OLDaily

The Rise of Skills-Based Hiring And What it Means for Education
Tom Vander Ark, Getting Smart, 2021/07/05

Educators need to be aware that the marketing campaign against their unique value proposition is well underway. "Companies are missing out on skilled, diverse talent when they arbitrarily ‘require’ a four-year degree. It’s bad for workers and it’s bad for business. It doesn’t have to be this way," says former McKinsey partner Byron Auguste, who founded Opportunity@Work. "Instead of ‘screening out’ by pedigree, smart employers are increasing ‘screening in talent for performance and potential." The question for colleges and universities is this: if people no longer value your degrees and certificates, what will you be selling them when you charge them tuition fees?

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

What OpenAI and GitHub’s “AI pair programmer” means for the software industry
Ben Dickson, TechTalks, 2021/07/05

There was a bit of a splash made last week with the announcement of 'your AI pair programmer'. In computer science, 'pair programming' is where two people work on one computer to program something; the idea is that they're constantly talking about what they're doing. So what if an AI plays the role of the observer? "If you know a bit about what you’re asking Copilot to code for you, and you have enough experience to clean up the code and fix the errors that it introduces, it can be very useful and save you time." There is, of course, no reason to limit this capacity to computer programming. Anyone developing any sort of content - even detailed and technical content - will need to take note.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

1Misaligned Education
Adrian Currie, University of Pittsburgh, 2021/07/05

There was a bit of a discussion last week on games in education which led me to take note of this article when it passed through my reader. Adrian Currie argues (17 page PDF) that a humanities or liberal arts education designed to help you "get ready for your future career by developing a range of skills" is self-defeating. He draws an analogy with games, which can be played with two possible ends in mind: either 'striving', which is to seek the highest aesthetic accomplishment, or 'achievement', which is to win the game. It is often noted that playing a game merely for achievement is self-defeating; to play your best you have to put aside worries about winning or losing and focus on the game itself. The same applies to education, he argues. In order to gain the skills and values employers want in a humanities education, you can't focus on 'achieving' a job, but rather, 'striving' through appreciation of the subject itself. So humanities and liberal arts programs should not advertise themselves on the basis of their value to employers. Image: Wired.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Why We Need a New Normativism About Collective Action
Javier Gomez-Lavin, Matthew Rachar, The Philosophical Quarterly, 2021/07/05

Education often requires collective action, for example, collaboration, or working in groups, or participating in social media. This paper focuses on the normativist account offered by Margaret Gilbert, specifically, that "collective (or shared) intention and action is joint commitment. Our collectively intending something is a matter of being jointly committed to doing that thing." If this is true, the suggestion is that a person would need, minimally, to notify and seek permission from the others before leaving a collective action. If you're walking with someone, for example, you can't simply change direction and leave without saying anything. This paper (30 page PDF) responds by asking whether that obligation is to the group, or whether it's more like a promise made to one or more specific individuals. If it's the latter (as the authors argue) then a new normativism of collective action is required. Image: IRC.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Differentiating online variations of the Commonplace Book: Digital Gardens, Wikis, Zettlekasten, Waste Books, Florilegia, and Second Brains
Chris Aldrich, 2021/07/05

This is an interesting topic to be because, arguably, all of these are variations of the personal learning environment. One value of this post is the list - with links - to the related projects. And as Chris Aldrich notes, "they’re completely ignoring their predecessors to the tune of feeling like they’re trying to reinvent the wheel." Indeed, he says, we're taught to take notes in school, but nobody ever tells us why! What I think is that taking notes is only half the equation, as valuable as it may be. Exploring through those notes, using them in creative products, and sharing or applying the result of your work: all these are equally important. And, adds Aldrich, "my dream—similar to that of Bush’s—is for individual commonplace books to be able to communicate not only with their users in the Luhmann-esqe sense, but also communicate with each other." Image: Building a Second Brain.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

CLIPDraw: Exploring Text-to-Drawing Synthesis through Language-Image Encoders
Kevin Frans, L.B. Soros, Olaf Witkowski, arXiv, 2021/07/05

File this one under 'AI-generated content'. "CLIPDraw is an algorithm that synthesizes stroke-based drawings based on natural language input. CLIPDraw does not require any training; rather a pre-trained CLIP language-image encoder is used as a metric for maximizing similarity between the given description and a generated drawing." Here's the Arxiv Paper (9 page PDF) and here's the Blog Post. Good-by clip art, hello Airt.

New term alert: Airt. (ɛərt) Art created by an AI, typically based on a verbal or textual description. Eyt: term coined by me, but when I looked it up to see if it's new (it is) the meaning resonates really well with the Scots term 'airt'.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]