OLDaily

What does the future hold for AI-enabled coaching?
Elizabeth Loutfi, Chief Learning Officer, 2019/11/26

The idea of a coach, whether a human or an AI, is to hlp a person practise a skill. We don't see them much in our day-to-day life because they're expensive, and so reserved for athletes and corner-suite executives. But that could be changing. For example, “LeaderAmp is a high-touch, high-tech combination approach to making coaching both more effective, because it’s more embedded in people’s daily lives, and more scalable, so it’s responsibly lowering the cost by relying on some new kinds of artificial intelligence."

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What’s next for Ed-Tech? Critical hopes and concerns for the 2020s
Neil Selwyn, et.al., Learning, Media and Technology, 2019/11/26

The authors call for a "a critical EdTech agenda" that answers the questions of  "how might schools and other educational institutions adopt and adapt ‘convivial technologies’ (Vetter 2018) which are not designed for profitability, efficiency and growth, but instead orient toward de-growth, and to more equitable, participatory, democratic, interrelated and ecological societies? (and) what possibilities are there for decolonising technology, or using what Tunstall (2019) calls ‘respectful design’? These approaches contest the currently dominant racist, monolingual, ethnocentric and sexist discourses of EdTech by foregrounding relational and community approaches to design." These, of course, are questions I and many of my colleagues have been wrestling with for the last two decades or more. But propos for recognizing these as issues. The same authors, in the same journal issue, also author "What might the school of 2030 be like?" but this is behind a subscription wall and would cost me $US 43 to read, which I guess answers the question in the title and also points to why we have the sorts of problems listed above.

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Design Sketch for a Network of Collaboration Practitioners
Eugene Eric Kim, Faster Than 20, 2019/11/26

What's interesting about this approach is that it draws (some) elements from Alcoholics Anonymous to faculitate a support network for collaboration practitioners. Probably the most salient feature is the regular check-in and the suggestion to "encourage (but not require) participants to find a regular checkin partner." And also, "I’m also making a bet about our Sharing muscles... I want to actively cultivate this muscle by encouraging participants to share rough little tidbits about their work and their thinking more frequently." I'm not sure how much of this would be appropriate for classrooms but I can see it having value in professional development circles.

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Mitigating Bias in Algorithmic Hiring: Evaluating Claims and Practices
Manish Raghavan, Solon Barocas, Jon Kleinberg, Karen Levy, arXiv, 2019/11/26

I've talked on numerous occasions about machines being used to hire people. This paper, which was referenced in the panel previously mentioned here, looks at this subject in detail. Now what's worth keeping in mind is that these companies (the paper lists around a dozen of them) are assessing specific activities (questions, video interview analysis, and gameplay) . In the long term, I think they will be using the full range of available online media (which may well include activity records and videos). Nonetheless, questions about accuracy and bias will continue to exist. But "vendors and advocates point out that many of the potentially problematic elements here (subjective evaluations; biased historical samples; emphasis on fit) are equally present, if not more so, in traditional human hiring practices."

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Why Instructure’s News Matters: Big Tech
Phil Hill, Phil on Ed Tech, 2019/11/26

Phil Hill has a two-parter (part one, part two) on recent news from Instructure that they are going “to explore strategic alternatives in order to maximize shareholder value”. What this means is that they might be open to being sold, and if so, then people might become concerned about Instructure becoming just another company that values corporate profits over... well, everything. Hill notes that Instructure's use of Amazon Web Services (AWS) gave it a big advantage in the market, because people could rely on AWS, but that this advantage has evaporated as all of the vendors have moved to the service. "AWS is king in EdTech." There's a part three to this series coming, so watch for it.

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