mastodon 4.6.8+glitchI'm a teacher/professor, researcher, and writer. I'm totally a dilettante. I can't stop thinking. Sometimes it's a problem. on Substack at https://jeffreyfisher.substack.com/
Alpha School is complete BS, from their education model to their employment model to their revenue model.
If you ask me, this is the obvious end-result of education as production and customer as product.
https://jeffreyfisher.substack.com/p/alpha-schools-education-coaches-are
Alexander Kustov's complaints about academics resisting AI ("Academics need to wake up about AI") seem to be getting a lot of play, even as they drive a lot of hostility, but while he is right about quite a bit, he is also very wrong about some very important things.
the narrow (and exclusive) definition of academia in terms of knowledge production is a dead end and fatal to the idea of education. when you say “academics,” most people don’t think you mean “but not the teaching part,” and when you say "AI" they don't think you mean "but not for learning to read and write."
so if you’re concerned about precision at all, which a social scientist presumably is, you should step back and think about what you’re saying, and to whom, and refine your language. otherwise you’re just doing the same misleading clickbait-y stories that produce the bs slop research you’re ostensibly complaining about.
https://jeffreyfisher.substack.com/p/homer-was-never-called-a-stochastic
Now that we're out of the in-fighting over Chomsky's culpability with respect to Epstein (I did not even have a horse in that particular race), it's worth taking a look at what it tells us about how elite people get along even when they disagree in ways that matter.
https://open.substack.com/pub/jeffreyfisher/p/bring-back-commitments-to-communities
And in case you thought there weren't enough hot takes on sam altman's recent freudian slip, here's another one. but how many have you read that talk about Douglas Adams and Deep Thought?
https://jeffreyfisher.substack.com/p/more-human-than-human-sam-altmans?r=2g7xpl
The problem I want to highlight is that one central reason student evals don’t work is that we don’t really have a clear, concrete, specific, universally applicable framework for identifying “quality instruction” in the k-12 or higher ed environments. I would argue that we not only can’t have one, we shouldn’t even want one and shouldn’t be trying to make one. When people teach, they teach like a person. Insofar as they are working with people and not widgets, that is to be desired. Students will eventually work for people they will have to deal with one way or another, whether as bosses or colleagues or co-volunteers or whatever it is. Different people are better and worse at different things, and have different ways of going about things — some ways are arguably better or worse, but teachers in classes are often trying to do different things from each other and different things from what the students have come to expect, whether from their parents or previous schooling or their peers or their own reflection. Those different things might have to do with aptitudes or inclinations, but also have to do with specific pedagogical choices.
https://jeffreyfisher.substack.com/p/student-evaluations-dont-evaluate?r=2g7xpl