Last week I asked readers to vote for our book club‘s next reading. After a very energetic process (117 votes, 7 comments, plenty of stuff on Twitter and via email), we have a new title.
The winner is….
Kelly and Zach Weinersmith, Soonish: Ten Emerging Technologies That’ll Improve and/or Ruin Everything (home page; Amazon) (2017).
As I noted in the original post, Zack is the creator of the amazing and amazingly prolific Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal webcomic. Kelly is a parasitologist. Together they dive deeply into a mix of technologies, based on scholarship and interviews with practitioners.
Given the enormous importance of technology to the future of education, this is a fine book to read.
So grab your copies (library or purchase, digital or print). I’ll share a reading schedule… soonish.
Just behind that were Angela Nagle’s Kill All Normies and Richard Susskind and Daniel Susskind’s The Future of the Professions How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts.
Thanks to everyone who participated by suggesting titles, voting, and sharing their thoughts!
There are so many good pieces in the long article, like this fun thought experiment:
Imagine that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg suddenly recognizes and totally embraces the idea that stewardship of some version of at least the public portion of Facebook (whatever that may be) is profoundly important, and that the company needs to support and enable it. Facebook then offers a comprehensive record to one or more stewardship institutions — perhaps the Library of Congress, Harvard University, … — and perhaps even some funding (one can always dream).
How many petabytes, and how many square miles of data centers are necessary to support and provide any form of meaningful access to this data?
Or the idea of “robotic witnesses”, or trying to remix population segmentation.
And this powerful, condensed summary of what algo-preservation could be:
Actually documenting the “Age of Algorithms” ideally involves capturing and preserving the answers to two questions. The first is to record, given each specific set of inputs (which may include identity, history and context) the actual outputs of the algorithm at a given point in time. The second, and even more difficult but much more comprehensive question is to be able to capture the answer to the subjunctive form of the first question: given a hypothetical set of inputs, what would the algorithm’s outputs have been at a given point in time?
Over the rest of January the Future Trends Forum will explore several vital issues for the future of education and technology:
Monday, January 8: Katie Linder, research director for Oregon State University’s Extended Campus, will introduce an exciting and possibly unique new project that she just launched. The Online Learning Efficacy Research Database aggregates scholarly research about how well digital learning succeeds. It compares wholly online learning to blended and offline methods.
(note the date; we’re usually on Thursdays. This week’s an exception.)
Thursday, January 18: how will libraries change in the future? Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe, professor/coordinator for information literacy services and instruction in the University Library at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, will share her insights.
Lisa served as the 2010-2011 President of the Association of College and Research Libraries, which launched the Value of Academic Libraries Initiative during her presidency. Along with Debra Gilchrist, Lisa is the lead designer for ACRL’s training program for the Standards for Libraries in Higher Education and the IMLS-funded Assessment in Action project.
Lisa has presented and published widely on information literacy, teaching and learning, the value of libraries, library assessment, program evaluation, and organizational innovation. Her most recent book is Environments for Student Growth and Development: Libraries and Student Affairs in Collaboration (co-edited with Melissa Autumn Wong). She is an internationally sought after speaker and has also conducted workshops and trainings on five continents. She’s one of the most dynamic librarians I’ve ever met.
Lisa is especially knowledgeable about, and active in, digital literacy. She recently worked on a digital literacy report with myself and several others.
Thursday, January 25: what’s next with net neutrality, education, and technology? Jarret Cummings, the Director of Policy and Government Relations for EDUCAUSE, author of the official EDUCAUSE statement about net neutrality and education’s stake in maintaining it, will join us.
Jarret has helped assemble a broad coalition of institutions and associations across education, technology, and the cultural heritage sector. I interviewed him about this in December. I plan on asking his thoughts on what the FCC’s actions mean for teaching, learning, and research. I also hope to seek his advice about what we should do in response.
There’s more to come in February. Stay tuned.
If you haven’t had a chance to catch the Forum live, here are some recent recordings:
A slowdown in the number of international students heading to American colleges and universities has started putting pressure on those campuses while surprising none of my readers, according to the New York Times. All right, the Times didn’t assess your savvy, but you get the idea.
To recap: American higher ed has aggressively sought out foreign students for years and for various reasons, financial and diversity-related. Yet over the past year that rising tide has paused or declined.
