OLDaily

The Growing Business of Student Surveillance
Tim Stahmer, Assorted Stuff, 2021/06/17

Tim Stahmer summarizes a recent article in The New Yorker, Is Online Test-Monitoring Here to Stay? "Unfortunately, the answer is probably yes, especially since the broader student surveillance industry is rapidly expanding." He observes that most teachers don't trust students, and adds "despite the biases hard-wired into these systems, and the lack of evidence for both the need and effectiveness, their use will expand. Someone – or something – must be vigilant watching for cheaters."

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Power dynamics: A systemic inquiry
Anna Birney, Networkweaver, 2021/06/17

I enjoyed this discussion of the dynamics of power in society (though I confess I had to read some way in before I was sure Anna Birney was talking about community relations and not energy policy, which reinforces how deeply the metaphor runs). The article is divided roughly equally between looking at existing power structures and trying "to understand how we transition to a future that is equitable and just and has power dynamics (new power) that are fluid, plural and understand life as a process." In particular, I think it's worth sharing the set of practices that lead to this outcome (none of which, I might add, involves 'telling other people what to do or not do'): minimizing one's own power over others, modeling and using processes of shared power, and enabling people to develop their own sense of agency.

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The problem with online learning? It doesn’t teach people to think
Robert Danisch, The Conversation, 2021/06/17

My first thought on reading the headline was, "It doesn't? Really?" Maybe I'm confusing online learning with being online generally, because my own experience is that I am wrestling every day with thoughts, emotions, practices and theories. But let's hear out the argument. The gist is this: "acquiring knowing-how habits, like critical thinking, problem-solving and close reading, required interaction and imitation... (but) people imitating each other — is impossible in a remote setting." For example, "an isolated 18-year-old, staring at a computer, can learn what a text is supposed to mean but will have a much harder time learning how to perform a careful interpretation." I don't think this is an accurate description of online learning, at least as I understand it, and I think that online learning in many ways makes it easier to model and demonstrate thought processes and supports in many ways the sort of practice and reflection needed to go beyond mere rote memory. Via Academic Matters.

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QuickPoll Results: Artificial Intelligence Use in Higher Education
2021/06/17

The bottom line: "AI is most developed for instructional use, especially for monitoring student behavior during exams and ferreting out plagiarism. AI is being used the least for institutional tasks... Immature data governance, concerns about algorithmic bias, and ineffective data management and integration pose the greatest challenges." While I'm not really convinced about the reliability of the data in this 'quickpoll' the results accord with my own observations of the space. And it tells me that there are numerous blind spots in academia when it comes to AI, including algorithmic content creation, assessment, traffic shaping and marketing.

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Evolution, rewards, and artificial intelligence
Ben Dickson, TechTalks, 2021/06/17

This is quite a good discussion of an assertion made in an earlier paper that reinforcement learning is enough for general AI (my coverage here). "The researchers hypothesize that the right reward is all you need to create the abilities associated with intelligence, such as perception, motor functions, and language." Is this true? The idea has good empirical support, but as this discussion suggests, it breaks down in practice. "There’s a tradeoff between environment complexity, reward design, and agent design."

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