Stephen Downes

The Flexible Learning for Open Education (FLOE) project has put together a collection of articles on AI in education from a set of well-known education and edtech writers. From OpenStax (now in a partnership with Google) Richard Baraniuk writes, "to create Responsible AI for education, we must build it on an open, equitable foundation." Beth Rabbitt suggests AI should be a public good for education. Jutta Treviranus warns "Because AI is a powerful statistical pattern replicator, it is poised to make every other harm even worse for people who are already struggling," calling this phenomenon 'statistical discrimination'. Anne-Marie Scott points to legal issues and references the OSI definition of 'open AI'. Sarah Johnson focuses on he usability of AI products. And so on, with more authors. FLOE is a project of from The Inclusive Design Research Centre and OCAD University.

OK, this is a 40 minute video on how to install a hydraulic brake on a bicycle. I just watched it beginning to end. It paced me nicely through the process, clearly showing me the tools used, step by step process, and what the result should look like. It's an example of direct instruction done the way it should be. Now I wouldn't say I have learned how to install the brake until I did one on my own, but I feel I could probably manage it after watching this. Now (with a nod to Kirschner) I wouldn't want to attempt this without prior instruction. It's too complex, there are too many steps that could go wrong, and the cost of failure is too high. Yet it has to be noted, there's no way I'm going to sit riveted with interest in this video without the prior experience of riding my bicycle and developing a very specific need for this knowledge. It also helps (a lot!) that this video and many others like it are available for free online.

This is an interesting article though I don't exactly agree with it. It describes 'markdown', a system some text editors use to allow writers to create bold, italics, lists, headers and links without using complex HTML or even more complex .docx formats. Though the article attributes markdown to John Gruber and Aaron Swartz, it draws on conventions people used for decades in text-only editors, for example, **bold** for bold. What makes it different is you can run markdown text through an interpreter and it will produce nice HTML format for you. The article says "As a professional writer, you probably don't care much about bold, italics, and underline, while you write," but from my on perspective, I care quite a lot about formatting. Via Stephen Harlow.

The cancellation of FediForum as a result of two-year old anti-trans statements by one of the organizers is representative of the cultural conflict roiling the western world right now. It's particularly relevant here given the trans-positive origins of the fediverse. For my own part, it's hard for me to understand the hate some people feel for diverse and different people, including trans people, and I wish we could learn to live in an inclusive and equitable society. The whole concept of the fediverse is something like 'live and let live' and  'to each their own' and it's a concept I embrace, especially when compared with what we see in places like Twitter and Facebook.

By 'messages' we refer "not to individual spikes but rather to patterns of excitations - comprising spikes, their timing and their spread across the wider network." The animation at the top of this article offers a good example of a 'message' as the sequence of activations (signified by red coloured neurons) spreading out from the original signal. Characteristic input produces characteristic messages in a given connectome. "Message fingerprints—namely spiking patterns—showed up in specific neurons in a specific order, again and again." It's still early days - "we don't yet have an accepted definition of what constitutes a message." But I suggest that what's being called a 'message' here is sometimes a sensory experience - in other words, consciousness.

I've been researching freeze-dried food for my upcoming bikepacking trips. Because of recent events, I want to ensure I'm buying from Canadian suppliers. I got a list of providers from Google and then searched on each to check its web page. But Google clutters the results with lists of 'in stock' products at Amazon instead, so I added the '-ai' flag to my search request to knock out the AI. AI fail, right? But then I asked ChatGPT for a list of Canadian freeze-dried food companies and got a good list, with descriptions and links to the right websites. The lesson here is two-fold: Google search is becoming useless, and is not helped by AI, but if I adapt my own practices, AI generates better results. All of which sort of validates Om Malik's point here.