Stephen Downes

This paper is clever in various ways (creating a term like 'Coauthorship Integrity', for example, or mapping the discussion to the Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing) but it's ultimately disappointing. Here's the gist: because students can use AI to generate essay and assignment responses, we can't accept these as sufficient evidence of learning. Instead, students need to show independently that they understand what they have submitted, for example, by explaining it. That would historically have been done by having the student perform well in an oral interview - a viva voce - but that's impractical today. So the authors propose an AI viva (their term) where understanding is demonstrated to, yes, an AI. Now while many will object to the use of an AI here, my concern is deeper: what is it to 'explain' or show that you 'understand' what you have written, over and above being able to restate what you have written? "Explain what you wrote in your own words?" There's a conceptual confusion here.

It's the same sort of lesson being learned again in the corporate learning environment. "We expected high engagement. We anticipated deep learning. The result? A ghost town. Across 20 participants and several weeks of the pilot, the total time spent with the AI coach was 10 minutes. Not 10 minutes per person, 10 minutes combined." The lessons: first, "to accurately test an innovation, you must select the audience that feels the problem most acutely. You need the people who are truly feeling the pain"; second, ", L&D teams must move from "destination learning" to workflow integration"; and third, evaluate for "operational viability metrics" - that is, "tell us if the tool is intuitive enough to be adopted without hand-holding." Without saying anything about AI, I think I can project that, some time in the future, most learning providers will follow these lessons.

Obviously I agree with the sentiment expressed in the title, and it's true that the bulk of the conferences I've attended and spoken to over the last five years have been online, yet I too enjoy the in-person experience. But let's be clear (and honest) about it: what we who are privileged enough to go to conferences enjoy is not the 40-minute talk in a crowded (or worse, empty) salon. It's going to new places, meeting new people, visiting the pubs, seeing the sights, enjoying the foods. These are valuable learning experiences, but of courses, as the academics we are, we have to pretend that the real value is in the classroom. And so that's what online conferences have preserved, and consequently, they're not nearly as enjoyable. Still - we'll figure this out. Image: ) Helen De Cruz, from the post.

The campaign to rein in the rampant freeloading at local libraries continues apace. Ron Charles cites an Authors' Guild report saying "Almost two-thirds of readers obtain books for free — whether from friends, personal collections, libraries, pirate sites, or other free sources" and asks "are affluent library users impoverishing authors?" Well, no. But let's take a step back. I agree with Doug Johnson that authors deserve a decent living. If they don't get one, though, it's not because of scofflaws like me, it's because we've create this scrape-to-get-by economy that turns everything good into a struggle to find a business model and to make ends meet. We're not going to address author poverty by eliminating libraries; at most, we'll do nothing but make a few billionaires richer.

It's basically a trope now to compare the current wave of AI technology to previous ed tech innovations, like MOOCs, say, and to say "they didn't wipe out universities so this won't either". It's lso misleading. With the exception of on very foolish person, nobody said MOOCs (or anything else) would spell the end of education as we know it. They did say it would be transformative, and I think that remains true. Sure, you could take MOOCs as implemented by educational institutions and criticize "the video-and-quiz approach to learning that MOOCs popularized." In the same way, you can criticize AI tutors that emulate lectures and even coaching. But none of this addresses the real impact the technology has had. It has changed what we need to learn, where we learn it, and how we learn it. Ultimately, the MOOC was about people learning to teach themselves, rather than to consume education as though it were some consumer good. You have to look outside institutional learning to see it, though,

This article uses a lot of words to make what is at heart a simple point: "Drawing on experience across higher education in the UK and Malaysia, two academics argue that the real AI divide in universities is not about access to tools but about institutional readiness - and why it is an urgent equity issue policymakers can no longer afford to ignore." Via Sai Gattupalli.