Why? Trump is one obvious reason. Another cause, not well understood in the US, is what Stephanie Saul describes as “the increasing lure of schools in Canada, Australia and other English-speaking countries.” Remember what I’ve been saying for years, that higher education is increasingly becoming a single, transnational marketplace.
Saul adds other reasons:
Officials said that other reasons for the decline in enrollment include increased competition from schools in other countries, cuts in scholarship programs in Saudi Arabia and Brazil, and a currency crisis in India caused when the government decided to swap widely used notes for new bills.
Recall, too, my emphasis on declining enrollment in American higher ed, when Saul observes that “[t]he shift comes just as some states also are experiencing a drop in domestic students, partly the result of a decline in birthrates two decades ago…”
For years, American colleges had been staking their futures on continued growth in foreign students, and after the recession a decade ago, those students were a lifeline for colleges that had poured money into new buildings and amenities.
Just think about what this means for an awful lot of colleges and universities. Dependent on tuition for revenue (very, very few have powerful endowments; most states have drastically cut per-student support), these institutions are utterly committed to getting students in the door. They will market themselves energetically and build up campus support systems.
Saul gives an Ohio example of the latter: “In just the past six months, the University of Akron opened an international center in an existing building and hired 10 employees to work in international programming.”
That very open and welcoming door, recently crowded, is starting to show some empty spaces now. That means program cuts:
Budget cuts are underway….
Wright State has decided to eliminate Italian, Russian and Japanese, part of more than $30 million in budget cuts…
[The University of Central Missouri] has been forced to cut instructors in computer programs, where many of the foreign students were enrolled, as well as defer maintenance and shave money from other departments, such as the campus newspaper.
This international decline also means human losses:
At Kansas State, Italian classes are going the way of the Roman Empire…
Other cuts included the full-time French horn and tuba professors, both one year short of tenure protection. The school had asked both to remain as adjunct professors with reduced pay. Instead, they landed other jobs, and adjuncts have taken their positions at Wright State.
Will the Horizon project become a historical artifact and recede into the past?
Or can we create a new project, one that explores the future of education and technology, using some of Horizon’s strengths while building a fundamentally new effort? Put another way, if we wanted to create a new project from scratch in 2018, what would it look like?
With this post I’d like to kick off a process that could lead to a prototype or even a new publication. I hope interested parties can take part as they see fit, and that as many people partake as possible. I plan on following up with the effort through the blog, other technologies, and in person meetings.
On a personal note, Horizon meant a lot to me, professionally, as it did for thousands of others. I’d like to respect its history and memory by creating something new. To that end I will devote my professional expertise and some (scant!) resources to development.
To be clear, in this post I am not talking about the 2018 Horizon Report for higher education. That one is roughly half done, and its fate will be decided by the bankruptcy process. Here I’m referring to what we can do beyond that. I am also not writing to represent the NMC, as I am not an employee, creditor, or debtor; I am writing as an independent, thinking about a different project.
Let’s begin with questions. I’ll supply some answers that might look like a FAQ, but are really designed to take the questions further.
And let’s creatively open our minds to the full range of possibilities. This could be fun.
Q: What was the value of the Horizon Report?
A: Some institutional decision-makers found it useful for strategizing their next moves (hiring, purchasing, organization, etc.). Others saw inspiration in creating new projects. Perhaps the key aspect was getting ahead of the present, anticipating what could be coming down the pike. Some referred to it as actionable intelligence. One appreciative observer adds that
the report is a great corpus to analyze recurring conversations and singular topics in the edtech community.
In my experience, the value of trend forecasts like the Horizon Report lies less in offering correct prognosis about the future and more in inspiring discourse within the community by depicting alternative futures for educational technology adoption…
Q: What methods should a new project use, if it wants to provide that value?
A: Horizon used a version of the Delphi method, which is a process for getting experts to forecast the future of their domain specialty. It’s a classic, invented by RAND in the 1950s, and has well known strengths and weaknesses. A new project could easily adopt a form of Delphi, configuring it strategically.
RAND’s graphic for Delphi.
There are other methods out there as well. The futures world has an established toolbox, which I’ve sketched out here and here. Scenario creation is a popular one, combining imagination with role-playing and a somewhat detailed vision of a possible future (examples). There is trends analysis, which identifies present-day trends then extrapolates them into the future; my FTTE report is an example of this. Prediction markets bring in gaming and different social dynamics (I used to run one for the National Institute of Technology in Liberal Education; alas, there is no archive; I did publish an article about the project).
