The new frontier of education consists of figuring out a way to cut costs. Or, failing that, figuring out a way to make money for investors while laying off teachers.
That brings us to the subject of computer-graded essays. Think of the savings if a computer can grade essays so teachers can do something else or be laid off!
Anthony Cody learned of a professor at MIT, Les Perelman, who has figured out why computers are really very bad substitutes for human beings.
“As our government agencies and various reform efforts seek to shift high stakes testing away from multiple choice questions, there is growing interest in computer programs that can read and score student essays. But questions persist, given the limitations of the algorithms these programs use.
“So Mr. Perelman has done an experiment. He created something he calls the Basic Automatic BS Essay Language Generator, BABEL for short. During his interview with Carol Off, Perelman fed his machine a topic she suggested, “Fair Elections Act.”
Here is what the BABEL machine provided in response:
Fun fair for adherents and presumably will never be altruistic in the extent to which we purloin the analysis. Fair is the most fundamental postulate of humankind. Whiner to act in the study of semiotics in addition to the search for reality. Act is intrepidly and clandestinely axiomatic by most of the scenarios. As I have learned in my semiotics class, act is the most fundamental exposition of humanity.
“Mr. Perelman then submits this essay for grading. The result, a score of 5.4 out of 6, placing this essay in the 90th percentile.
“Perelman explains his purpose:
“I did this as an experiment to show that what these computers are grading does not have anything to do with human communication. If you think about writing or any kind of human communication as the transfer of thoughts from one mind to another mind, then if the machine takes something that anyone would say is complete incoherent nonsense, and scores it highly, and we know that it’s not, then we know that it’s not grading human communication.”
Students will quickly learn how to game the system instead of learning how to write intelligibly. Use big words and long sentences. Impress the machine. Meaning doesn’t matter.
This is our Brave Néw World, a world of high-scoring gibberish.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Hm-m-m-m… looks like the computers are measuring the skills needed to make a political speech… or to be a commentator on Fox News…
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Reblogged this on Blogcollectief Onderzoek Onderwijs and commented:
Interesting experiment showing once again, that teachers will be needed for many years to come.
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As long as there have been “essay” requirements, students have figured out how to game the cheaters. Years ago, Chicago high schools required a “senior paper.” It had to have at least ten pages, footnotes and a bibliography where I was at the time. The kids I was teaching figured out that one of my colleagues, who had become tired of reading all those “essays,” just checked the introductory page and the footnotes and bibliography. And DIDN’T BOTHER TO READ THE REST OF THE TEXT. So one student, without telling me, wrote an “essay” that had a bland “introduction” on page one and then a lengthy series of footnotes and a “bibliography” at the end. And pages 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8 contained the text of “Mary had a little lamb…” over and over an over.
That was before the days of COPY and PASTE, so the exercise for the student was a bit of a challenge. But her point was to prove that the teacher in question didn’t bother to read what the kids had written, only grading for the “technical” parts (intro, footnotes, bibliography). The “essay” also had a ponderous title.
Sure enough, the kid brought the “essay” to be with a grade (on the first page) of “A” and the comment “Nice work.”
I never could figure out how to suggest to my colleague that he begin reading student “essays” again. But I brought it up indirectly in a couple of faculty meetings, usually in the context of pointing out how time consuming it was for English (and other) teachers to demand essay writing, and how that was why we must have (a) smaller class sizes and (b) fewer classes. That is, if we were expected to help students learn how to “write.’
That was 25 years ago, a full decade before I was fired and blacklisted by Paul Vallas for daring to publish some of the dumbest “tests” ever promulgated by a major school system, Chicago’s CASE (Chicago Academic Standards Examinations).
Now it is 2014, and my wife Sharon is the faculty sponsor for what is one of the best high school student newspapers in Chicago (not just my opinion; the Tribune Foundation gives awards every year in many categories, and the Steinmetz Star is always among the tops, even though it is published at a general high school — i.e., in Chicago not a “selective enrollment” high school). And it is still taking a human being hours, days and weeks (if you add up all that time) to read what every kid actually writes and then continue the laborious process of helping that kid to learn to write “better.”
