Right/Wrong:How Technology Transforms Our Ethics

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Juan Enriquez: “Most people have a strong sense of right and wrong, and they aren’t shy about expressing their opinions. But when we take a polarizing stand on something we regard as an eternal truth, we often forget that ethics evolve over time. Many shifts in the right versus wrong pendulum are driven by advances in technology. Our great-grandparents might be shocked by in vitro fertilization; our great-grandchildren might be shocked by the messiness of pregnancy, childbirth, and unedited genes. In Right/Wrong, Juan Enriquez reflects on what happens to our ethics as technology makes the once unimaginable a commonplace occurrence.

Evolving technology changes ethics. Enriquez points out that, contrary to common wisdom, technology often enables more ethical behaviors. Technology challenges old beliefs and upends institutions that do not grow and change. With wit and compassion, Enriquez takes on a series of technology-influenced ethical dilemmas, from sexual liberation to climate change to the “immortality” of mistakes on social media. (“Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Google are electronic tattoos.”) He cautions us to judge those who “should have known better,” given today’s vantage point, with less fury and more compassion. We need a quality often absent in today’s charged debates: humility. Judge those in the past as we hope to be judged in the future….(More)”.

Ethical issues of crowdsourcing in education

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Katerina Zdravkova: “Crowdsourcing has become a fruitful solution for many activities, promoting the joined power of the masses. Although not formally recognised as an educational model, the first steps towards embracing crowdsourcing as a form of formal learning and teaching have recently emerged. Before taking a dramatic step forward, it should be estimated whether it is feasible, sustainable and socially responsible.

A nice initiative, which intends to set a groundwork for responsible research and innovation and actively implement crowdsourcing for language learning of all citizens regardless of their diversified social, educational, and linguistic backgrounds is enetCollect.

In order to achieve these goals, a sound framework that embraces the ethical and legal considerations should be established. The framework is intended for all the current and prospective creators of crowd-oriented educational systems. It incorporates the ethical issues affecting the three stakeholders: collaborative content creators, prospective users, as well as the institutions intending to implement the approach for educational purposes. The proposed framework offers a practical solution intending to overcome the revealed barriers, which might increase the risk of compromising its main educational goals. If carefully designed and implemented, crowdsourcing might become a very helpful, and at the same time, a very reliable educational model….(More)”.

The Pandemic Is No Excuse to Surveil Students

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

 Zeynep Tufekci in the Atlantic: “In Michigan, a small liberal-arts college is requiring students to install an app called Aura, which tracks their location in real time, before they come to campus. Oakland University, also in Michigan, announced a mandatory wearable that would track symptoms, but, facing a student-led petition, then said it would be optional. The University of Missouri, too, has an app that tracks when students enter and exit classrooms. This practice is spreading: In an attempt to open during the pandemic, many universities and colleges around the country are forcing students to download location-tracking apps, sometimes as a condition of enrollment. Many of these apps function via Bluetooth sensors or Wi-Fi networks. When students enter a classroom, their phone informs a sensor that’s been installed in the room, or the app checks the Wi-Fi networks nearby to determine the phone’s location.

As a university professor, I’ve seen surveillance like this before. Many of these apps replicate the tracking system sometimes installed on the phones of student athletes, for whom it is often mandatory. That system tells us a lot about what we can expect with these apps.

There is a widespread charade in the United States that university athletes, especially those who play high-profile sports such as football and basketball, are just students who happen to be playing sports as amateurs “in their free time.” The reality is that these college athletes in high-level sports, who are aggressively recruited by schools, bring prestige and financial resources to universities, under a regime that requires them to train like professional athletes despite their lack of salary. However, making the most of one’s college education and training at that level are virtually incompatible, simply because the day is 24 hours long and the body, even that of a young, healthy athlete, can only take so much when training so hard. Worse, many of these athletes are minority students, specifically Black men, who were underserved during their whole K–12 education and faced the same challenge then as they do now: Train hard in hopes of a scholarship and try to study with what little time is left, often despite being enrolled in schools with mediocre resources. Many of them arrive at college with an athletic scholarship but not enough academic preparation compared with their peers who went to better schools and could also concentrate on schooling….(More)”

The Road Back to College Is Paved with Barriers, but Behavioral Science Can Help Smooth the Way

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog by Katherine Flaschen and Ben Castleman: “In order to create the most effective solutions, policymakers and educators need to better understand a fundamental question: Why do so many of these students, many of whom have already made substantial progress toward their degree, fail to return to college and graduate? …

With a better understanding of the barriers preventing people who intend to finish their degree from following through, policymakers and colleges can create solutions that meaningfully meet students’ needs and help them re-enroll. As states across the country face rising unemployment rates, it’s critical to design and test interventions that address these behavioral barriers and help thousands of citizens who are out of work due to the COVID-19 crisis consider their options for going back to school.

