Toots for jedbrown@hachyderm.io account

Written by Jed Brown on 2024-12-20 at 01:07

TMC: What radicalized me in new ways was sitting in the room in vendor negotiations for ed-tech companies, most of them coming to us with barely a proof of concept, but if they can get a university to sign on, they became instantly profitable. [Matt: they're laundering the prestige, the education gospel.] Yet we would sit in the room as if we were in the weaker negotiating position. Wouldn't push back on boilerplate language, wouldn't negotiate for more control... We would just give it all away.

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Written by Jed Brown on 2024-12-20 at 01:05

TMC: We've got a captured population. There are only two of those, BTW, students and prisoners. And frankly, the student data is richer, more diverse, [..] in ways that make it more valuable. (1:21)

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Written by Jed Brown on 2024-12-20 at 01:04

TMC: I want higher ed institutions to write a Digital Bill of Rights for students' data. I think we could model for the broader public what it means to give people control of their data. Which is not a ridiculous idea, it's what they've done in the UK. We won't do it in the US because we don't have the political will to do it. But universities aren't beholden to that. (1:18)

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Written by Jed Brown on 2024-12-20 at 01:03

TMC: I want institutional detox. I am (professionally) here in part because I have been deeply embedded in digital movements. I clearly think they have a right place, and a right scale. [..] And I think right now the scale is completely out of whack in our institutions. Nowhere to me is that more clear than in our complete, uncritical adoption of AI into institutions without any understanding of what it means, what the consequences are, why or how we should use it and for whom. (1:17)

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Written by Jed Brown on 2024-12-20 at 01:02

TMC: Public not-for-profit higher education institutions should see their institutional fate linked with unions, social movements, because those are the things that make us less necessary but more valuable. (1:14)

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Written by Jed Brown on 2024-12-20 at 00:38

TMC: The trap we put ourselves in was making ourselves necessary, but unaccountable. I want the accountability back, to democracy and to communities, without the necessity. Necessity is where desperation comes from, that's where the profit motive comes from, that's where the drive comes from that creates all these worthless degrees and programs. (1:13)

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Written by Jed Brown on 2024-12-20 at 00:35

TMC: The education gospel remains most powerful among the most vulnerable groups of people. It is still core to how immigrants and the children of immigrants think that they will be integrated into American citizenship. And that would be fine if we were able to offer that opportunity at affordable cost with high rewards. But increasingly, we just can't promise that sort of social mobility.

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Written by Jed Brown on 2024-12-20 at 00:34

TMC: And we're using those masters degrees, the revenue from that [...], they are filling the gaps, some of the economic cracks of institutions that have experienced a lot of disinvestment. I've been at those institutions, places where we sit in the room and we want to offer the new online Masters degree. We have lots of questions about how to do it, very few questions about whether it's worth doing. (1:10)

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Written by Jed Brown on 2024-12-20 at 00:33

TMC: This is the core of the education gospel: there is no such thing as a bad education. What that means is that you should take on an educational opportunity at all cost. Nothing has fueled the growth of worthless Masters degrees more than the idea that there's no such thing as paying too much for education because it will pay off, if not in a good job, you will at least be what, a better person.

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Written by Jed Brown on 2024-12-20 at 00:33

TMC: High-cost, almost 100% financed through student loan debt, disproportionately enrolling minority, low-income, first-generation students, all those students who bring relative negative worth positions to higher education. Which means they need the outcomes even more.

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Written by Jed Brown on 2024-12-20 at 00:32

TMC: [Bob Shireman] wanted good data on the outcomes of Masters degrees. What we know is in the student loan debt world, we kinda tapped out on extracting profit from people with student loan debt at the undergrad level and all the growth got shifted to Masters degrees. But we didn't know anything about the quality of them, labor market outcomes. He's got new data out about what he calls the "worthless Masters degree" [...] at not-for profit traditional institutions. (1:08)

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Written by Jed Brown on 2024-12-20 at 00:31

TMC: I think the increased power of the technology administrative class is lower ed. [] probably the most powerful person in admin at your university, that you don't know about, is not the Provost, it's the Chief Technology Officer. They are entering into vendor agreements that will absolutely change how faculty works and how students learn. (1:06)

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Written by Jed Brown on 2024-12-20 at 00:30

TMC: If you look to technological change you usually see where the for-profit models are. [...] That was the way bootcamps and MOOCs and short-term credentials were folded into the not-for-profit traditional university. At my university, [...] it's getting the ads on TikTok for the UNC Bootcamp in Data Science. If you look beneath the hood of those programs, they're almost always managed by a for-profit. Those were purchased whole-sale from the for-profit college system. (1:04)

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Written by Jed Brown on 2024-12-20 at 00:28

TMC: "Faculty governance was not just meant as job security. Faculty governance was meant to buffer students experience of the university from administrative creep. We were supposed to stand in the gap. [...] when we use faculty governance to defend our students, students will help defend us." (15:45)

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Written by Jed Brown on 2024-12-20 at 00:28

TMC: "Our inclination when the culture turns against you, especially powerful interests turn against you, is to retreat, tell them what they want to hear, keep your head down until they bored of it, they'll move on eventually. HBCU's have said "no, double down on who you are"." (13:00)

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Written by Jed Brown on 2024-12-20 at 00:27

TMC: "Every problem you have that is new to you is a an old problem for HBCUs. Our legitimacy has always been questioned, we've always been defunded, we've always been politically compromised, and somehow we have sustained. ... I like to point this out because we tend to look for guidance at the very institutions that don't have the kinds of problems that are coming for most of us in higher education." (11:45)

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Written by Jed Brown on 2024-12-20 at 00:26

I listened to a great podcast episode recently, and would like to quote some from Tressie McMillan Cottom (whose has two appearances in the episode). She really puts her finger on a number of systemic issues in higher ed. #HigherEd #LowerEd

https://theamericanvandal.substack.com/p/the-education-gospel-enshittifyedu

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Written by Jed Brown on 2024-12-18 at 20:17

I grates me to even ask, but if a policy seeks to define "generative AI", how can we get the gist across without reinforcing marketing and misconceptions? We don't want to include spellcheck and don't want to claim originality.

"A system capable of generating output that exceeds the length of the input, usually through a nondeterministic process. Such systems may involve multiple modalities, including text, images, and sound."

Can we do a better job excluding compilers and compression?

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Written by Jed Brown on 2024-12-04 at 22:41

This is a thoughtful talk by @chrisjrn about community norms in open source/maintainership, mental health, and sustainability. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bf_6EVTlZOY

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Written by Jed Brown on 2024-11-08 at 01:02

Living in Colorado, I'm fascinated by the juxtaposition of these two figures. Neither of the candidates campaigned significantly here and I don't think we have a unique media environment relative to other non-swing states. Although not every county in the state moved left, many did, including blue and red counties from rural to urban areas. I wonder what we can learn about this to inform future elections.

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