We (my nine and twelve year old sons and I) miss Sharon Schmidt when she is immersed in reading students’ writings, whether on “MacBeth” in her literature classes or as “news” stories. Nothing has changed during that quarter century. If you ask kids to write, you have to read what they have written. And that takes a human being a good bit of time.
But, as anyone visiting the Steinmetz Star website can read, it’s really worth the effort. And no computer can top that, nor can any hedge funder replace it.
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Just do the math. A English teacher with 120 students spends ten minutes properly reading, correcting, and grading essays. That would be 20 HOURS. Most secondary teachers get 10 to 12 HOURS of no-teaching (“free”) time PER WEEK. The so-called “free” time is used to plan lessons, create activities, make phone calls, answer emails, complete electronic grading, provide extra help, and much, much more. A part-time job indeed.
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What professional responsibility does a teacher have when a colleague is not doing their job or doing it so badly that little education is taking place?
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What professional responsibility does a teacher have when policy makers push policies that insure little education is taking place (e.g. by inducing us to teach to the SBAC/PARCC tests)? Bad policy is more invidious than “bad teachers”.
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Not really an answer to the question, but I certainly think that the two are related. If teachers are not willing to honestly evaluate each other, a peer evaluation system will not work and some other evaluation system must be used.
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TE
NONE. ZERO. (We are however compelled to report abuse, cheating, and criminal behavior; all extremely rare). We are not administrators,, supervisors. or managers. Why would you ask such a ridiculous question? Better yet, why am I responding?
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I am asking the question because a peer evaluation system is one alternative to the current system.
Peer evaluation seems to work reasonably well in post secondary education. My institution is fairly typical. All tenure decisions go through a committee of faculty at the department level, at the college level, and finally at the university level. All faculty are evaluated by their colleagues every year, and in years where there are possible salary increases, a committee of faculty recommend how large an increase each faculty member should receive out of the raise pool.
As long as teachers view the evaluation process as something others are responsible for, others will do it.
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NY teacher: Ionesco would heartily approve of the last sentence in your comment of 5/10/2014, 12:39 PM—
“It is not the answer that enlightens but the question.”
Why, indeed?
😎
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Because teachers do not seem to like the way others are evaluating them. Perhaps the answer is to evaluate each other.
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Then why not say so to begin with. Peer review requires training and certification. Most teachers would strongly support independent or outside peer review. Successful peer review programs require the scale of large city and large suburban districts. This is a very different issue form my next door neighbor telling the principal that they think I am incompetent. The truth of the matter is we never get to see each other teacher and no one should draw judgements from gossip and innuendo. Why do you insist on such round about writing? Why do you have so much trouble articulating simple ideas? Too much time in the ivory tower I suppose.
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True, teachers don’t have an opportunity to witness other teachers teaching because we are teaching. And when we aren’t teaching, we are usually desperately correcting student work or planning lessons mostly in the isolation of our empty classroom or at home.
All we know is what we hear from students and that isn’t always the best source unless you are hearing it from the best students who earn high grades in every class. And when I say earn, I mean those students worked for their grades.
The last few years I was teaching, the district started to require that we give up one of our prep periods each year, do an observation of another teacher teaching and write up a report.
But the choice of who we observed was up to us so usually we went to teachers who had a great reputation that we might learn from—administration even encouraged us to do this instead of trolling for incompetence. You see, there just aren’t that many incompetent teachers in most schools. There are burned out teachers who were not incompetent to begin with—before jumping on this, find out what causes teachers to become burned out. A study at a Texas middle school by a PTSD expert found that a third of the teachers had PTSD from the stress of teaching. And PTSD might lead to burn out and what would be perceived as incompetence.
Instead of an inquisition to find teachers to burn at the stake—America’s curse of witch trials—we should discover why these teachers reached burn out in addition to offering counseling in an attempt to recover from the PTSD. Current high-tech brain scanning research indicates that if caught early brain damage from PTSD may be stopped reversed. Yes, I said brain damage! If left untreated, this damage can be permanent.
The only real-life evidence I have of the ratio of incompetent teachers is when I asked our daughter after she had graduated from high school and was studying at Stanford how many incompetent teachers she had k to 12. She thought long and hard and her answer was two out of maybe the 50 teachers that taught her for those thirteen years, and those two didn’t get in the way of her being accepted to Stanford where she graduates this year with a GPA that’s 3.56 at this time with two quarters to finish.
