#opened13

Andrew Ng's Same Old Speech - needed glitching

"College textbook prices have skyrocketed in recent years, threatening the affordability and accessibility of higher education in America.  The average student spends $900 on textbooks annually, which can be the tipping point between affording a degree and dropping out because of cost.  As prices continue to rise, the need for solutions is increasingly urgent.

Journalist and education tech writer “The Education apocalypse”.  She began with Yeats The Second Coming.

    Turning and turning in the widening gyre     The falcon cannot hear the falconer;     Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;     Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,     The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere     The ceremony of innocence is drowned;     The best lack all conviction, while the worst     Are full of passionate intensity.

With a quip about venture capitalism. She spoke about Camping and the rapture and the fear that the world would end May 21st, and then it didn’t. He took out billboard ads and raised millions of dollars. Campaign successful but the prediction was a failure.

There are over 170 dates that predicted the end of the world according to Wikipedia. Google’s director of engineering spoke about replacing human flesh with prosthetic devises.

The end times is a cultural myth. It is a fascination with MOOC millennialism, and Clayton Christiensen’s ideas about the market, the invisible hand (not God, the other one)

“Disruptive innovation" is a persistent millennialist myth held with religious fervor accorded a sacred text. The tech industry has latched on to the millennial narrative and the way that it means the death of print, library schools, music, universities, and on and on. The structure of the narrative parallels religious narratives. Armageddon and then paradise. She recalled the year 2000 where, due to the inability to propoerlu code our computers, the world was going to be over.

1 in 5 Americans believe the world will end in their lifetime.

It is worth asking what these high priests of post secondary predict. Watters quotes Christiensen’s belief that the bottom 25% of Universities will merge in the next 10-15 years

#opened13 could narrative of disruption be so dominant in the US (and globally) because the US/middle class/global capitalism is in decline?

— Scott Leslie (@sleslie) November 7, 2013

@philosopher1978 yeah, the US has a rich evangelical history that amplifies this eschatological narrative

— Scott Leslie (@sleslie) November 7, 2013

WTF says Watters, why are we accepting these stories on faith. Why is it the future that there will only be 10 Universities left in 15 years. Who is assigned in terms of salvation and why is salvation in the hands of markets but not communities?

She challenged what happens when we live in a state of pending Armageddon. How are we living in a crisis narrative and who do we think will save us.

Gospel according to artificial intelligence.  

David Wiley "Narratives we tell ourselves are ours to choose--we can think about our moral obligation to make the world better"

Robert Farrow types faster than I do, so here is his live blog.