There are others. A new project could pick up one or more of these.
Q: What form should a new research project take?
A: Horizon was a report, a clearly demarcated, identifiable, and short pdf document, often appearing on an annual basis. In 2018, is that the best way to communicate such research? Would a more fluid and continuous object be better, such as a wiki or Google Doc? Would a series of short bursts work for more people than a single bundle of findings? Conversely, should a research project have multiple dimensions, combining different production and release modalities?
Are there other and/or newer technologies we could use? (Let’s talk about specific technologies in the next question.) Should face-to-face discussions play a role?
Q: What technologies should people use to produce and consume it?
A: Horizon has grown in web pages (wikis, a browser-based voting tool) and appeared in published form through pdfs.
In 2018, are other platforms better suited for producing and sharing such research?
For example, video continues to dominate the digital world in all kinds of ways. Should a new research project appear as one or more video files? Or consider podcasting, a decade and a half old technology that now enjoys a new renaissance. Would a new futures effort be better communicated through a podcast series? Can we use big data and new analytics to learn and/or publish more? The Shaping Tomorrow project is a fascinating example of this.
Other alternatives come easily to mind. Imagine storing findings in a blockchain, giving them a kind of digital permanence so subsequent researchers can return to them. A team could produce a virtual or mixed reality experience, such as a scenario or presentation. Another group might build an augmented reality layer superimposed over a campus, overlaying a future on top of the present. (For my money the great experts to consult on this are Maya Georgievna and Emory Craig) We could use or create a game to stir the imagination, like the one built by Canisius College students, or the old Virtual-U computer game, possibly updated, or a version of The Thing from the Future.
Q: What about criticisms of Horizon?
A: People have criticized Horizon since the beginning (one example) (another) and for many reasons (too focused on tech to the exclusion of non-tech dimensions; not enough rigor about actual technology adoption; no looking back at previous iterations; too commercial; etc.). From my view, I think we should aggregate these criticisms to see how they can shape and temper a new project. I’d love to include critics in the process as well.
For Harry Potter fans.
Q: What should we call such a project?
A: I like “Prospect”. Ceredwyn recommends “Phoenix”. We crowd-sourced this question during the holidays and saw a ton of other terms: edge, parallax, genesis, ambit, and more (check this post).
Q: How could we actually create a new project?
A: Looking ahead, this seems to require a group effort. I could produce one myself, but don’t have the time, and think the result would be better if it drew on a variety of backgrounds and imaginations.
Such a team should be diverse along many axes: gender, race, geography (yes, this should be international or transnational), and profession (think librarian, IT leader, faculty member, museum administrator, start-up founder, foundation staffer…). It could be physically colocated, but a distributed team seems more likely to come together. The team should be able to tap into multiple networks for intelligence and feedback. We should reach out to global leaders and experts for feedback and participation, depending on availability. Horizon veterans and NMC staff could be sought, ditto.
We could follow a design thinking process, starting from ideas and developing a prototype. This could occur in a face-to-face meeting, or online, or a series of such events. The prototype could be unveiled the world as a proof of concept, and a calling card for support.
Phoenix/Prospect/whatever-we-call-it would need support beyond the goodwill of participants and fans. The Horizon Project used to draw on NMC staff resources, enhanced by support from the EDUCAUSE ELI group. Would a new project arise within another institution, or would it be independent? Would it require a board and multiple sponsors? Could crowdfunding suffice to keep it going? Should it sell results and/or associated products?
Would the project maintain a group of experts over time, or cycle some off to keep things fresh? What kind of assessment mechanism would work best?
Should the new project be conducted in the open, with content available for all, like an open source software build? Or should some or all of it occur offline, like the way the Horizon Report was written (as opposed to the Delphi derivation of findings), perhaps to allow privacy for participants in a challenging online environment, at least in certain nations?
What should our online book club read next? After all, what better way to start a new year than by reading a book together!
(One note from our last reading: Benjamin Kahn published a fine blog post about Cathy O’Neil’s Weapons of Math Destruction. You can find all of my posts, your comments, and links about that important book here.)
Some authors have kindly interacted with us as we read their works. Several have engaged with us via Twitter, like Tressie Cottom and Malka Older. As our book club progressed, some of the authors have been guests on the Future Trends Forum; scroll down on that link and see.