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TE, I do think peer evaluation makes more sense than having administrators do it. However, as in so many areas of education today, fuzzy and false ideas have become orthodoxy. Regardless of who evaluates, the criteria for “good teaching” will likely include misguided demands that students turn-and-talk, that they “demonstrate higher order thinking” (even though straightforward teaching of facts will yield better higher-order thinking in the future, and that “pumping” the “thinking muscles” during class, while it looks impressive, may not yield any real benefit), that the teacher should not talk too much, etc. Until we get the foundational concepts right, any teacher evaluation system will be ineffective at best, harmful at worst.
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One 40 minute formal observation by any evaluator is equivalent to a someone reviewing a two hour movie and only watching a random 45 second clip from somewhere in the middle.
The reality of evaluating teachers primarily through one or two observations is that the most important aspects of program really can’t be observed. Not to mention the fact that most formals are planned and many a not-so-good teacher put on a pretty good dog and pony show while being observed.
If you told Bill Belichick or Nick Saban (two of the best teachers out there) that you were going to evaluate there skill as coaches and the overall football program that they created by observing one 40 minute practice session or one 40 minute film session, they would slam their office door in your clueless face.
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Lloyd
I asked my daughter who is currently a junior in HS the same question regarding bad teachers. When I asked her which teacher(s) she would fire because of gross incompetence, she said, “None of them”
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NY Teacher,
My middle son would have been able to name a couple.
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It’s good to know that your middle son could name a couple (2) out of, what, 40 to 50 teachers. Keep in mind that there are almost 4 million public school teachers in the United States teaching almost 50 million children. It is WRONG to condemn all of them and punish all of them for a couple here and there.
In addition, there are no reputable long term studies that prove that a couple of incompetent teachers will destroy a kid’s education—inf fact, the 2 my daughter said she had didn’t hurt her education.
But there are plenty of studies that prove beyond a doubt how much damage a parent/guardian is capable of doing.
So why aren’t the fake education reformers going after parents to take all kids away from them and send the kids to corporate orphanages to be raised by TFA trained parents/teachers and robots? The corporations could then garnish the parents’ incomes to finance that care.
The profits from child-support payments to fund the raising of 70+ million children by taking them away from their horrible, incompetent parents (I’ve read that Arne Duncan seems to believe that most if not all US parents are incompetent although Amy Chua and most Asian parents would disagree—that issue might be the only thing that would enrage Asian parents to violence) would be off the charts making the robbery of the public school seem insignificant.
The military industrial complex would be ecstatic too becasue huge armies would be necessary to subdue angry parents and grandparents wanting their kids back while the feds tax all citizens to fund the military that’s shooting them or throwing them in prisons to behave.
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George Schmidt: excellent contribution to this thread.
If I may, let me riff off this part of the posting: “Mr. Perelman then submits this essay for grading. The result, a score of 5.4 out of 6, placing this essay in the 90th percentile.”
This is an indirect reminder (as if we needed one) of the innumeracy that I, and so many others, suffer from. Most of us tend to accept whatever numbers are shoved at us.
Part of what we accept—until we are challenged by thoughtful consideration—is that even if what the numbers “represent” is not perfect, they are telling us something compellingly powerful and accurate and trustworthy. For example, think about all the sports stats that so many can recite at the drop of a hat.
Yet it is much worse than that. Consider this statement from the polymath John Tukey (Jim Horn and Denise Wilburn, THE MISMEASURE OF EDUCATION, 2013, p. 147):
“When the right thing can only be measured poorly, it tends to cause the wrong thing to be measured, only because it can be measured well. And it is often much worse to have a good measurement of the wrong thing—especially when, as is so often the case, the wrong thing will in fact be used as an indicator of the right thing—than to have poor measurements of the right things.”
IMHO, most folks don’t realize that one of the worst aspects of this obsession with numerical labeling, sorting and ranking [with attendant few rewards and many punishments] of students, teachers and public schools is not that we have poor measurements of the right thing, but what John Tukey points towards: that what gets measured (the outstanding example is standardized test scores) is MISLEADINGLY powerful and accurate and trustworthy.
