Serendipity35

Reading on the Open Campus blog and earlier on the ACT blog got me thinking about how the long tail of this pandemic will be felt in education. One area that seems to be changed in the long term is admissions testing and perhaps testing for placement in general.

Many colleges have extended their test-optional policies that began last year into this year. Those schools include the entire Ivy League and big players like Stanford University and the University of Texas at Austin.

Most predictions have said that the SAT and the ACT will never return to the role they played, but colleges still need some way of assessing both if a student should be admitted and where they should be placed after admission.

For admissions, it seems that the two measures being used are the "rigor" of the classes that applicants took in high school and their grades in them.

The term "rigor" in education is difficult to determine. It is used to describe instruction, coursework, learning experiences, and expectations that are challenging. On a micro level, I might say that a  multiple-choice test on a novel is not as rigorous as an essay test. But measuring rigor for a high school course at a distance by a college is difficult. Clearly, an honors junior English course at one high school is not equal to those at other schools.

What colleges have been doing is collecting data on students who already enrolled and comparing them to their high-school courses and grades. When they have enough data on a particular high school (starting with the highest sending schools), they can track the grade-point averages (GPA), freshman year success, and eventual degree completions of students from that particular school.

?Even when I applied to college in the last century, placement tests given at the college after admission played a much more significant role in my college course selection and path.

Besides helping to decide if a student is admitted to the college, these tests are supposed to measure readiness and predict success. One of those posts I read gives the example that 93% of test-optional applicants to Georgia Tech took calculus in high school, but that isn’t really part of the SAT’s math section. Since students will be required to have calculus, how useful is that SAT score? 

We'll see what a few years of test-optional college admissions produce. As others have said, the pandemic will have a very long tail for higher education. 

Amber MacArthur's newsletter turned me on to a new book by The New York Times tech columnist Kevin Roose called Futureproof. which considers the question Is your job future-proof? 

First thought: Is any job future-proof? I'd guess that we will always need doctors, farmers, teachers, police and a bunch of other professions, but as they change will they remain recognizable as their former professions?

As a teacher, I've been hearing for decades that we'd be replaced someday by computers, robots, and artificial intelligence. It hasn't happened yet, but that doesn't mean it won't happen after I have left the planet.

The age of automation has been with us since the last century. We have all seen how some industries, like automakers, have automated many jobs that were done by humans. Some humans are still there working with robots and such but not very many. I once toured a beer bottling facility and the observation area was decorated with a timeline showing the place over the years. The thing that immediately hit me was that as we moved through the 20th-century photos was that people were vanishing from the photos. A crowd of humans was putting bottles into boxes in the 1920s and on the floor in front of me now was one person on a platform operating controls for it all to be done by automation.

Automation doesn't take breaks, call in sick, slow down at the end of the day, join a union, or mind working 24/7 for no extra pay.

Futureproof's subtitle is "9 Rules for Humans in the Age of Automation" and the first rule is to "Be Surprising, Social, and Scarce." Roose's approach is to do things yourself to protect your job.

It's not about defeating the machines because they are here and not leaving and it doesn’t just change our jobs. It changes our entire life experience with AI and algorithms influencing what you watch on screens, what you listen to, the news you get, and on and on. 

It's not about becoming like a machine. In fact, Roose thinks you need to be more human. What are the creative, inspiring, and meaningful things you can do that even the most advanced AI can’t do? At least, not yet.

Better technology for medical imaging was welcomed into hospitals, but you still needed humans to read those x-rays, scans, and such. But now, we are finding that AI might be able to more accurately read those results without bias and using comparisons to an ever-growing data collection of other results. 

Chess and Go players once thought no machine could beat a master. Wrong.

There is too much in the book to summarize here but think about some of these provocative personal rules: Resist machine drift; Leave handprints; Demote your devices; Treat AI like a chimp army.
 
Think about one of those rules: "Leave Handprints." It's the idea that we still value human artisanship and service. People are willing to pay a premium for some handmade items - such as artwork - or to be served in a restaurant. 

 

 

 

 

I read that the American rock band Kings of Leon is getting in on NFTs (non-fungible tokens). They are not the first. I looked into this term which I was not familiar with and found that the artist Grimes sold a bunch of NFTs for nearly $6 million and an NFT of LeBron James making a historic dunk for the Lakers garnered more than $200,000. The auction house Christie's got bids in the millions for the artist Beeple. 

NFT (sometimes pronounced niff-tees)stands for "non-fungible token" meaning a token that you can't exchange for another thing of equal value. Fungibility is the ability of a good or asset to be interchanged with other individual goods or assets of the same type. Fungible assets simplify the exchange and trade processes, as fungibility implies equal value between the assets.One comparison I found said to consider that you can exchange a $20 bill for two $10 bills. They are fungible. But an NFT is one of a kind.

These NFTs are used to create verifiable digital scarcity. They also give digital ownership. They seem to be used with things that require unique digital items like crypto art, digital collectibles, and online gaming.

This goes back to blockchain which has become an established way to provide proof of authenticity. Blockchain gets most of its attention because of its use with cryptocurrencies, like Bitcoin. Ownership is recorded on a blockchain which is a digital ledger.

NFTs use Ethereum, a decentralized, open-source blockchain featuring smart contract functionality. Ether is the native cryptocurrency of the platform. It is the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, after Bitcoin.

We heard recently that Elon Musk bought a lot of Bitcoin and will accept it as payment for his Tesla vehicles, and other vendors accept cryptocurrencies as payment. But NFTs are unlike cryptocurrencies because you can't exchange one NFT for another in the same way that you would with dollars. Its appeal is that each is unique and acts as a collector’s item that can’t be duplicated. They are rare by design, like limited editions and prints. 

And now, with music, proponents say that NFTs could help artists struggling with digital piracy, low streaming royalty rates and a lack of touring revenue from the last year of Covid-19 pandemic restrictions.

The phrase "cancel culture" is showing up in the news more frequently. Cancel culture (or call-out culture) is the term sometimes used when someone is shut out of a social or professional group. This could be either online (particularly on social media), in the real world, or both. Those who are subject to this ostracism are said to be "canceled."

I wrote earlier about moderating content and issues about freedom of speech. One conclusion in that article was that private companies (Twitter, Facebook, et al) have the right to remove accounts that violate their terms of service and that is not a freedom of speech issue.  

Let's look at definitions of a non-legal nature. Merriam-Webster says that "cancel" means "to stop giving support to that person." Dictionary.com has a pop-culture dictionary that defines "cancel culture" as "withdrawing support for (canceling) public figures and companies after they have done or said something considered objectionable or offensive."

The latest spin on the expression "cancel culture" has given it a more negative connotation. Some politically conservative people and groups view recent examples (like Donald Trump being removed from Twitter) as a free speech and censorship issue. My thoughts on that are clear in that earlier post.

Cancel culture or call-out culture can also be less "official" when large numbers of people boycott an individual or company or group who they feel has acted or spoken in a questionable or controversial manner.

When President Biden was inaugurated, a number of accounts changed hands. As has always been the case, the @whitehouse Twitter account has different administrators with a new President. The @POTUS and @FLOTUS accounts also have new administration.

When those kinds of changes occurred, many followers of those accounts unfollowed them. Is that "cancel culture"? No one would have used that term when Barack Obama became President, but people did follow or unfollow those accounts at the time of Presidential change too. Of course, former President Obama still has a Twitter account as simply @barackobama as do other living ex-Presidents. 

For individuals losing access to social accounts or any form of cancel culture, it can mean losses to reputation, personal branding, and possibly income. For a company or group to lose access, the income portion can be a much greater concern, though all three things are important.