Today’s poll is based on the latest one for nonfiction, back in fall 2017. I have cut several titles from previous lists that fail to win any votes, and added a couple of new ones that look exciting. You can see that there’s a mix of subjects, from pedagogy to technology, economics to online life, scholarly publishing and public policy. Most are pretty recent. Some will seem especially relevant to some of you based on current events.
Here’s the poll, if you’d like to jump right in. You get up to three (3) votes. If you want more information about the titles, just scroll down to the full list just below.
Below is the full list as a kind of annotated bibliography. I’ve linked to pages for each one, including those from publishers, Amazon, and the authors themselves, plus some relevant further readings (interviews, articles, etc.) and acknowledgements to the good folks who nominated several titles.
Martin Ford, Rise of the Robots (2015). A popular and accessible consideration of where automation might take us. (thanks to Jeff Mehring)
Peter Frase, Four Futures: Life After Capitalism (publisher; Amazon) (2016). A bold quartet of futures, each a world powerfully reshaped by technology in different ways. Based on this 2011 article.
Will Richardson and Rob Mancabelli, Personal Learning Networks: Using the Power of Connections to Transform Education. (publisher; Amazon) (2011) A serious look on connected learning, co-authored by a Future Trends Forum guest, and in its third edition.
Strauss and Howe,The Fourth Turning(1997). This is the big book about American generational theory, an ambitious interpretation of this nation’s culture, and a tool for getting at the future. It’s very much in the news now, as people seek to apply its model to either Trump or his opposition.
Peter Temin, The Vanishing Middle Class: Prejudice and Power in a Dual Economy (Amazon; publisher) (2017). A cutting-edge examination of economic inequality in the United States.
Fred Turner, The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties (publisher; Amazon) (2013). A deep dive into the origins of multimedia technology as a democratic and psychological project.
Kelly and Zach Weinersmith, Soonish: Ten Emerging Technologies That’ll Improve and/or Ruin Everything (home page; Amazon) (2017). Zack is the creator of the amazing and amazingly prolific Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal webcomic. Kelly is a parasitologist. Together they dive deeply into a mix of technologies, based on scholarship and interviews with practitioners.
You can vote in this poll, and also add thoughts in comments below. You can support up to three titles.
I’m looking forward to your choices!
PS: soon I’ll launch a bookstore where you can purchase these titles.
Things haven’t gotten much better since. This morning Wunderground * sent me their daily weather update:
Today is forecast to be MUCH WARMER than yesterday.
HI 8° F | LO -10° FC
Caps in original.
We don’t have much snow – just a foot or so – but it’s cold enough that the top freezes, often preventing footsteps from sinking through to the chilly earth below. Ice on top of snow in darkness.
Seen during Christmas break.
I’m not the only one writing about darkness. As we reflect on 2017 and look ahead to 2018, many people are gloomy. Articles, blog posts, podcasts, and videos identify bad trends and awful people in power. They share dystopian prognostications. So much is terrible that we exit December with a cringe. 2018 is looming ahead with a Darth Vader Imperial March soundtrack.
Professionally, I get it. Readers know that in my futures work I’ve identified many, many dark and challenging trends. Some of my scenarios contain grim elements or are openly dystopian. As a futurist my job is not to play Pollyanna. Instead, my task is to open people’s minds to the variety of futures, including ones many of us would rather not inhabit.
On a business level, I know that my dark work can be very attractive. That’s far from a new insight. “Fear sells” is a time-honed truism, from journalism (“if it bleeds, it leads”) to fiction to true crime and horror. This dreadful truism certainly applies to education, technology, and ed tech.
But my professional charge is also to share futures that don’t loom ahead like a descending sledgehammer. There are many possibilities for 2018 et seq, including positive and even inspirational ones. That’s what this blog post is about. We have passed the darkest night, and are due for a little more sunlight every single day for a while.
(I owe a debt of gratitude to a bunch of people for this one. In a recent podcast the awesome Rebecca Solnit just took darkness head-on and gave us reasons to keep working for progress. Mimi Ito found good among the bad. My Patreon supporters, including the new and upgraded ones (HURRAH!), are literally banking on hope. And my family, despite having me as a gloom-meister in the house, keeps racing ahead into the future with spirits high. This is a blog post of thanks, and a lot of love.)
So what’s looking good?
The end of overpopulation This is a huge topic, but it looks like the human race decided not to drown the planet in people. For younger readers the epochal nature of this development might not be so staggering, so follow that link for the backstory.
