OLDaily

The evolution of the global education industry during the pandemic
Ben Williamson, Anna Hogan, Code Acts in Education, 2020/07/16

It's not clear whether the authors of this report are opposed to the use of technology in education or the commercialization of education, and maybe it ultimately doesn't matter because the one is consistently conflated with the other throughout this report. Yes, there was a lot of ed tech used during the pandemic, and that's because the non-tech alternative of breathing in each others' faces wasn't available. From where I sit, the variuous organizations, institutions and companies involved have been responding to the general failure of traditional educational institutions, and their professors, to provide any meaningful response either to the pandemic, to cost considerations and chronic inequality, and to contemporary learning needs. I am a greater supporter of public education than most, and I am distressed that the intransigence of academia has pushed us to this point. (78 page user-hostile Issuu format).

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With a degree no longer enough, job candidates are told to prove their skills in tests
Jon Marcus, The Hechinger Report, 2020/07/16

The tests serve a two-fold objective: they provide a means of filtering applicants when a degree requirement isn't sufficient to do so, and they enable more equitable hiring by allowing the degree requirement to be removed entirely. "We’ve conflated employability with university degrees. We shouldn’t, said Jacob Hsu, CEO of Catalyte, which conducts tests designed to find job candidates who have the potential to become software engineers, whether or not they went to college." Catalyte uses AI to "identify candidates from non-traditional backgrounds who have the potential to become high-performing software developers."

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Pseudogen
Hiroyuki Fudaba, GitHub, 2020/07/16

I have talked in the past about open educational resources (OER) being auto-generated by artificial intelligence, being used as needed, and discarded when done. We're getting closer to that picture. Two applications are highlighted here. The first is pseudogen, a tool that automatically generates pseudo-code from source code (6 page PDF). Then you could use, say, AthTek to generate code (in a different language, maybe) from the pseudo-code. The second is planned for release today, a tool called GPT-3 code generator, in which you describe the web page you want, and it automatically creates it (GPT-3 also writes creative fiction).

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What if Kindness Is the New Normal? A Call to Re-Imagine the Purpose of Education in the Post-COVID World
Vishal Talreja, Sucheta Bhat, Qatar Foundation, 2020/07/16

This very short article makes the oft-repeated point that we cannot return the education system to 'normal' after the pandemic. "The oft-repeated assumption that children would have to face an uncertain job market and a fast-changing world a few years from now is already amidst us," write the authors. "Today we are rightly being forced to prioritize well-being over economic growth, for ourselves and the planet." I agree, and would encourage changing educational outcomes "from academic and economic outcomes to well-being and thriving of all students, communities, and the planet." But this is not the easy path forward, which makes it the less likely outcome.aa

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