NOT READY TO LET GO: A STUDYOFRESISTANCETO GRADING CONTRACTS
This article was included in the curriculum for the Open Pedagogy track led by Dave Cormier in the 2019 Digital Pedagogy Lab Toronto.
In a 19 March 2019 Virtually Connecting session, Dave explained that he uses the contract in this article as a negative example — not to be adopted uncritically, but as a starting place to think about how one might generate a better assessment model.
Algorithms will privilege some forms of ‘knowing’ over others, and the person writing that algorithm is going to get to decide what it means to know… not precisely, like in the former example, but through their values. If they value knowledge that is popular, then knowledge slowly drifts towards knowledge that is popular.
I'm so glad I read Dave's post after having just read Rob Horning's great post, "The Sea Was Not a Mask", also addressing algorithms and YouTube.