Yes, calls for advanced nations to start making more babies can be either funny or creepy (again, see that link). But it’s enormously positive that that’s where we are now, instead of figuring out how to avoid mass starvation.
Renewable energy While global warming continues to rise, one bright spot shines forth. Renewable energy keeps making progress. Americans have shifted a good portion of our automotive fleet to hybrids and electric cars, a dream straight from science fiction. Solar cell prices keep dropping. Project after project seeks to harness wind power in the best ways. 350.org, led by my neighbor and friend Bill McKibben, heroically assembles a planetary coalition to fight climate change.
Yes, it’s not enough, but it’s more than we used to have, and it looks likely to grow.
Political insurgency The United States elected a bad president in 2016, and his Congressional allies have busied themselves trying to implement a raft of bad ideas. The flipside of this is a rebirth of activism. Science fans took to the streets like something out of H.G. Wells.
The science march in Montpelier, Vermont.
Immigrants and their supporters have also protested and organized. Sexual assault and harassment victims organized online through #metoo. Women, above all, have leaped into the political arena in what seem like the highest numbers in American history (please correct me in comments if I’m wrong).
There’s a dialectical at work here, with awfulness calling out energetic activism. That doesn’t show any signs of slowing down as we head into 2018.
Thinking and planning about automation I and others have been writing about automation’s possible impact for years, and this isn’t the place to summarize that. Critics have pointed out the many ways automation can go wrong, and the problems of hype frenzy; ditto. What I want to identify here is one good thing: that we’re talking about it all.
See, that’s not a given. Technology and tech policy easily fall off the cultural and political radar for a variety of well-worn reasons: complexity, bad journalism, etc. Automation could easily have suffered such a fate. Instead, not only is there crazed hype around it, but also thoughtful discussion, imagination, and some planning. This is why we’ve resurrected the minimum income idea, for example. That’s why Nick Bostrom is doing breathtaking work at Oxford. Wherever I go in the world, educators and everyone else are interested in where automation is going. Sure, we’ll get all kinds of things wrong. That’s what happens when you explore the future, especially for something as hard to determine as automation. But we’re actually trying.
(I think this is a sign of science fiction’s growing popularity and good influence on society.)
Digital creativity keeps going Historically, people tend to respond to new media and forms creatively, making new stuff: new art, new stories, new shapes for expression. That’s been going on in the digital world since the 1970s, and shows no signs of slowing down. This is an underappreciated aspect of educational technology. (You could read a book about this).
I’ve been impressed by the hardware side, among others. In November I visited Singapore and saw that every middle school student received a Micro:bit to explore. The year before that, the Icelandic education minister described how they gave all students in that nation a Raspberry Pi to work on. This reminds me of the way students work on robots, from Lego’s Mindstorms on up.
We can discuss the questions of requiring students to work on software and hardware, and I do. But here I’d like to draw attention to the spirit of creativity playing out as students – and the rest of us – pick up technologies and explore.
Science! Despite the many ways people worldwide oppose a variety of scientific projects, researchers keep growing what we know about the universe. Even though anti-vaxxers apparently hanker for a return to the plague old days and intelligence designers (or however they brand themselves) still oppose the fossil record, scientists continue to work.
My son, Owain, paying homage to a Bill Nye exhibit at the Smithsonian.
Some fields are in various forms of crisis, notably social sciences. Psychology is still reeling from the disastrous reproducibility crisis. Economics still struggles with 2008. But these can be the kinds of challenges from which fields emerge with better methods, intelligence, and teaching.
The open revolution proceeds Every month more educational content appears as open education resources. Z-programs and entire Z-degrees are now a thing. Many people labor mightily to flip scholarly publication to open access. Others work on open pedagogy (shout out to Robin DeRosa). The Creative Commons keeps growing. Indeed, “commons” has become a cliche, as it’s so widely used. It’s amazing to see this proceed in the teeth of fierce and/or stodgy opposition. It’s like the dialectical opposite to neoliberalism.
Higher education’s self-awareness My sense is that people working within American colleges, universities, and associations are increasingly alive to the economic crisis most institutions are working through. In my work, a greater proportion of folks other than chief financial officers are interested in the topic and know at least a little something. Conversations about the topic are hard to have, sometimes, which is why the appearance of NACUBO’s discussion guide is very well timed. This is progress.
