Of Ethics and Artificial Intelligence

Of Ethics and Artificial Intelligence

Bias, privacy, and security issues are challenges that we already face in our very human lives, and they are mirrored in the development of AI. Strangely, it might give us a small degree of comfort to know that, although we don’t know exactly what AI will bring, it exhibits risk characteristics with which we are already familiar and against which we already strive to stay ahead of the game. Such risks will need to become part of risk management in schools, which includes the governance level as well as the senior management team.

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The Ethics of Leadership Search
Ethics, Leadership, Governance Kevin Ruth Ethics, Leadership, Governance Kevin Ruth

The Ethics of Leadership Search

Discourse and communication are powerful aesthetic features, to be sure, when it comes to influence and persuasion. The responsibility for evaluating the epistemic and ethical legitimacy of these features, including the epistemic and ethical legitimacy of engaging the emotions of potential candidates, rests with three groups: the board (the progenitor of the position description), the search consultant (the framer of culture and opportunity, involved to varying degrees in the presentation of the position description), and the candidate her/himself (the interpreter of the position description, with an eye to securing the position and leading the school).

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The Stream of Now

The Stream of Now

Curriculum providers, accreditation agencies, and recruitment agencies need to pay attention to the stream of now as well, as should those commercial enterprises that provide products and services to schools. The stream of now isn’t some notion from science fiction; it is already available. It is the nature of our age that everyone is already in the stream of now. Question: how are we responding to it?

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On Imaginative Gridlock

On Imaginative Gridlock

More learning (data gathering and theoretical application of technique) will not, on its own, change the way people see things or how they perceive them. "There must first be a shift in the emotional processes of that institution [in our case, international education as a sector]. Imagination and curiosity are at root emotional, not cognitive, phenomena. In order to imagine the unimaginable, people must be able to separate themselves from the surrounding emotional processes before they can even begin to see (or hear) things differently. Without this understanding, it becomes impossible to realise how our learning can prevent us from learning more." (Friedman, A Failure of Nerve, 31). In the event that this doesn't make sense, consider Galileo, who offered naysayers an opportunity to utilise his telescope to observe the movement of cosmic bodies, to look for themselves. So many naysayers, in those earliest days of his efforts, refused to observe, even when offered the chance. Consider just how much longer it took for things to evolve because their "learning" got in the way of learning, of becoming something more.

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Compensation for School Leaders: Do We Have the Right Model?
Governance, Leadership, Strategy Kevin Ruth Governance, Leadership, Strategy Kevin Ruth

Compensation for School Leaders: Do We Have the Right Model?

In a recent article on executive benchmarking in Korn Ferry Briefings, the authors (Irving S. Becker and Lawrence M. Fisher) note that Korn Ferry Hays Group “recommends that board members go beyond benchmarking, and instead use multiple lenses to evaluate compensation via a more complex and rigorous assessment of both internal and external factors” (20). As they state further, “the goal is to establish ‘internal equity,’ or the perception that the organisation is paying people according to the relative size and impact of their roles” (20).

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