- Aug 2023
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www.edweek.org www.edweek.org
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All this matters because existing research indicates CTE participation can be stratified by race, gender, income, and rurality.
Interesting that these four specific categories were chosen. I haven't heard of "rurality" as a classification before.
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I’m there to gawk over what it can do—and, spoiler, it goes well beyond producing first-year term papers.
I think we're currently hanging out somewhere up on the "Peak of Inflated Expectations" scale.
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As you might imagine, this demonstration led to some inevitable—and now ubiquitous—hand-wringing about automation and the implications for society.
I find it amusing that the author poses nervousness about the implications to his job in this section, yet later poses a chart where "GOV" is relatively low risk for job loss due to automation. To me, this suggests his study and/or data is flawed and requires closer scrutiny.
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I’ve been on ChatGPT a lot lately and—apparently—I’m not the only one. I’m not actually using it (though I intend to)
I've not really dived into how to use this tool yet either. There's a time commitment required to learn any new tool and I haven't yet felt a need to dive into what could potentially be a very deep rabbit hole of playing with AI. I imagine our students, unhindered by responsibility and encouraged to play, will have much more opportunity to play with this tool and gain skills to manipulate AI that I can only dream of.
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How Will AI Automation Affect Career and Technical Education?
FIRST!
Glad I figured this new bit of tech out. I figure AI will be much the same. Another tool we have to learn to work with. Or we don't, and accept that we'll be less capable than those who learn how to use it effectively.
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To begin, jobs requiring skills that are difficult to automate with available technologies are at lower risk of automation. These skills include things like two-way communication, critical thinking, creativity, planning, management, and problem-solving. These are transferable skills, not technical skills. Career and technical education courses and programs need to equip students with both. Not only will the combination of technical and transferable skills help CTE students compete for the automation-resilient jobs of today (which tend to require bachelor’s degrees), the combination will give them greater agility when automation threats come knocking tomorrow.
I get the impression that the author views transferrable skills as only coming from academic/bachelor programs and not from technical education. The irony is of course that a huge number of white collar jobs that require bachelor degrees are in imminent danger of becoming obsolete.
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Today’s “career and technical education” is yesterday’s “vocational education,” though not really.
Writing a lot to not say much at all here...
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I’ve been on ChatGPT a lot lately and—apparently—I’m not the only one. I’m not actually using it (though I intend to); I’m there to gawk over what it can do—and, spoiler, it goes well beyond producing first-year term papers. At a recent social gathering, one of my colleagues demonstrated that—if given a fictional research question—the generative artificial intelligence behind ChatGPT can write nearly flawless computer code for a certain syntax-based statistical package commonly used among policy-researcher types, like myself. It was humbling; I’ve spent years learning to write such code, to middling ability. As you might imagine, this demonstration led to some inevitable—and now ubiquitous—hand-wringing about automation and the implications for society.
ChatGPT is a death knell for many relatively entry level administrative and information sector jobs. Scheduling automation is already taking the place of secretarial work, legal research is getting done by AIs that can process and aggregate far more cases than any number of underpaid and overworked articling students. Even high level financial advisors are already going the way of the algorithm. A program can track the billions of data points on wall street and make far more accurate predictions than a human ever could. For those still in those jobs, I'd definitely have feelings of concern.
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By contrast, courses and programs within the “academic” curriculum emphasize subject-matter knowledge and the development of broadly applicable skills—think history, science, language studies, etc.
This seems like a pretty big assumption. The skills I learn as a machinist are quite broadly applicable to a number of different trades. There is an increased trend towards specialization in industry, (for example a CNC machine in a machine shop may have an operator, a programmer, and an engineer all performing specialized jobs to keep it running) however education at the high school level cannot possibly prepare students for all the specific skills required. This necessitates a much broader education more in line with what the author describes as "academic".
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There’s a collective (and bipartisan!) sense that these changes have steered CTE in a positive direction, toward “relevance and rigor,” and away from its “dark history” of tracking disadvantaged students into low-wage, low-opportunity occupations.
No need to use CTE to track disadvantaged students when you have the US justice/prison system there to gobble them up.
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