The human factor Above all, what inspires me with hope and humility is the people in education: the faculty, the technologists, the librarians, the administrators, the groundskeepers. In 2017 they took an enormous amount of heat. A growing number of Republicans think educators are taking the country to hell. A number of progressive critics deem a good chunk of educators to be hidebound regressives, brazenly fighting to turn schools into hellzones. Few are paid anywhere near “well”; the majority of American faculty would do better driving for Uber or flipping burgers. Again and again we are assured that educators, ed tech, and education is doomed, stalled, hateful, or terrible.
And in response? These people just keep working.
The librarians – ye gods, can we really not understand their heroic nature, even at this late date? Nobody has to teach and support every person who walks unmediated, unscheduled, and unannounced into their doors. Librarians have little press, and next to no visible fans. They face an existential crisis like no other sector in education. Their budgets are at best frozen. Popular culture ruthlessly stereotypes librarians as unprofessional, cringing scolds. Heaps of sexist tropes fall upon librarians without a touch of popular demur.
And they keep doing their work. Without fanfare librarians connect people to information, train people on technology, provide safe spaces for younger folks and work spaces for all. They keep reinventing their spaces and services. It staggers me that libraries do this and we don’t hold regular parades on their behalf. Of course librarians will rock 2018.
All kinds of education professions work largely beyond the limelight at the majority of American institutions. With depressing persistence popular conversations around higher ed tend to zero in on the handful of richest colleges and universities. It’s Harvard, Stanford, and a clutch of elite liberal arts colleges that hog the media’s attention, and many educators follow suit, sadly. Meanwhile, community colleges teach nearly one half of American students. Swarms of private colleges, often religious in mission, continue their work. Many public universities that aren’t flagships get starved by state legislatures, yet they keep on with their fundamentally democratic mission.
I often write about the ways American higher ed serves to midwife plutocracy into the middle of the 21st century. It’s vital to remember that the pre-neoliberal model of higher ed, reaching from the 19th century’s land grants to the 1960s community college boom, still exists and does a huge amount of education.
And the students, ah, the students. To begin with, my readers know of the growing importance of “non-traditional” (soon to be “traditional”) students: older adults, taking classes in ever-growing numbers. They have little representation in popular awareness, since we’re still, idiotically, convinced that higher ed is about 18-year-olds heading out of state to a residential campus (remember, this is one niche of several in higher ed). Adult learners hack classes in between jobs, caring for family members, and trying to fit into a strange if not forbidding schoolscape. In 2018 we should see this continue, and probably grow.
What about those “traditional” students, the tail end of Millennials and rising Homeland/Z Generation? It’s still fair game for older folks to not just disdain them, but to blame them for every damn thing, from election outcomes to economic woes to cultural problems and simple bad taste. Frankly, a disturbing number of older folks openly hate the rising younger ones. It’s not a new story, of course, but still one that sells. A lot.
Found on Facebook.
In response, those kids turn to terrorism and drugs, setting alight the world that spurns them. Actually, no: they just get to work. Instead of punching back at their elder enemies, the rising generation of traditional age students takes a hard look at the awful stuff we’ve done to them (think: climate change; a bad workforce; heaps of student debt; the balance of the opioid plague)… and bends to the grindstone. They work in the gig economy, putting in hours for low wages as their elders screw up healthcare and grow the plutocracy. They go to class in growing numbers, proportionally, and knowingly place mounds of loans on their shoulders. Some of them start political movements aimed at justice, and keep on in the teeth of reaction and fury.
Every single day Millennials and Homelanders inspire me. I hope that in 2018 more people share that same inspiration.
I am writing this post after numerous public and private conversations, including some with lawyers.
To be completely clear, in case it’s not:
I do not work for the New Media Consortium. I am an independent actor, unaffiliated with NMC, and running my own small business.
In the past I have had several contract relationships with NMC, both paid and unpaid. Those all finished some time ago.
I do not speak or pretend to speak on behalf of NMC.
In the future I will link to this post for the benefit of people who have questions. It is also intended for those who don’t understand my relationship with NMC, or who mischaracterize it. I may edit it to add further clarifications, should people request them.
I am happy to answer any questions through comments on this blog post or via email.
This has been a vital question for decades, but has taken on a new dimension of late as automation and algorithms have started altering the landscape.
Thursday, January 25: what’s next with net neutrality, education, and technology? 
Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz, 
Angela Nagle, Kill All Normies (
