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DL 271

The Coming War

Published: December 5, 2020 • 📧 Newsletter

Welcome to Digitally Literate, issue 271. Your go-to source for insightful content on education, technology, and the digital landscape.

🔖 Key Takeaways

Hi all, welcome back. Take a look around.

This week I worked on the following:

📺 Watch

Ted Koppel, Bettina Gregory, and Ken Kashiwahara present news stories from 1981 on the relevancy of computers in everyday life and how they will affect our future. Included are interviews with Apple Computer Chairman Steve Jobs and writer David Burnham.

📚 Read

Timnit Gebru, a prominent co-leader of the Ethical Artificial Intelligence team at Google, sent an email to her colleagues voicing exasperation over the company's response to efforts to increase minority hiring.

Gebru had been working on a research paper that she hoped to publish, but ran into resistance from superiors. The paper, titled "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?" lays out the risks of large language models.

A few days later, Gebru was fired—Google reportedly found the email "inconsistent with the expectations of a Google manager." It details the struggles Gebru experienced as a Black leader working on ethics research within the company, and presents a bleak view of the path forward for underrepresented minorities.

A growing group of lawyers are uncovering, navigating, and fighting the automated systems that deny the poor housing, jobs, and basic services.

Credit scores powered by algorithms consider vastly more data and increasingly affect whether you can buy a car, rent an apartment, or get a full-time job. Their comprehensive influence means that if your score is ruined, it can be nearly impossible to recover. Worse, the algorithms are owned by private companies that don't divulge how they come to their decisions.

Bonnie Stewart on the testing and proctoring methods that invade privacy and erode trust end up undermining the very integrity that institutions demand students uphold.

As Stewart points out, higher ed doesn't need proctoring. Timed tests value what students remember.

Is memorization really a valid educational reason for risking privacy, well-being, and tight university budgets in a world where students will spend most of their lives with Google in their pockets?

This study examined the relationship between screen time and well-being in adults.

Screen time was not found to be significantly correlated with well-being. However, screen use meaning was positively associated with overall well-being and positive relationships.

This finding prompts a review of the importance of screen time for well-being, suggesting that this may be a limited approach. Other factors related to screen quality may be equal if not more important.

Teacher burnout will erode instructional quality, stymie working parents and hinder the reopening of the economy.

"If we keep this up, you're going to lose an entire generation of not only students but also teachers," said Shea Martin, an education scholar who works with public schools on issues of equity and justice.

🔨 Do

Caitlin Tucker with ideas and strategies for utilizing shared spaces:

🤔 Consider

The greatest crimes in the world are not committed by people breaking the rules but by people following the rules.

Banksy

Banksy's insight frames an issue about systems—Google following rules to fire an ethics researcher, algorithms following rules to trap people in poverty, proctoring software following rules to surveil students. The coming war isn't against individuals but against the rules themselves.

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