OLDaily

Good-enough
Wendy Grossman, net.wars, 2022/09/07

While TikTok's AI voices are almost universally hated, for most day-to-day applications artificial voices are good enough (indeed, as Wendy Grossman notes, having a human read railway announcements, customer service bulletins or marketing campaigns would be overkill). But the writing is on the wall. This article raises the question of whether people whose voices were used as samples deserve royalties (especially if their voice is distinctive and already famous). "Today," writes Grossman, "voice actors really could find themselves competing for work against synthesized versions of themselves." True, but that's only today. AI synthesizers will soon generate genuinely unique voices, and the market for human voice actors will disappear. Bad news for them, but good news for people who depend on (say) access to inexpensive audio recordings of learning materials.

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The AI startup erasing call center worker accents: is it fighting bias – or perpetuating it?
Wilfred Chan, The Guardian, 2022/09/07

When I entered university in 1981, after scoring an A in my first math class, my progress ground to a halt after back-to-back classes in calculus taught by professors with thick accents. I'm a lot better with accents now, but at that age I had no experience with accents and was out of my depth. Would I have been perpetuating bias had I asked for something like this software that would have erased the instructor's accents? I never did finish that second calculus class, which also ended my aspirations to study physics. It's one thing to use such software in a call centre, but quite something else when we're looking at doctors, teachers and other professionals where clear communication is vital.

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The State of Post-Secondary Education in Canada, 2022
Alex Usher, Higher Education Strategy Associates, 2022/09/07

Though he's focused rather more on economics than on learning and technology, Alex Usher's analyses of higher education in Canada are always a good read. This post summarizes his latest report (136 page PDF) once you get past the advertisements. His main focus in this summary is "recent changes in the provision of student aid, and specifically the massive run-up in student grants which has been occurring." Now the graphic he runs is very misleading, as it makes it look like grants are up across the board, while in fact only one grant program has increased over the last few years, the Canadian government Canada Student Financial Assistance Program's (CSFAP) (formerly the Canada Student Loans Program (CSLP)), while everything else has been shrinking. Usher also looks at institutional research, though while he mentions "Memorial University's intriguing research profile" there's nothing in that chapter that would warrant such a remark (perhaps he means the quip about health funding in chapter 4). More telling, I think, is the data that shows (once again) that the Canadian private sector far underperforms its counterparts in other OECD nations.

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Adobe’s and Unacademy’s new channels on YouTube
Daniel Christian, Learning Ecosystems, 2022/09/07

Daniel Christian points to more new entrants to the ever widening range of educational content on YouTube. In the first, "Adobe Live will be streaming to our own YouTube channel (+Behance!) starting 9/6!" And in the second, "Unacademy, an Indian EdTech unicorn and one of the leading online learning platform, has recently launched 50 new education channels on Google-owned YouTube."

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A Call to More Equitable Learning: How Next-Generation Badging Improves Education for All
Danielle Allen, Democratic Knowledge Project, Harvard University, 2022/09/07

This paper is a good overview of the case for badges and a description (with some case studies) of their potential application, but aside from a one-sentence nod to Mozilla it does not get into any detail at all about a badging infrastructure in general, but rather, the institutional changes (for example, replacing the Carnegie unit) that badges would support. It's very much focused on the competency-based approach to badging, and with it, a formal and structured approach. I wish it had looked more widely at the discussions around badges over the years, and especially their application in a decentralized system of skills recognition (which it calls the 'first generation' approach to badging). Were I a cynic I would say that this is another example of an elite university taking a novel concept developed elsewhere and reforming it into something harmless and benign to existing entrenched interests.

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On a personal note at a crossroads in life
Alastair Creelman, The corridor of uncertainty, 2022/09/07

We wish all the best to Alastair Creelman, an oft-quoted pundit in these pages, as he steps back from day-to-day involvement in the field. He's right when he says "blogging can be quite a solitary activity". This is true even for well-known bloggers, and it's pretty easy to feel we're casting our words into the void. I share many of the concerns Creelman expresses in this post and I think it's important to say to the people who raise them, "I hear you. Your words have impact."

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2022 Progress Report
Mya Haynes, Martin Kurzweil, Tania LaViolet, Adam Rabinowitz, Emily Schwartz, Josh Wyner, 2022/09/07

American universities have enrolled fewer lower-income students year over year since the high water mark set in 2018, according to this report from the American Talent Initiative (ATI). These students can be successful if given the chance. "Of the entering cohort of lower-income students at ATI institutions in 2015, 80 percent graduated within six years." Data from non-ATI members was not included, but "we expect those institutions to have experienced steeper declines in lower-income student enrollment than ATI members," write the authors. Via the Chronicle.

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