‘Fear of Looking Stupid’: Anthropologist offers explanation for why faculty members hesitate to adopt innovative teaching methods - article by David Matthews for Times Higher Education. "Lauren Herckis was brought in to Carnegie Mellon University to understand why, despite producing leading research into how students learn best, the institution had largely failed to adopt its own findings.... Herckis observed academic bureaucracy up close in meetings and through emails for more than a year, and tested lecturers’ attitudes through surveys and interviews....One of the stumbling blocks, she found, was that 'a desire to get good [student] evaluations posed a risk to their willingness to innovate.' But an even stronger source of inertia was the need to hang on to their 'personal identity affirmation' -- in other words, to avoid appearing stupid in the lecture hall. One academic interviewed by Herckis said that faculty members’ 'No. 1 challenge' was to make sure that they were 'not an embarrassment to [themselves] in front of … students.' Herckis also found that many academics clung to a 'very strong' idea of what constituted good teaching that they had often inherited from their former professors or even parents, even if other evidence was available. One interviewee told her that, above all, he wanted to emulate an inspiring lecturer he had been taught by in 1975." (Search for Global Learning Council Summit 2017 "lauren herckis" for more.)
Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? by Frans de Waal – review by Matthew Cobb in The Guardian. "Virtually every characteristic that has been claimed to be uniquely human has eventually turned out to have some kind of a precursor in a close relative. As De Waal explains in a series of engaging accounts, language, self-recognition, tool making, empathy, co-operative behaviour, mental time-travel, culture and many other traits and abilities have turned out not to be exclusively human. This is hardly surprising, given that we evolved from an ape ancestor not so long ago: we share behaviour with our relatives, just as we share anatomy.... De Waal does not explore the underlying processes producing the complex and intriguing behaviours described here: we know very little about them. Instead, he focuses on observations and behavioural experiments from the growing field of evolutionary cognition. These allow us to peer into the minds of non-human animals – mainly social animals such as primates and corvids (crows and their relatives), but also dolphins, elephants and one invertebrate, which differs from the others not only in its anatomy but also in its solitary behaviour: the octopus."
Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O’Neil: trouble with algorithms - review by P D Smith in The Guardian. "Her main point is that predictive models are never neutral but reflect the goals and ideology of those who create them. They also tend to load the dice against poor people, reinforcing inequality in society. From calculating university rankings or credit ratings and processing job applications, to deciding what advertising you see online or what stories appear in your Facebook news feed, algorithms play an increasingly important role in our lives."
Whose Speech Is Chilled by Surveillance? - article by Jonathon W. Penney, on Slate. Referenced in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog. "My findings suggested that once people were made aware of different online threats, they were less willing to engage in a range of activities online. For example, when made aware of online surveillance by the government, noteworthy percentages of respondents were less likely to speak or write about certain things online, less likely to share personally created content, less likely to engage with social media, and more cautious in their internet speech or search. In other words, there was a clear chilling effect.... My statistical findings also suggest a greater chilling effect on women and younger internet users. In every scenario examined, I found a statistically significant age effect: The younger the participant, the greater the chilling effect. This association was strongest in the scenario involving government surveillance.... I also found female internet users in the study were more likely to be chilled in scenarios involving surveillance and personal legal threats for content posted online, with the statistical association strongest in the latter scenario. Besides being more often the victims of online harassment, my findings suggest women may also be more negatively affected when targeted with legal and regulatory threats."
Emmanuel Macron’s official portrait is a symbolic celebration of centrism - article by Anne Quito and David Yanofsky in Quartz, referenced in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog. "With a two-word tweet, French president Emmanuel Macron unveiled his official portrait yesterday. Taken in his office at the Élysée Palace 46 days after being sworn into office, the 39-year-old centrist’s striking portrait is a masterclass in soft-power symbolism.... Working with his official photographer, Soazig De La Moissonnière, Macron carefully planned the location, pose, props, and publicity for the portrait, which will decorate the walls some 50,000 French government outposts around the world. In the tradition of power portraiture in art history, the so-called 'Jupiterian president' carefully chose props that hint at his personality and underscore his centrist politics. Every detail matters."