In less elegant terms: we’re being sucker punched by the dishonest and unethical use of numbers&stats.
Again, your comments are much appreciated.
😎
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I wish parents in my state knew that the essays have been scored by machine for years. I think the shine would come off the testing very quickly. However, I’m sure no teacher can tell them that without threat of discipline.
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A quote that resonates addresses computer scoring of essays, “…Students will quickly learn how to game the system instead of learning …”
All of public education is being taken away from the learning experience and made into a “gaming experience” thanks to the “corporate ed reform” way. Whether it is learning how to “write” the perfect essay for a computer scorer, or learning which is the most likely correct answer to “bubble” in on a test or… for teachers… “which topic to choose for the infamous SLO – which is most likely to show student growth … and ALL TEACHERS forced to endure such nonsense realize that what suffers in all this is students’ joy and engagement for learning and teachers being able to exercise their true professionalism. What this enforced do or die “gaming” is doing… it is eliminating learning that comes from engaged and self directed reflection on a range of topics. “Ed reform” has even created a “rubric” for what and how to “reflect..think”!!! Really? Ughhhh.
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Aside from mechanics (which is important), lets me honest human beings are not real expert at it either. Even with all these rubrics flying around standardized testing grading ware houses, the level of subjectivity in any form of essay grading makes test and measurement people break out in a sweat. Actually, the term grading, for essays, is not how that form of assessment should be termed. We should think more in terms of feedback on the organizational of ideas, how ideas are supported, is there theme, etc. The last outcome we would want from this process, is what we have now— the three paragraph essay, that prep students for providing a standardized format (1 introductory sentence, three supporting reasons, etc.) that can be assigned a grade, but are unreadable/uninteresting/and dampens a style of writing. The outcome of trying to standardize/make objective a process that is inherently creative was a greeting card my neighbor showed from her daughter was written as an elementary school project for Mother’s Day: The card had floating valentines on the cover, very cute and artistic. Inside the card was the following inscription: “Mom, I love you for the following three reasons” — there were there reasons that were numbered. The mom, who was so happy with card, did not understand how the institutional goals of schooling were systematically destroying the interest in and talent for the wonderful art of writing.
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I agree that many teachers have fuzzy and misguided ideas about writing. The quest to Teach Writing directly is a quixotic one, just as the quest to Teach Reading directly is quixotic. What we CAN teach directly is a broad array of knowledge, and it is knowledge, more than anything else, the makes one a capable writer or reader. Thnk about it: who will write better about cricket –a low-achieving British boy, or an honors-level American kid? Currently we think there’s some writing “muscle” in the brain that will get so strong with practice that it will be able to write well about anything. This is only a drop of truth to this. Curing ignorance is the sine qua non for making a good writer (or reader), and that’s a task our schools are failing to undertake in a concerted way.
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Stay on that soapbox Ponderosa. You and a few others seem to get this critical idea. Why is this so hard to grasp? Millions of teachers seem to struggle with this. Maybe we really do mostly suck.
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I am even a proponent of teaching content that is “one thousand miles wide and only a fraction of an inch deep” as opposed to “an inch wide and a mile deep”
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Well said, Ponderosa! yes yes yes
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Wait, it now takes an MIT professor to prove to folks that computer scoring of essays is a Bad Idea?
R. I. P. Common Sense
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Standardized testing doesn’t lead to thinking, whether it’s a computer or a human checking off the little boxes on the rubric. I subbed in an AP Lit class yesterday, and I got to read some of their practice-essays. What depressing little exercises in other peoples’ ideas, and pro forma “academic language”, all neatly packaged in just the right number of paragraphs they were too! We’re selling these kids a bill of goods here. You can’t measure original thinking, which is what their instructors are going to be looking for when they get to college.
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Well said, Wendy. Yes, and this makes me weep–the teaching of InstaWriting for the Test instead of writing.
And that’s what the Common [sic] Core [sic] has visited on us.
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Students in elementary know how to answer the writing portion of the ELA with less effort. One 3rd-grade students that I proctored, typed “dfk” and hit the “Next” button. I’ll leave those letters to your imagination and humor. So what is the purpose when the computer program will except any answer? Bad news for Pearson when the response is “no” to the question: Are you smarter than a 3rd grader?.
