Stephen Downes

I've written articles like this - the ones where I take a pile of notes (like, say, these OLDaily posts) from the last year or so, organize them into themes, and then build a narrative around them. I pinnacled in the form around 12 years ago in London at Greenwich and the LSE. This article is like that, documenting the many many ways AI is going to kill the university or (in the words of Tyler Cowen) "will persist as a dating service, a way of leaving the house, and a chance to party and go see some football games." The sheer volume of notes is evidence of a community roiling. But this is a community based on rigid hierarchy and protocol, that exploits a large percentage of its work force, that denies access to the majority of society, and fails a third of those who enter. I'm not going to say that AI is the answer to all things, but it's directly impacting things that have needed attention as long as I have been active in the sector.

I have mixed feelings about this paper (17 page PDF). On the one hand, the turning point for my efforts to learn French can when I began to apply frames to what I was trying to say (so I could decide things like tense and gender once and then not worry about it). On the other hand, I think of fMRI as a modern form of phrenology. What I can derive from this is the idea that language learning isn't just about language. As the authors put it, "a deep understanding of language... requires the exportation of information from the brain's core language system to other cognitive and neural systems that can build models." It's not, they say, that the whole brain is responsible for language processing, it's just that language processing depends on (shall we say) other systems that have multiple uses. 

This is a useful reconstruction of the transformer architecture introduced in 2017 describing 'attention' and kicking off what would become the AI revolution stating in 2022. As Arpit Bhayani writes, "at the core of the attention mechanism in LLMs are three matrices: Query, Key, and Value. These matrices are how transformers actually pay attention to different parts of the input." This tells us what words in a sentence matter the most, and allows us to create the three matrices to more accurately predict what should come next. This is why AI isn't going away; look how simple and straightforward this is.

This is quite a good discussion on how to use Nano Banana to support genuine learning activities. As Philippa Hardman points out, the software is trained using text, not images, and thus avoids many of the issues of other image-generating software, while having issues of its own (including, as I showed a few days ago, making stuff up instead of relying on the source). But these examples - things like creating metaphors or generating fill-in-the-blank images - are generally resilient to that.

I think this is well stated: "The cognitive impacts of smartphone adoption are documented... So where's the real disagreement? His diagnosis: screen culture inherently biases toward poorer quality thought. As he puts it, "the general bias of a screen culture is towards poorer quality thought and information." The medium itself degrades cognition. My diagnosis: we've built extractive attention economies that exploit cognitive vulnerabilities for profit, and we're blaming the victims of this extraction for their own exploitation. The problem isn't screens; it's what we've designed screens to do." Image: Kidtown Melbourne.

This article discusses the definition of cheating in video games, and in particular the question of whether it is possible to cheat in a single-player game. I think the considerations also apply to education. The definition Charles Joshua Horn eventually settles on is 'to gain unfair advantage over others', which means it would be impossible in a single-player game. But I play No Man's Sky, and we often share things we've built or expeditions we've run in pictures and videos online, and 'glitch' builds allow some (console) but not all (PC) players to do certain things. So I can never do the great builds and hence suffer (oh! the pain) socially. As education slowly transitions from a competitive endeavour to a, if you will, single-player game, the same considerations seem to apply. Something to think about.