For example, colleges could provide monetary incentives to students for taking actions related to re-enrollment that overcome these barriers, such as speaking with an advisor, reviewing upcoming recommended courses and developing a course plan, and making an active choice about when to return to college. In addition, SCND students could be paired with current students to serve as peer mentors, both to provide support with the re-enrollment process and to hold them accountable for degree completion (especially if faced with difficult remaining classes). Community colleges could also encourage major employers of the SCND population in high-demand fields, like health care, to provide options for employees to finish their degree while working (e.g., via tuition reimbursement programs), translate degree attainment into concrete career returns, and identify representatives within the company, such as recent graduates, to promote re-enrollment and make it a more salient opportunity….(More)”.

An algorithm shouldn’t decide a student’s future

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Hye Jung Han at Politico: “…Education systems across Europe struggled this year with how to determine students’ all-important final grades. But one system, the International Baccalaureate (“IB”) — a high school program that is highly regarded by European universities, and offered by both public and private schools in 152 countries — did something unusual.

Having canceled final exams, which make up the majority of an IB student’s grade, the Geneva-based foundation of the same name hastily built an algorithm that used a student’s coursework scores, predicted grades by teachers and their school’s historical IB results to guess what students might have scored if they had taken their exams in a hypothetical, pandemic-free year. The result of the algorithm became the student’s final grade.

The results were catastrophic. Soon after the grades were released, serious mismatches emerged between expected grades based on a student’s prior performance, and those awarded by the algorithm. Because IB students’ university admissions are contingent upon their final grades, the unexpectedly poor grades generated for some resulted in scholarships and admissions offers being revoked…

The IB had alternatives. Instead, it could have used students’ actual academic performance and graded on a generous curve. It could have incorporated practice test grades, third-party moderation to minimize grading bias and teachers’ broad evaluations of student progress.

It could have engaged with universities on flexibly factoring in final grades into this year’s admissions decisions, as universities contemplate opening their now-virtual classes to more students to replace lost revenue.

It increasingly seems like the greatest potential of the power promised by predictive data lies in the realm of misuse.

For this year’s graduating class, who have already responded with grace and resilience in their final year of school, the automating away of their capacity and potential is an unfair and unwanted preview of the world they are graduating into….(More)”.

Blame the politicians, not the technology, for A-level fiasco

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

The Editorial Board at the Financial Times: “The soundtrack of school students marching through Britain’s streets shouting “f*** the algorithm” captured the sense of outrage surrounding the botched awarding of A-level exam grades this year. But the students’ anger towards a disembodied computer algorithm is misplaced. This was a human failure. The algorithm used to “moderate” teacher-assessed grades had no agency and delivered exactly what it was designed to do.

It is politicians and educational officials who are responsible for the government’s latest fiasco and should be the target of students’ criticism….

Sensibly designed, computer algorithms could have been used to moderate teacher assessments in a constructive way. Using past school performance data, they could have highlighted anomalies in the distribution of predicted grades between and within schools. That could have led to a dialogue between Ofqual, the exam regulator, and anomalous schools to come up with more realistic assessments….

There are broader lessons to be drawn from the government’s algo fiasco about the dangers of automated decision-making systems. The inappropriate use of such systems to assess immigration status, policing policies and prison sentencing decisions is a live danger. In the private sector, incomplete and partial data sets can also significantly disadvantage under-represented groups when it comes to hiring decisions and performance measures.

Given the severe erosion of public trust in the government’s use of technology, it might now be advisable to subject all automated decision-making systems to critical scrutiny by independent experts. The Royal Statistical Society and The Alan Turing Institute certainly have the expertise to give a Kitemark of approval or flag concerns.