On the other hand, the proctors of that 3rd grade class were told that they had to sit there for 30 minutes without touching the computer. In the meantime, they had to write a draft (pencil/paper) or simply daydream until 30 mins passed. Furthermore, some of the kids were better at writing it out as oppose to typing. I find this process cruel, tortureous, and a “waste of time” as one of the 3rd graders shouted out as she was frustrated, because she can’t read at the 3rd grade level.
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PLEASE don’t keep doing this. It’s not helping. If you can’t figure out the technology, get a new email address.
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Some of the computer-scoring software vendors readily admit that their software can be gamed.
Here is a link to the FAQ from PEG Writing one of the leading computer essay scoring programs.
PEG presumes “good faith” essays authored by “motivated” writers. A “good faith” essay is one that reflects the writer’s best efforts to respond to the assignment and the prompt without trickery or deceit. A “motivated” writer is one who genuinely wants to do well and for whom the assignment has some consequence (a grade, a factor in admissions or hiring, etc.).
Efforts to “spoof” the system by typing in gibberish, repetitive phrases, or off-topic, illogical prose will produce illogical and essentially meaningless results.
http://www.pegwriting.com/faq#what-is-peg
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Reblogged this on peakmemory and commented:
I think Dianne Ravitch is mistaken here. There is a big difference between saying that current software cannot grade student’s written work and saying that it could never do it.
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“Basic Automatic BS Essay Language Generator, BABEL for short. ”
The real meaning of BS is _ _ _ L _ _ _ T
I think you know the letters that will fill in the blanks.
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Just another “silver bullet” solution waiting to be disproved in the court of reality.
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If machines are going to grade writing, perhaps they’re already producing it:
From a Mission Statement recently discovered on a TFA application in response to a Request For Proposals issued by a large urban school district:
“In keeping with our most valuable data-driven asset domains, we’re passionately bold to reform and accountabilify a transformational Achievement Gap of rigor and choice for all children can learn. Therefore, we recruit portfolios of excellence and the measurable best and brightest teaching like champions, regardless of their zip code. Experience and research show great teachers make a difference in the special interest status quo, for whom it’s all about the kids’ innovative Civil Rights movement disruption first.”
Sources report the proposal was duly accepted and a multi-million dollar no-bid contract awarded.
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LOL. This is priceless.
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Essay question.. What is public education about? With a rubric-perfected response!
(special request that it be scored by the latest “innovation” in “ed reform” education – a computer programmed to grade essays).
“Public Education is About C ommon R Igor A ssessment P rotocals”
Public education is about rigor with respect to differentiated data-driven reforms that standardize common core components of content area core competencies using highly effective best practices including rubrics, regular assessments, arrays of excerpted short passages littered with yellow sticky notes demonstrating knowledge of significant detail like author’s purpose and plot all within a brief excerpted non fiction passage whereby turn and talks reveal oral comprehension of reading followed by timed seat time to demonstrate effective writing skills starting with BCR-like prompts and giving exactly 2.45 concrete examples to support the excerpted text passage while a principal comes into the classroom with I-Pad in hand at 11:15am and looks for the daily posted subject area objective and looks at the teacher’s posted lesson plan to see if he is doing what he laid out that he would be doing at 11:17am and looks around to see evidence of engagment as the principal types necessary formatted prompts to ensure an objective observation is given and then looks up before leaving to see the teacher and to make sure the teacher is standing and not sitting at a desk, to make sure that the teacher is not talking too much and is allowing for accountable talk and then asks a student to reveal what the class objective is all the while keeping fingers moving on the keyboard so that information can be quickly entered onto the I-pad as time is over and there is another observation that is to take place at exactly 11:40 down the hall where the science teacher has planned a lesson specifically to review vocabulary that will be on her SLO so that her students will do well and she will not receive an evaluation marked “ineffective” at year’s end because the data she “drove” did not show growth even though 4 of her designated 15 students have already moved to different schools and 3 other designated students are habitually absent and she will probably have skewed data thus rendering her the label of “ineffective” even though she received a congratulatory letter just the year before from the superintendent awarding her teacher of the year and thanking her for all she did for the students but if she is lucky despite being a 30 year successful veteran teacher she will be given a second chance by having a one year in… highly effective rated TFA teacher mentor her until that TFA teacher hears word of an opening for a high 6 figure salary to direct an education think tank in DC and resigns thus requiring the science teacher to be mentored to improve her teaching skills by the other highly effective rated teacher who has mastered assisting the students in all of her classes to learn how to beat the test … how to bubble in all the correct answers thus getting great scores on all high stakes tests meanwhile a charter school is taking the entire second floor of the building and the science teacher has to move into what was the locker room in the basement so the charter can take the science room and make it into a computer room while non charter school students enjoy the windowless basement rooms to enhance focused learning free from distractions like sunlight, viewing birds on tree limbs from the window as they look at a common core math problem where they are to figure out obtuse dare I say nonsensical practice test questions like the example Luis CK gave… “… And then I look at the problem and it’s like, ‘Bill has three goldfish. He buys two more. How many dogs live in London?'” And in conclusion this essay speaks volumes about the clarity of all “ed reform” directives involving current public education and what it is all about.
