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House of Cards: Can the American university be saved?
Daniel Bessner Sept 8, 2929
https://www.thenation.com/article/society/gig-academy-meritocracy-trap-universities-crisis/
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Your Classes Are on Zoom and Your Teaching Staff Is Being Cut
FRANCO PALAZZI
https://jacobinmag.com/2020/04/academia-uk-essex-university-layoffs-higher-education/
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On the Current Situation: Normal Violences, Pandemics, Emergencies, Necropolitics, Zombies, and Creepy Treehouses?Jeremy Hunsinger
https://fastcapitalism.journal.library.uta.edu/index.php/fastcapitalism/article/view/386
Investment continues to flow to ed tech, with $803 million injected during the first six months of the year, according to the industry news website EdSurge. But half of that went to just six companies, including the celebrity tutorial provider MasterClass, the online learning platform Udemy and the school and college review site Niche.
From the outside, the ed-tech sector may appear as if “there’s a bonanza and it’s like the dot-com boom again and everybody’s printing money,” said Michael Hansen, CEO of the K-12 and higher education digital learning provider Cengage. “That is not the case.”
Even if they want to buy more ed-tech tools, meanwhile, schools and colleges are short on cash. Expenses for measures to deal with Covid-19 are up, while budgets are expected to be down.
Analysts and industry insiders now expect a wave of acquisitions as already-dominant brands like these seek to corner even more of the market by snatching up smaller players that provide services they don’t.
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Tech-based contact tracing could put schools in murky privacy territory
https://www.educationdive.com/news/tech-based-contact-tracing-could-put-schools-in-murky-privacy-territory/584881/
- A white paper from the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (STOP) suggests the use of contact tracing technology by schools could erode student privacy and may not be effective in preventing the spread of coronavirus.
Despite the pandemic, schools still must conform to the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) and other laws governing student privacy. Districts can disclose information to public health officials, for example, but information can’t be released to the general public without written consent from parents.
The Safely Reopen Schools mobile app is one tool available for automating contact tracing. The idea is that if two mobile phones are close enough to connect via Bluetooth, the phone owners are close enough to transmit the virus. The app includes daily health check-ins and educational notifications, but no personal information is exchanged between the phones, and the app won’t disclose who tested positive.
Colleges are also using apps to help trace and track students’ exposure to coronavirus. In August, 20,000 participants from the University of Alabama at Birmingham were asked to test the GuideSafe mobile app, which will alert them if they’ve been in contact with someone who tested positive for COVID-19. The app determines the proximity of two people through cell phone signal strength. If someone reports they contracted the virus, an alert will be sent to anyone who has been within six feet of them for at least 15 minutes over the previous two weeks.
Critics of the technology claim these apps aren’t actually capable of contract tracing and could undermine manual efforts to do so.
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more on ed tech in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=educational+technology
https://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/District_Dossier/2020/08/coronavirus_principal_early_retirement.html
Will the pandemic change the cycle for educational leaders?
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more on EDAD in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=edad
https://www.forbes.com/sites/charliefink/2020/08/28/this-week-in-xr-walmart-goes-tik-tok-as-apple-facebook-deal-and-reveal/#289e980c1985
https://www.oculus.com/facebook-horizon/
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more on Oculus in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=oculus
The Long Road Ahead: Thriving Through Fatigue
The Pandemic is not a financial recession: it is a fast-paced economic transformation. We’re transforming our companies into low-touch, high-safety businesses and we’re doing it a light speed.
We’re hyper-engaged digitally, yet highly stressed emotionally.
The most stressed part of the workforce is now young families, working mothers, and single employees working at home – and despite the online yoga classes and bread-baking videos, people are just tired.
Fatigue Management is what wins or loses wars.
- Reduce workload by clarifying goals.
- Create cadence and recovery cycles in the business.
- CEO-level focus is needed
- Take time off to rest, walk, and exercise every day. Stand up and walk around.
- Turn off the TV and stop watching Twitter.
- Take it slow. Don’t carry to heavy a load: you’ll get more done if you pace yourself over time.
- If you’re a manager, help show people what “not to do.” Help people find focus, and don’t waste their time.
- Turn off your Zoom camera and shorten meetings to 15 minutes if you can. Stop every meeting early.
- Tell your team to take a week off. And don’t email while they’re gone. Things will be fine when they come back, and work will resume better than ever.
- Be patient with your colleagues, peers, and yourself. People always want to do the best – right now it may just take a little more time.
- Have some empathy for leadership. They are tired too. Ask them how they’re doing and let them know you care.
https://www.npr.org/2020/08/13/901419012/with-more-transparency-on-election-security-a-question-looms-what-dont-we-know
a historic report last week from the nation’s top boss of counterintelligence.
the need for the United States to order the closure of the Chinese government’s consulate in Houston.
metaphor for this aspect of the spy game: a layer cake.
There’s a layer of activity that is visible to all — the actions or comments of public figures, or statements made via official channels.
Then there’s a clandestine layer that is usually visible only to another clandestine service: the work of spies being watched by other spies.
Counterintelligence officials watching Chinese intelligence activities in Houston, for example, knew the consulate was a base for efforts to steal intellectual property or recruit potential agents
And there’s at least a third layer about which the official statements raised questions: the work of spies who are operating without being detected.
