial venture. Interesting note from Dawhal Shah: Coursera and FutureLearn raised big money from the same investor.

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The danger of claiming that relationships can’t scale
Julia Freeland Fisher, Christensen Institute, The 74, 2019/05/03

The point of departure for this article is New York Times columnist David Brooks's assertion, “Relationships do not scale.” I think most of recognie that there is an upper limit, designated by Dunbar's number, on the number of relationships a person can sustain. But what, then, can the idea that 'relationships scale' actually mean? Julia Freeland Fisher has some uggestions. For example, "scaling our relationship reservoirs," that is, allowing us to keep trak of old relationships. Also, "scaling support and trust online." Or, "scaling public investment," for example, "increasing public investment in relationships and the infrastructure required to nurture social capital development." I'm not sure any of these count as 'relationships' in the way the term is usually used. And I am wary of combining the idea of relationships with business and investment (though, I guess, there's obviously a link). Also here.

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AI and Education: the Reality and the Potential
Rose Luckin, The Knowledge Illusion, 2019/05/03

Script of a presentation (video is here). It begins with this premise: headline in the New Scientist: AI achieves its best ever mark on a set of English exam questions. Rose Luckin writes, "this headline draws our attention to the fact that we can build AI that can achieve what we set our students to achieve. The AI will get better and faster at this and it therefore is not intelligent to continue to educate humans to do what we can automate." So, she suggests, " The need to change the what and how of teaching will be my third area for discussion tonight." But (to my mind) maybe we should be looking at how we train AIs for clues about how to help people learn. Luckin, meanwhile, argue "We need to make these three things happen: Use AI to tackle educational challenges, prioritize the development of our uniquely human intelligence, educate people about AI. To do this we need partnerships between educational stakeholders to build capacity."

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