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Human_Fallback
Laura Preston, n+1, 2023/03/09

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This is a long article offering an argument that there is a job market for PhDs in English and Comparative Literature - but it only pays 22 dollars an hour, and consists of watching an AI respond to requests and intervening when the 'human touch' is needed (meanwhile, the AI learns from you as you do it, making you less and less necessary). Of course, it's about more than just that - it's about how the human and AI have to blend personalities because the caller is not told they're dealing with an AI, it's about the software's single-minded purpose in setting up appointments, and ultimately, I guess, it's about what all of this is doing to human relations, where people are nothing but the 'human fallback'. Web archive version.

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Lessons on Customer Engagement from Fan Controlled Football
Sascha L. Schmidt, Sebastian Flegr, Harvard Business Review, Internet Archive, 2023/03/09

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This was quite an interesting article so I saved an archive and hope that everyone can read it. Also, you have to put aside the HBR bias in favour of capitalist competitive markets. The article describes the creation of a 'football' league where all the decisions are made by fans. The league is presented as a success in the article, though most likely the only way most heard of it was through the article. And of course the whole concept is presented as a buy-in using NFTs and web3. Put all of that aside, transfer your perspective to educational organizations where all the decisions are made by the learners. The same sort of technology can enable this (minus the fintech scams) and some sort of success can be had. How far away are we from something like this? Five years from now, we may recognize that they had already started in some fashion (think of things like Matrix channels, the fediverse, Discord groups). Or, maybe longer, and we might need some decent AI to facilitate them. But they feel pretty inevitable to me - more inevitable, in fact, than fan-owned football leagues. (p.s. no I don't subscribe to HBR - I can read their full articles in my RSS feed).

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Surge in Education Savings Accounts Was Decades in the Making
Adam Peshek, Education Next, 2023/03/09

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"My advice to  Education Savings Accounts (ESA) advocates is to not slow down," writes Adam Peshek. "The wave of ESAs happening now was built on a decade of trial and error, with lots of error along the way. Had we heeded the warnings of those before, today's wave would be a trickle." The discussion is framed not only in the context of retirement savings accounts, but also Health Savings Accounts. The need for, and existence of, any of these, to my mind represents a social policy failure. When people must save up to pay for future education, health care, or basic living expenses, the question has to be asked, what happens to those who can't?

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Where Have we Come from a 2015 UGH
Alan Levine, OEGlobal Connect, 2023/03/09

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This is a discussion in OEGlobal Connect initiated by the ubiquitous Alan Levine and referencing back to a 2015 post by Robin DeRosa essentially making the point that 'open education' has to mean something more than open textbooks. This discussion has gone back and forth for a decade, and the current thread is a revival of it. My own response somewhere way back when was to start using the expression 'free learning' as analogous to the sort of open education I would have in mind, as an alternative to 'control learning', which no matter what the status of the learning resources, was ultimately designed to serve some interest other than the student's. At the same time I have never thought of any of this as being some sort of 'movement' - that's a political concept, tied to some old idea of influence and power politics, in which I have no interest. I think we can have free learning and open educational resources and we don't all have to line up behind one unifying conception of what those must be. Image: Giulia Forsythe.

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