The challenges of election security include its incredible breadth — every county in the United States is a potential target — and vast depth, from the prospect of cyberattacks on voter systems, to the theft of information that can then be released to embarrass a target, to the ongoing and messy war on social media over disinformation and political agitation.
Witnesses have told Congress that when Facebook and Twitter made it more difficult to create and use fake accounts to spread disinformation and amplify controversy, Russia and China began to rely more on open channels.
In 2016, Russian influencemongers posed as fake Americans and engaged with them as though they were responding to the same election alongside one another. Russian operatives even used Facebook to organize real-world campaign events across the United States.
But RT’s account on Twitter or China’s foreign ministry representatives aren’t pretending to do anything but serve as voices for Moscow or Beijing.
the offer of a $10 million bounty for information about threats to the election.
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more on trolls in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=troll
the 2020 choice for best laptops to compare:
https://www.edutopia.org/article/11-teacher-recommended-math-apps-and-online-tools
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more on math in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=math
https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2020/07/22/round-the-clock-communication-is-exhausting-teachers.html
Even before the pandemic, texting and school communication apps—like Remind or ClassDojo—had given students and families new ways to contact teachers 24/7. But teachers like Davis say that school closures have increased the pressure to be “always on” for students and parents, as remote instruction has blurred the boundaries between work life and home life.
Teachers want to be available to their students, to clarify their questions and calm their fears. But it’s also crucial that teachers set time aside for themselves, and that schools and districts respect—and even help create—these boundaries
Developing systems that protect teacher well-being should be a priority for schools in the fall, …, as the demands of remote learning aren’t likely to disappear.
An ‘Internal Battle’ Over Boundaries
administration set a policy that teachers didn’t have to respond to messages sent after 5 p.m. until the next day.
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distributing responsibility. Grade-level teams could take turns having “on” hours
https://www.scienceopen.com/document/read?vid=992eaf61-35dd-454e-aa17-f9f8216b381b
This article presents an examination of how education research is being remade as an experimental data-intensive science. AI is combining with learning science in new ‘digital laboratories’ where ownership over data, and power and authority over educational knowledge production, are being redistributed to research assemblages of computational machines and scientific expertise.
Research across the sciences, humanities and social sciences is increasingly conducted through digital knowledge machines that are reconfiguring the ways knowledge is generated, circulated and used (Meyer and Schroeder, 2015).
Knowledge infrastructures, such as those of statistical institutes or research-intensive universities, have undergone significant digital transformation with the arrival of data-intensive technologies, with knowledge production now enacted in myriad settings, from academic laboratories and research institutes to commercial research and development studios, think tanks and consultancies. Datafied knowledge infrastructures have become hubs of command and control over the creation, analysis and exchange of data (Bigo et al., 2019).
The combination of AI and learning science into an AILSci research assemblage consists of particular forms of scientific expertise embodied by knowledge actors – individuals and organizations – identified by categories including science of learning, AIED, precision education and learning engineering.
Precision education overtly uses psychological, neurological and genomic data to tailor or personalize learning around the unique needs of the individual (Williamson, 2019). Precision education approaches include cognitive tracking, behavioural monitoring, brain imaging and DNA analysis.
Expert power is therefore claimed by those who can perform big data analyses, especially those able to translate and narrate the data for various audiences. Likewise, expert power in education is now claimed by those who can enact data-intensive science of learning, precision education and learning engineering research and development, and translate AILSci findings into knowledge for application in policy and practitioner settings.
the thinking of a thinking infrastructure is not merely a conscious human cognitive process, but relationally performed across humans and socio-material strata, wherein interconnected technical devices and other forms ‘organize thinking and thought and direct action’.
As an infrastructure for AILSci analyses, these technologies at least partly structure how experts think: they generate new understandings and knowledge about processes of education and learning that are only thinkable and knowable due to the computational machinery of the research enterprise.
Big data-based molecular genetics studies are part of a bioinformatics-led transformation of biomedical sciences based on analysing exceptional volumes of data (Parry and Greenhough, 2018), which has transformed the biological sciences to focus on structured and computable data rather than embodied evidence itself.
Isin and Ruppert (2019) have recently conceptualized an emergent form of power that they characterize as sensory power. Building on Foucault, they note how sovereign power gradually metamorphosed into disciplinary power and biopolitical forms of statistical regulation over bodies and populations.
Sensory power marks a shift to practices of data-intensive sensing, and to the quantified tracking, recording and representing of living pulses, movements and sentiments through devices such as wearable fitness monitors, online natural-language processing and behaviour-tracking apps. Davies (2019: 515–20) designates these as ‘techno-somatic real-time sensing’ technologies that capture the ‘rhythms’ and ‘metronomic vitality’ of human bodies, and bring about ‘new cyborg-type assemblages of bodies, codes, screens and machines’ in a ‘constant cybernetic loop of action, feedback and adaptation’.
Techno-somatic modes of neural sensing, using neurotechnologies for brain imaging and neural analysis, are the next frontier in AILSci. Real-time brainwave sensing is being developed and trialled in multiple expert settings.
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more on AI in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=artificial+intelligence