As ever, technology in itself is neither good nor bad. But it is certainly not neutral. The more we deploy automated decision-making systems, the smarter we must become in considering how best to use them and in scrutinising their outcomes. We often talk about a deficit of trust in our societies. But we should also be aware of the dangers of over-trusting technology. That may be a good essay subject for next year’s philosophy A-level….(More)”.

Calling Bullshit: The Art of Scepticism in a Data-Driven World

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Carl Bergstrom and Jevin West: “Politicians are unconstrained by facts. Science is conducted by press release. Higher education rewards bullshit over analytic thought. Startup culture elevates bullshit to high art. Advertisers wink conspiratorially and invite us to join them in seeing through all the bullshit — and take advantage of our lowered guard to bombard us with bullshit of the second order. The majority of administrative activity, whether in private business or the public sphere, seems to be little more than a sophisticated exercise in the combinatorial reassembly of bullshit.

We’re sick of it. It’s time to do something, and as educators, one constructive thing we know how to do is to teach people. So, the aim of this course is to help students navigate the bullshit-rich modern environment by identifying bullshit, seeing through it, and combating it with effective analysis and argument.

What do we mean, exactly, by bullshit and calling bullshit? As a first approximation:

Bullshit involves language, statistical figures, data graphics, and other forms of presentation intended to persuade by impressing and overwhelming a reader or listener, with a blatant disregard for truth and logical coherence.

Calling bullshit is a performative utterance, a speech act in which one publicly repudiates something objectionable. The scope of targets is broader than bullshit alone. You can call bullshit on bullshit, but you can also call bullshit on lies, treachery, trickery, or injustice.

In this course we will teach you how to spot the former and effectively perform the latter.

While bullshit may reach its apogee in the political domain, this is not a course on political bullshit. Instead, we will focus on bullshit that comes clad in the trappings of scholarly discourse. Traditionally, such highbrow nonsense has come couched in big words and fancy rhetoric, but more and more we see it presented instead in the guise of big data and fancy algorithms — and these quantitative, statistical, and computational forms of bullshit are those that we will be addressing in the present course.

Of course an advertisement is trying to sell you something, but do you know whether the TED talk you watched last night is also bullshit — and if so, can you explain why? Can you see the problem with the latest New York Times or Washington Post article fawning over some startup’s big data analytics? Can you tell when a clinical trial reported in the New England Journal or JAMA is trustworthy, and when it is just a veiled press release for some big pharma company?…(More)”.

The Obsolescence of Interfaces

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Carlos A. Scolari: “COVID-19 has highlighted the need to redesign current interfaces to tackle an increasingly complex and uncertain world….

Whenever somebody says the word interface one immediately thinks of a keyboard, a mouse or a joystick, and an infinite number of icons on a screen… This interface – also called a graphical user interface – is a place for interaction, the frontier space where the analogical (double-clicking the mouse) becomes digital (a file, made up of bits, opens). But the graphical user interface is not limited to that exchange between individual and technology: that relationship is mediated by an “interaction grammar” that, in order that things function, must be shared between designer and user.

This idea – the interface understood as a network of actors that are human (user, designer, etc.), technological (mouse, keyboard, screen, apps, Internet, etc.) and institutional (interaction grammar, businesses, laws, etc.) – can be taken far beyond the classical image of the individual against the digital machine. If we scale the concept, we can consider the school as an interface where actors that are human (teachers, students, governors, families, etc.), technological (blackboards, benches, books, pencils, projectors, tablets, etc.) and institutional (school management, PTA, Department of Education, Ministry, etc.) maintain different types of relationships with each other and carry forward a series of processes.

Educational interfaces

For years there has been talk of a “crisis in the school system” and of “educational innovation”. Rivers of ink and seas of bits have issued forth on this question in recent years. Back in 2007, in an article published in La Vanguardia, Manuel Castells warned: “The idea that young people today should bear the burden of a rucksack full of boring textbooks, defined by ministerial bureaucrats, and should be locked up in a classroom to endure a discourse irrelevant to their perspective, and should put up with all this in the name of the future, is simply absurd”. For some, the solution simply involves incorporating “educational technology” into the classroom and training the teachers. However, for others, we believe that the issue is much more complex and that it demands another type of focus. Perhaps a view from the perspective of interfaces might be useful for us….

