Stephen Downes

A recent meeting of UNESCO on digital education futures is notable for the resources distributed: "its AI Readiness Assessment tool to translate the Recommendations on the Ethics of AI into actions, as well as its Guidelines for the Governance of Digital Platforms to enable freedom of expression and inclusion while promoting a healthy information ecosystem in a digital era." Additionally, UNESCO's Guidance for the Use of Generative AI in Education and Research contains "a roadmap for regulating AI in education and strategies to address its profound risks and impact on teaching and learning," and a recent research report "which revealed gender biases and prejudices found in Large Language Models."

I've been doing some work recently looking at task modeling. The time of linear and even circular models (like OODA) has past. Today we're looking at learning and working in complex environments that requires new tools. I stated by thinking of circular network diagrams, looked at chord diagrams, but this seems to be getting closer to the reality. "The CL aims to capture the entanglement and dynamics between the Covid-19 crisis and the Swedish food system through data-based visualization. The methodology includes a creation of a constantly evolving database with systemic trends captured through qualitative research methods i.a. interviews with food system actors, or literature review." The tool they use is called Kumu.

I like this a lot. "This e-book is a template for you to use to get started documenting your learning journey (aka an e-Book of One's Own - eBoOO). You are free to copy the book and use the template to make it your own. Instructions on how to do all this are included within. We look forward to seeing the results!" Via Terry Greene.

I thought I linked to Elle Griffin's No one buys books, and commented "books are over", but maybe I just imagined it, because I can't find the link. Still, I would have done that, and in fairness, feel obligated to post this rebuttal. "BookScan counted 767 million print sales in 2023. BookScan claims to cover 85% of print sales." That's a lot of books, though keep in mind that this averages to about three books per person in the U.S. (population 336 million). These figures seem widely accepted even by those proclaiming a crisis in print book sales. It's one of those arguments where everyone can be right.

Ellie Pavlick tells us "we decided that meaning involves concepts in some way... If you use the word 'apple' to mean apple, you need the concept of an apple. That has to be a thing, whether or not you use the word to refer to it." And my opinion is, this is a category error. So it was interesting to see them actually find evidence of such a concept - "we found a small place in the model where it basically boils that connection down into one little vector... It's like this systematic 'retrieve-capital-city' vector." Is that what it means to, say, 'know' what an apple is? If so, though, then the knowledge and the thing knowing are one and the same thing - there's no 'concept' over and above the 'conceiver'.

The first thing I did as I started to read this item is to look up X.509 Certificates on Wikipedia, which made me gulp a little. It's a bit daunting to grasp from scratch. The assertion in this post is that "the abundance of X.509 certificate authorities who already perform identity proofing for businesses provides a rich resource that can be leveraged to boot the verifiable data ecosystem." There are still questions to ask, for example, can we trust these authorities, are they accountable, are the costs reasonable, are they available, and of course, are they technically feasible for the wider population? That said, the idea is new to me, and represents another step in the thinking toward distributed identity (DID).