I left twitter for a while and all this hapenned here. Then I had to jump straight into class and could not help having a discussion with my students on this thread. Very interesting to hear their perspectives.
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Thank you for sharing! These discussions in my view, about learning in the context of the world and power, is crucial to any learning experience. We don’t live OR teach in a vacuum.
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[Thread] Let me give thanks to one thing publically: For the nakedness and hypocrisy of neoliberalism in the last decade. No longer is it necessary to parse words, speculate about secret motives, or to interpret dogwhistles to understand gov’t power in the US. #ThankfulFor /1
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Quantified education 👎
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Replying to @mckellogs
The classroom as an act of collective action (IMHO) is the most important pedagogical frame. Particular when our histories (instructor) are part of the dynamic. I nearly failed 5th, 8th, high school, and the first 6 yrs of ComColl. Cultivating student consciousness...
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Quantification of learning is a farce.
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The Value of Anthropology - Noticing and Challenging the Magic Counting Dragon #highered #challengingnotaccomdating anthropology-news.org/index.php/2013
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In fact, I mostly agree that quantification is a farce! :)
This is more an epistemological claim than an ontological one: I think there are things here to be known, but as a practical matter, such attempts tend to do more harm than good the more they lean into quantification.
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SRS does involve quantities, but I don’t think those quantities are very meaningful for the kinds of claims edu-quantifiers would like to make.
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Are there any metrics worth tracking in SRS? Anki for eg gives you “notes” reviewed in “X” time that’s not really meaningful, I believe. In TTFT you measured retention after “N” repetitions is that worth tracking for different topics?
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I spent a lot of time working on this last year, but I still don’t like my answers here.
It’s worth being careful about what “meaningful” means. Meaningful to you, the reader, in that it reflects lived experience? Meaningful to an outside assessor, in that it “proves” something?
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Demonstrated retention rates are fairly meaningful to me, the reader, when they resonate with and reinforce my lived experience of growing confidence with the material. But I don’t think they’re very meaningful to an outsider who wants to know if you understand a given concept.
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In terms of “living with” an SRS, I think one of the most meaningful metrics is *throughput*: if I say I want to spend 10m/day on this habit, how much material can I add per day?
Another useful (and classic) one is the “forgetting index”: in the (sometimes long) periods between sessions, how likely am I to actually remember the thing if I find I suddenly need it?
Too low, and you lose confidence in the system; too high, and you’re wasting time.
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For me, the north star metric is roughly: what, on the margin, did this enable you to think or do? But of course, you can’t really measure that in general.
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