Now… can we finally get back to putting teachers in charge of classroom learning????
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LOL, again! Awesome!
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Art, your essay has a lot of truth in it. Do computers care about truth?
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Regrettably Ponderosa.. computers are “mandated truth”. I wrote this pseudo essay out of total frustration for the absolute absurdities of our time – that “ed reformers actually might want computers to grade essays thus supporting the insane notion that computers “understand” the complexity and variety of thinking among individuals… and this is ABSURD. Our teachers are like automaton’s programmed to use ever faster fast-paced pacing calendars that race our students through a lot of great sound bytes posing as curriculum but do not allow for any digestion – henceforth learning. I chose to eliminate punctuation because truthfully as a teacher I feel a bit like a hamster racing to nowhere faster and faster… who has time to stop and actually think in this R ace T o T he B ottom time enforced by “ed reform” in supposedly public education!
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The paid mercenaries of the technocratic Philistine plutocrats have long since battered down the gates of our K-12 schools. Now they are massed outside our colleges and universities. Beating them back is not going to be easy. This will be a dark time.
Like sex offenders, people who think that computers should “grade” essays should not be allowed anywhere near schools. Of course they shouldn’t. Such people are very, very sick and do not get, at all, what schools exist to do.
Seriously, the very idea of having machines grade papers is insane and obscene on so many levels that one doesn’t even know where to begin. It’s child’s play to write one of these grading programs, of course. But they frequently yield results that are totally caca. More importantly, and this is the key point, it’s obscene to WANT to do that, for education is, at root, transactional. It’s a hand-off. And that transactional nature of education is a sacred matter if anything is sacred. The same can be said of writing, of course. It’s a blasphemy down the stations of the breath, as Dylan Thomas put it, to treat education and writing in any other way.
We should look askance at readability programs too, of course, though for less fundamental and essential reasons. I recently ran a Lexile on “Paul Revere’s Ride,” large portions of which I had memorized before I ever went to school. Graduate level. Way above the highest level on the CCSS Lexile chart.
And Dylan Thomas’s
Time held me green and dying.
is Lexile level 240–lower than 2nd grade. LOL.
Those readability programs are useful,–very, very useful–but they are very, very limited and no substitute for human judgment.
That said, it would be fun to create a program using Vladimir Propp’s mathematical model for the folktale and the Arne-Thompson motif index to generate folktales. This kind of work has been taken very, very far in musical composition, where works that convincingly appear to be lost pieces by Beethoven and Mozart have been generated. That kind of work is an intellectual adventure. But computers grading essays is an obscenity.
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The > 2nd-grade level Dylan Thomas line is, of course, incredibly sophisticated conceptually. It might as well be, to the 1st grader, “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.” But it meets the simple criteria of the algorithm–it’s short and uses simple words. And the stuff generated by Les Perelman’s delightful program meets the criteria for sophistication of an essay grading program, even though it is as nonsensical as any speech by, say, Arne Duncan or Michelle Rhee.
