This interview of Jon Dron on using AI for education is not typical. His stance is clear. It makes sense. It doesn’t go overboard. He admits when he is not sure of something.
He is against LMSs, even though he developed some big ones for the Canadian educational system.
(Via Stephen Downes, of course)
I’m a regular reader of Future Perfect, a Vox column that had its start with the Effective Altruism movement. I know Sam Bankman Fried took a lot of people’s money using EA as a mask for his intentions, but I think Vox and Future Perfect have recovered.
A good place to start is the 10 most popular stories from 2024.
Open Source, too!
Carol Chapelle at Iowa State has morphed her focus from tech to AI and language learning. A logical change. She is leading up a team with a new journal, Exploring AI in Applied Linguistics.
https://www.iastatedigitalpress.com/plugins/books/154/
Take nurses: increasingly, American hospitals are firing their waged nurses and replacing them with gig nurses who are booked in via an app. There’s plenty of ways that these apps abuse nurses, but the most ghastly is in how they price nurses’ wages. These apps buy nurses’ financial data from data-brokers so they can offer lower wages to nurses with lots of credit card debt, on the grounds that crushing debt makes nurses desperate enough to accept a lower wage:
Pluralistic: Nurses whose shitty boss is a shitty app (17 Dec 2024)
NYTimes article about the economics of football and how the exchange rate matters.
The third factor is that they are relatively affordable. The transfer fees asked for Japanese players are usually in the hundreds of thousands rather than in the multiple millions. The ones who sign straight from Japan are usually cheaper than those from other European or South American countries.