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Mortari's reply to: "Optimising" educational choices with algorithms
“One company getting buzz is ConnectEDU, sometimes described as an eHarmony for college matchmaking. Its founder, Craig Powell, dreams that students won’t even have to apply to college “because an algorithm will have already told them and the schools where they would fit best,”
The algo dream: to replace human agency and choice.
We must start to ask, what is so bad about making a non-“optimised” decision? Do we not learn things - do we not sometimes learn more - from the things we do that don’t quite work?
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We regret the roads not travelled. Let’s be careful about letting the gospel of “efficiency” too near these choices: rational “optimisation” may potentially be distinctly sub-optimal for a sense of life satisfaction.
Agree with this entirely. While optimisation may be very important for decisions in business or resource allocation, it cannot allow for that which we struggle to quantify: life satisfaction. Education does not just convey information or skills, it also fills out our world view by exposing us to new ideas and other people who have different priorities. The astronomy course which I took in my undergraduate studies has been of zero practical use to me in my academic career, but has left me with a true sense of wonder at the possibilities of science.
In the past 10 years I’ve hoped from studying philosophy, to psychiatry, to neuroscience, to psychoanalysis and now to psychology, and I don’t regret any of these choices. This could be seen as inefficient in terms of material learned which was not essential to understand my current field of study. But it has provided an understanding of the much broader context in which my research is situated, and the ability to analyse and incorporate insights from other fields.
Creativity and original thinking requires a degree of flexibility and openness, and in my experience this is best encouraged by a broad and varied education, in which people are exposed to new ideas from different topics. My fear over the optimisation of education is that it encourages the opposite of this: that students focus purely on the subjects which align closely with each other and reinforce each others’ assumptions. Efficiency is just another word for stagnation.
Thanks for the response Georgie - eloquent.
Two more points to flag from the article’s comments take the critique in a different direction - in fact, the socio-economic, slightly Foucauldian lens I tend to use. Worth summarising:
- The real world doesn’t put you in a meeting or a job interview with people who’ve been pre-selected for optimised learning. Success requires developing the capabilities to handle a challenge and people / situations you might not get on with very well. Avoiding this in college doesn’t do the student a favour.
- The economic argument: the UK has now joined the US in the vast, near-mortgage-sized debts 18-year-olds are expected to take out to render themselves “employable”. Under this circumstance, it may be more rational to continue on an economics or science degree you don’t like and get a 2:2 than switch to art history, get a 1st, and face much more constrained employment choices.
- Admin increasing the role for itself in preference to teaching staff; creating technocratic “solutions” to the problem of student performance and uncertainty which don’t address the real problem - don’t make a structural critique of the university and its relationship to capital.
Two more, from further thought and discussion:
- Students already have plenty of data on their own performance - their marks, plus their own self-knowledge. This is enough to make a good decision about what to study. Outsourcing this to a piece of software abnegates responsibility and delays maturity.
- From @megblight: Feedback loops. The new data would over a few years become wholly based on its own predictions. Random effects in initial data would surely be replicated?
Posted on January 15, 2012 via HAUTE POP with 26 notes ()
Source: chronicle.com
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The fact that more than 70 percent of our courses are taught by contingent faculty means that most of our courses and students are being taught by disempowered teachers. Therefore, students are less likely to be taught to resist, to talk back, and to try to make change happen. Contingent faculty members who refuse to back down are taking big risks, particularly in today’s environment, where the “student as customer” paradigm dominates so many administrator-faculty conversations. Even when administrators support these instructors, they often stand alone in their support and are likely to alienate themselves in defending these faculty members. As our teachers increasingly enter more contingent and precarious work situations, this phenomenon is on the rise.
Who loses? Our teachers, our students, and ultimately, society. Most people fear change—not just conservatives, but also liberals. But what we need now are folks who are willing to take risks, willing to fight for change, willing to create a vision for tomorrow. When we do not support and protect these folks, we stagnate. Innovative thinkers and teachers, like writers and artists, move us forward. When our institutions become hostile toward innovative thinking and new ideas, they—and the people who produce them—don’t disappear. They go elsewhere. The best thoughts are not happening on our campuses, they are happening elsewhere.
Knowledge, Power, and the Politics of Life by Mary Churchill, Chronicle of Higher Education, 26th July 2011.
I’ve recently read a couple of good but conflicting essays about the de/merits of doing a PhD:
- William Pannapaker on Overeducated, Underemployed: How to fix humanities grad school - why doing a PhD is a really bad idea in monetary or rational terms
- and @jsench’s response that as a working class doctoral student, it was the best thing he ever did.
Where I am now - 25, two years out of grad school, curious mind, good academic record and overqualified friends - I am actively Not Doing A PhD. On the one hand, academia is fucking broke. On the other, it may be necessary if I want to be danah boyd or Biella Coleman. (Got to say I love how the two top tech anthropologists are both women #glassceilingforthesmash)
Still something I think about, but jeez - ultimately I fall on the side of ‘not going back in a fucking hurry.’
Posted on July 29, 2011 with 10 notes ()
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Slightly repetitively, Middlesex prides itself on, ‘learning that provides a flexible learning experience that is delivered through work, in work, for work.’ It has not only set up Middlesex Organisational Development Network - ‘the first UK university-led network focusing on engagement with employers’ - but it has put millions into an ‘Institute for Work Based Learning’. This is used by businesses who want to ‘grow their staff quickly,’ and workers who want to ‘catch their vision.’
(What you do with a vision once it has been caught is unclear - presumably you kill it, cook it and eat it. What you do with your staff once they have been ‘grown’ is also unclear - presumably you kill them, cook them and eat them too.)
Beyond Measure | Mute magazine
A student protestor from the occupation of Middlesex University discusses the corporatisation of higher education.
Source: metamute.org
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