Stephen Downes

As Nick Potkalitsky writes, "Study after study warns that students who rely on AI tools experience diminished critical thinking skills, reduced cognitive engagement, and what researchers term 'cognitive offloading'". I've mentioned some here in OLDaily. However, as Potkalitsky writes, "The cognitive offloading critique rests on a historical fiction: the autonomous learner, working in productive isolation, building cognitive muscle through solo effort. This student never existed, or existed only for the few." Another way to put it is that "Students have always learned through assistance. From peers, from teachers, from resources, from the structured support of the classroom environment itself." Instead, he writes, "Owen Matson offers a fundamentally different framework. In Beyond Augmentation: Toward a Posthumanist Epistemology for AI and Education, he argues that we're witnessing not the addition of a tool but 'a shift in the epistemic conditions under which learning takes place.'" Specifically, "When we frame AI assistance as cognitive offloading to be resisted, we're making a choice: preserve the purity of unassisted struggle for students who've never had assistance in the first place, while students who've always had extensive support continue to benefit from it." Do read this one.

Interesting reflections on what universities should do. "The immediate challenge for the universities is to redesign leaning and assessment in response to AI. This is not just about stopping student cheating. It is about teaching staff learning how to teach using AI and teach students to use AI." So - more of the same, but better. The article also speaks to a simpler time. "When I decided to affiliate with a university, early in the previous century, I wrote to every one in Canberra. The first... response came within five minutes, with a very simple offer: 'Turn up Monday, we have an office for you'. The other universities wanted to have meetings, and discuss pay and conditions." I've never known anyone to have a job-finding experience like that.

I don't know whether I have aphantasia or not. "Aphantasia is an inability to voluntarily call up mental images," writes Hollis Robbins. "I've written about my own aphantasia and differences in mental modeling." It seems to me that I don't have mental imagery - I can hear voices clearly in my mind, but for me 'visualization' is nothing like that. I am terrible at remembering faces (if I've ever offended you by just walking by as though you're a stranger, this is why). This article is interesting to me because it describes how website design interacts with aphantasia. "Many of us with aphantasia cannot build mental maps. The locations do not attach to an internal picture, so the user is repeatedly reading labels and scanning the page." That is definitely my experience. Despite 45 years experience using keyboards, when my the lable on my keys wore out I had to find keys by counting ('q', 'w', 'e', 'r', 't'...). "Every instruction that says 'click the megaphone' or 'open the three-dot menu next to the assignment' leads to more scanning and uncertainty." Yes, exactly.

Bonnie Stachowiak on the crisis in education, quoting Dave Cormier: "The more I reflect on these desires to return to another time when it was easier to connect with students, the more I'm convinced that it has always been incredibly challenging. Dave Cormier describes the longer arc of these challenges, which are just that much more visible through the rapid expansion of chat-based large language models in his post In Search of Quality Points of Contact with Students. He writes: "I think the crisis is 25 years in the making and AI is the lens through which can finally see the problem for what it is. We have spent 250 years (give or take) trying to find ways to scale up our education system to try and teach more people, often with fewer resources." 

Jenny Mackness summarizes a talk by Iain McGilchrist, who has recently been made Chancellor of Ralston College, succeeding Jordan Peterson. "For McGilchrist universities are the cornerstones of civilisation; they are of medieval origin... These days, McGilchrist told us, tradition has a bad reputation, because it is being ossified, but he said, tradition is inherently dynamic, a living phenomenon. Universities must introduce a grounding of tradition because nothing creative can be done without tradition." It seems to me to be the usual call for universities to gt back to basics, back to their original foundation and intention, which really does not seem like a very good idea to me.

I know some people are completely tired of hearing about large language models (LLM) but they have had such an impact on the field of educational technology (edtech) that it would be irresponsible to ignore them. Fortunately, Simon Willison offers this set of 27 briefly described milestones for the year (it sounds like a lot but the article is actually a pretty quick read). Be familiar with this list and you will be able to speak and listen knowledgeably about cutting-edge edtech in the coming year.