More Good News on the Whole Robot Overlord Front

Nice article in today's NY Times here about MOOCs not doing all that Thomas Friedman (cf. his entirely predictably earlier puff piece) had quite hoped.

If the links don't work, just reset your browser history and they will open up. Here's a nice bit:

But the pilot classes, of about 100 people each, failed. Despite access to the Udacity mentors, the online students last spring — including many from a charter high school in Oakland — did worse than those who took the classes on campus. In the algebra class, fewer than a quarter of the students — and only 12 percent of the high school students — earned a passing grade.

The program was suspended in July, and it is unclear when, if or how the program will resume. Neither the provost nor the president of San Jose State returned calls, and spokesmen said the university had no comment.

But like "conservatism" for the Republican party, for academic administrators MOOCs apparently aren't something that can ever fail us, but rather only something we can fail.

Mr. Siemens said what was happening was part of a natural process. “We’re moving from the hype to the implementation,” he said. “It’s exciting to see universities saying, ‘Fine, you woke us up,’ and beginning to grapple with how the Internet can change the university, how it doesn’t have to be all about teaching 25 people in a room.

“Now that we have the technology to teach 100,000 students online,” he said, “the next challenge will be scaling creativity, and finding a way that even in a class of 100,000, adaptive learning can give each student a personal experience.”

You sam because apparently anything is just that much better if you just stick an "e" in front of it. [But Mom, I don't like brussells sprouts. "Jon these are e-brussells sprouts! Thomas Friedman says Arab countries are dysfunctional and the deficit is out of control because they aren't eating their e-brussells sprouts." No Mom really, they trigger my gag reflex and I have to cut them into tiny bits and swallow each one like a pill with a gulp of water just so I don't vomit up the rest of dinner. "But Jon, we're moving from hype to the implementation. . ."]*

Unfortunately, every single person reading this is in some capacity managed by Friedmanesque marks who are either in on the con or genuinely get excited about such nonsense. And there's nothing anybody can do. A few years from now it will just be some other damn thing.

[Notes:

*Sorry about that. I had started to go with the "dogmatic slumber" trope easily extractable from the previous quote, but got too depressed in mid-sentence. And it really is quite nice to not have to eat brussells sprouts any more. But seriously, is the current passel of jerks really Kant to the most recent passel of jerks' Hume? What can one say to such effrontery? I really am desperately tired of con-men and their flunkies treating me and my colleagues the same way lots of people treat special needs children.** As a former special needs child this is probably especially grating, and I became an academic because I thought that academia would be some kind of refuge from exactly this kind of condescending stupidity. Feh.

**Which, to answer Catarina's question, is partly why one blogs.]