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So here is my question.. what is THE LINE that will cause this “essay-scoring” computer to permanently malfunction…. might be “colorless green ideas sleep furiously”….
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No, the program will simply look at “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously” and note that
1. The sentence is short (so not sophisticated).
2. The sentence uses words of a certain frequency in the language as a whole (mid-frequency words like colorless and furiously).
3. Note whether the sentence uses key words (or variants of those words) from the prompt
4. Note whether various words used in transitional expressions (transitional adverbs, demonstrative pronouns, etc) occur with a certain frequency in the text as a whole (suggesting that the text as a whole is well structured.
5. Look for end punctuation.
And other such crap. Then it will give it a score. And it won’t matter, at all, if the text contains nothing but complete nonsense statements like Chomsky’s.
Of course, over time, the algorithms will go beyond this simplistic level, but even if they became perfect, using them would be a violation of this cardinal principle that writing and reading are a successful transaction between a human writer and a human reader.
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The humanities are already in trouble; now we’re trying to take the humans out of the humanities. We’re having computers take over human teachers’ grading role by having them read essays. Our school just bought a program that links kids to on-line tutorials and lessons based on their computerized test scores –in other words, computers are starting to take over the teaching role too. And now this: “Digital humanists” interviewed in the new New Republic advocate that human scholars should “read like a computer” –i.e. count word frequency. If human scholars want to stay in the humanities, they need to shape up and behave like computers, or at least make computers central to their practice.
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teaching, there’s an app for that
That’s part of the deform goal. Gates, who is the major funder of all this crap, gives a lot of talks about reducing the costs of education. Lurking like a troll in those talks is this idea: if you use computer-adaptive learning technologies and flipped classrooms, you can dramatically reduce the number of teachers. You can have a thousand kids in a room all doing their worksheets on a screen and one low-level aide walking around making sure that the machines are working and assisting with problems. There are lots of schools were demonstration programs for such methods are underway. ASU is one. And it just happens that someone (guess who?) stands to make a lot of money in this transition. The Common Core, of course, was bought and paid for by Gates because it was necessary to have a single national bullet list of standards to which to key or tag this software (and the assessments).
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At first, the deformers hoped to reduce the cost of education via technologies delivered at a distance. Then the data started rolling in. People didn’t complete distance-learning classes, and they didn’t perform as well in them. They tried to put the best face they could on this data. They hemmed and hawed and gave excuses and rationalized. Then they hit on the model of putting kids in a room with machines and a proctor (or, worse yet, monitoring technologies) to make sure that they were applying themselves gritfully.
And BIZARRELY, the leaders of the teachers unions DID NOT GROK AT ALL the connection between the single set of national “standards” and this long-term plan to reduce, dramatically, the teacher work force.
I think that they still don’t get this.
And that’s troubling.
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I have long advocated for the application of scientific techniques in the humanities. Some amazing work is being done in this area–Eric Switzgebel’s work in experimental philosophy, for example, which attempts to address issues in the philosophy of mind using experimental methods and so presents, to my mind, a welcome reinvention of “natural philosophy.” Computerized work with concordances and corpora can yield results of enormous interest to students of literature and linguistics. Technologies are as good or bad as the uses to which they are put. Often, however, they are very, very crude and are put to uses for which they are entirely inappropriate. Trains can be used to join communities and facilitate trade and leisure, or they can be used to ship children to death camps. We must be vigilant, increasingly so, about the negative uses of technologies, for they pose many cultural and political and economic and existential risks.
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Correction: That’s Eric Schwitzgebel, who is one of the most interesting of young, contemporary American philosophers
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This person clearly isn’t reading the comments. Can someone with an email address that he or she doesn’t mind giving up send her a note and tell her how to unsubscribe?
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Darlene.. just go to a computer shop to get help. If you have an apple, set up an appointment with the genius bar – they’ll help you in 15 minutes and it is free. If you are a PC person, find a micro center or equivalent store. In the meantime, if this is truly a problem to you, create a new email address. Truly there are a lot of crazy’s on the internet and if you keep posting an email with a request to stop sending you email and include your email, you are compounding the problem.
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another thought Darlene, maybe a public library has a librarian who might be kind enough to help you too. They like teachers wear many hats and are often eager to help.
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