The party’s over: how tuition fees ruined university life - article by Paula Cocozza in The Guardian. "It seems very strange that students should be seen as both demanding consumers and timid thinkers. But perhaps one leads to the other. Certainly [one] English literature tutor believes that 'there is a customer entitlement that erodes students’ sense of personal entitlement'. So even as they demand more of the service, they are 'more submissive to the institution'. There is 'an alliance of subjugation', he says, in which 'they feel they have got to do what’s asked of them, and we feel we have to help them achieve what’s asked of them. It makes me quite sad. I want a student who says: ‘Are you sure about that? Why do you think that?’ But those are fewer and further apart.' "
Radical Technologies by Adam Greenfield: luxury communism, anyone? - review by Steven Poole in The Guardian. "His book melds close readings of the small experiences of normal life as mediated by new technologies (how, for example, 'time has been diced into the segments between notifications') with techno-political-economic philosophical analyses of the global clash between Silicon Valley culture and the way the world currently works. It’s about what Greenfield calls 'the colonisation of everyday life by information processing', and this new colonialism, in the author’s view, is so far no better than past versions. He gives excellently sceptical accounts of wearable technologies, augmented reality like Pokémon Go (now an inbuilt feature of the iPhone’s operating system), the human biases that are always baked into the ostensibly neutral operation of algorithms; or the world of increasingly networked objects... What seem to be potentially anarchic, liberating technologies are highly vulnerable to capture and recuperation by existing power structures – just as were dissident pop-culture movements such as punk.... Much as he scorns the authoritarian uses of new technology, he also wants to warn progressives against technological utopianism. 'Activists on the participatory left are just as easily captivated by technological hype as anyone else, especially when that hype is couched in superficially appealing language.' "
Drama queens: why it’s all about women and power on screen right now - "Superhero movies are conspicuously fables about power: they are preoccupied with its sources, how to control it, how to justify it. They are the fantasies of superpowers. What made Wonder Woman seem so different, and such a pleasure to so many viewers, was that its story remained focused throughout on the question of women’s relationship to power. Made by and starring women, the film has been a global blockbuster, giving the franchise commercial power, which is the only kind Hollywood pays attention to; but the film itself has provoked a debate over what this allegory of female power is actually saying. Meanwhile, one of the year’s most-discussed television series was also about women and power, albeit in a far less celebratory mode. The Handmaid’s Tale asks explicit questions about what happens in a totalitarian patriarchal society that denies women access to all economic, legal and political rights. And now Game of Thrones, which is equally interested in women and power, has finally premiered its seventh series to its tenterhooked fans.... Countless words of journalism have debated whether Game of Thrones is feminist or misogynist; that either supposedly mutually exclusive position can be persuasively argued should suggest something of the show’s complexity. ... Watching Game of Thrones play out the storylines of all its varied, fascinating women, in other words, is like watching the culture do battle with its own ideas about women: overt misogyny, internalised misogyny, at least three waves of feminism and post-feminism are all fighting it out before our eyes. It is by no means clear who, or what, will win. What we see is what the struggle over women and power looks like.... While there is a tiny bit of hocus-pocus, most of the supernatural power in Game of Thrones is prosthetic, rather than symbolic. Women don’t have internal magical power, because they operate in a recognisably realistic political world – but they can acquire power externally (from dragons, potions, weapons or gods). And any power will do. In one of the best moments of the entire six series so far, Cersei is informed by an enemy that knowledge is power. With a signal, she has her guards put a sword to his throat before correcting him: 'Power is power.' Game of Thrones is not a story about dragons. It is a story about power."
Cast adrift - article by Ellen E. Jones in The Guardian Guide (29.7.17, pp 14-17). "The Handmaid's Tale, a bracingly up-to-date screen adaptation of Margaret Atwood's 1985 novel, has been praised for its cinematic visuals and compelling central performance from Elisabth Moss as handmaid Offred, but one element remains controversial: the inclusion of race without the depiction of racism. It's this that New York Magazine has described as the show's 'greatest failing'. ... 'The reality of Britain is vibrant multiculturalism, but the myth we export is an all-white world of lords and ladies,' wrote actor and rapper Riz Ahmed in the Guardian last year. 'Conversely, American society is pretty segregated, but the myth it exports is of a racial melting-pot, everyone solving crimes and fighting aliens side by side.'"