Many other interfaces that were already showing their limitations from a couple of decades ago, such as political interfaces (parties) or social interfaces (trade unions), must pass through processes of redesign if we want them to continue fulfilling their representative roles. COVID-19 has added hospitals and healthcare centres to this list: during the worst weeks of the pandemic, these interfaces had to be redesigned in real time in order to tackle the boom in the number of patients entering their emergency departments.

Another interface that will not escape redesign is the city. Urban interfaces will have to be rethought in all their dimensions, from the relationship between the public and the private space to the spaces for the flow and permanence of pedestrians while maintaining a “safe social distance”. Even highly innovative spaces on an urban level, such as the “super-blocks” of Barcelona or the new co-working rooms at the UPF, are not prepared for the post-pandemic world and will have to be redesigned.

Nearly all the interfaces that have been mentioned (compulsory state schools, political parties, trade unions, hospitals) were created during Modernity to cater for the needs of a type of industrial mass society that is in the process of disappearing. COVID-19 has done nothing if not slit open all of these interfaces and evidence their incapacity to tackle an increasingly complex and uncertain world….(More)”.

Social-Change Games Can Help Us Understand the Public Health Choices We Face

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog by the Hastings Institute: “Before there was the Covid-19 pandemic, there was Pandemic. This tabletop game, in which players collaborate to fight disease outbreaks, debuted in 2007. Expansions feature weaponized pathogens, historic pandemics, zoonotic diseases, and vaccine development races. Game mechanics modelled on pandemic vectors provide multiple narratives: battle, quest, detection, discovery. There is satisfaction in playing “against” disease–and winning.

Societies globally are responding to Covid-19 under differing political and economic conditions. In the United States, these conditions include mass unemployment and entrenched social inequalities that drive health disparities by race, class, and neighborhood. Real pandemic is not as tidy as a game. But can games, and the immense appetite for them, support understanding about the societal challenges we now face? Yes.

A well-designed game is structured as a flow chart or a decision tree. Games simulate challenges, require choices, and allow players to see the consequences of their decisions. Visual and narrative elements enhance these vicarious experiences. Game narratives can engage human capacities such as empathy, helping us to imagine the perspectives of people unlike ourselves. In The Waiting Game (2018), an award-winning digital single-player game designed by news outlets ProPublica and WNYC and game design firm Playmatics, the player starts by choosing one of five characters representing asylum seekers. The player is immersed in a day-by-day depiction of their character’s journey and experiences. Each “day,” the player must make a choice: give up or keep going?

Games can also engage the moral imagination by prompting players to reflect on competing values and implicit biases. In the single-player game Parable of the Polygons (2014), a player moves emoji-like symbols into groups. This quick game visualizes how decisions aimed at making members of a community happier can undermine a shared commitment to diversity when happiness relies on living near people “like me.” It is free-to-play on the website of Games for Change (G4C), a nonprofit organization that promotes the development and use of games to imagine and respond to real-world problems.

Also in the G4C arcade is Cards Against Calamity (2018), which focuses on local governance in a coastal town. This game, developed by 1st Playable Productions and the Environmental Law Institute, aims to help local policymakers foresee community planning challenges in balancing environmental protections and economic interests. Plague Inc. (2012) flips the Pandemic script by having players assume the pathogen role, winning by spreading. This game has been used as a teaching tool and has surged in popularity during disease outbreak: in January 2020, its designers issued a statement reminding players that Plague Inc. should not be used for pandemic modeling….(More)”.

Capturing Citizens’ Information Needs through Analysis of Public Library Circulation Data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Tomoya Igarashi, Masanori Koizumi and Michael Widdersheim: “The Japanese government has initiated lifelong learning policies to promote lifelong learning to a super-aging society. It is said that lifelong learning contributes to a richer and more fulfilling life. It is within this context that public libraries have been identified as ideal facilities for promoting lifelong learning. To support lifelong learning successfully, libraries must accurately grasp citizens’ needs, all while working within limited budgets. To understand citizens’ learning needs, this study uses public library circulation data. This study is significant because such data use is often unavailable in Japan. This data was used to clarify citizens’ learning interests. Circulation data was compared from two libraries in Japan: Koto District Library in Tokyo and Tahara City Library in Aichi Prefecture. The data was used to identify general learning needs while also accounting for regional differences. The methodology and results of this research are significant for the development of lifelong learning policy and programming….(More)”.