OLDaily

The Trouble with Teaching: Is Teaching a Meaningful Job?
John Danaher, Philosophical Disquisitions, 2021/05/28

John Danaher knows how to capture interest with controversy and this teaser of an article is no exception. Is teaching really a meaningful job? You might not think so after reading the arguments he offers to say that it is not. You might still not think so after you reads the counter arguments, which to me can be effectively summed up as "teaching is meaningful because it allows me to do other things, like research". It does point to a basic conundrum in academia: we wouldn't pay professors' salaries if they weren't teaching, but many professors have no real interest in teaching and see it at best as a means to an end, while many students see the intervention of teachers as an imposition they need to endure while trying to qualify for an education and a satisfying life.

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Types of Intuition
Thomas Nagel, London Review of Books, 2021/05/28

People interested in ethics and artificial intelligence would do well to read this offering from Thomas Nagel, one of today's most important philosophers. In it, he questions the basis for arguing in favour of a particular moral stance based on intuition or gut feeling. It's true that we may have very strong feelings about the rightness or wrongness of an act, but after thousands of years of debate, these feelings haven't decided any of the core debates in ethics, for example, the divide between deontic and consequentialist approaches. He asks, ultimately, whether "we should come to view our attachment to rights and deontology as an unnecessarily cluttered moral outlook." Maybe. But, he says, "I believe something would be lost.

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Using Learning Analytics to Predict Cheating Has Been Going on for Longer Than You Think
Matt Crosslin, EduGeek Journal, 2021/05/28

Matt Crosslin begins by referencing a NY Times article on online cheating accur=sations at Dartmouth (I won't link to the paywalled article, but here's a summary and here's a good discussion). As Crosslin reports, 13 of the 17 accused are protesting their innocence. Now there are reasons for concern here but Crosslin takes it a step further by digging up a 2006 paper where "the overall goal is to predict which students are most likely to be cheating based on demographics and student perceptions." Now yes, that would be an issue, but it's not clear that anything of the sort happened in the Dartmouth case. The real problem here (as Crosslin later points out) is the use of clickstream data to identify cheaters because (as noted in several places) this data include automated requests. "Those pages can automatically generate activity data even when no one is looking at them, according to The Times’s analysis and technology experts."

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Time to Rethink AI Proctoring?
Lindsay McKenzie, Inside Higher Ed, 2021/05/28

As this story reports, "Online exam proctoring company ProctorU announced earlier this week that it will no longer send artificial intelligence-generated reports of potential student misconduct to institutions without ProctorU staff members first reviewing the footage." It raises the question: are other companies even checking on their AIs' conclusions? Probably not; they prefer to offload the work: "It’s pretty standard for all proctoring companies that are offering AI-assisted or fully AI monitoring services to encourage faculty to review any flagged behavior before making any academic integrity judgements.” But faculty are asking why this becomes their job.  “It’s not appropriate for AI to be making decisions, and it’s unfair to expect faculty to do that work.”

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Twitter: Social media giant lists new 'Blue' subscription service
2021/05/28

Twitter, which earlier announced that many more people could now qualify for 'verified' check marks, has listed a paid 'Twitter Blue' subscription service in app stores. "According to technology blogger Jane Manchun Wong, who claims to be the first paying user of the service, it includes an 'undo tweet' feature as well as a 'reader mode' to make reading long threads easier." These aren't worth paying for, but limiting the range of your tweets (both incoming and outgoing) to either friend lists or other 'Blue' subscribers might well be worth paying for, at the very least because it would make bots a lot more difficult to operate. Twitter may also include in-app purchases for (one suspects) thinks like live events. See also: the Guardian, 9to5Mac, Engadget.

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