Stephen Downes

I can only imagine how much work it took to set up this brilliant parody of educational technology (as I type the support chatbot is having a meltdown). It has everything - ridiculous reserach papers, a haunted book, genius-level learning that starts at birth, 24-hour degree programs. Enjoy. Via Doug Levin. For more, see the Kickstarter. 

This article could be much more clearly written, but the basic argument is this: a 'tech oligarchy' has emerged that uses private ownership, market concentration, venture capital, tax strategies, regulatory influence, and control over infrastructure to defend and expand its wealth. What is significant is that this tech oligarchy defines itself as significantly more intelligent than the rest of society, and that therefore the oligarchy, rather than (say) democratic processes, should define the future of society. Intelligence, on this account, is identifies with wealth accumulation; great wealth is the surest evidence of great intelligence. If that doesn't seem right to you, it is not only because you are not intelligent enough to see it, you "have no idea what's even going on at those levels." If this is true (and this is me speaking now) then the sole function of education ought to be to teach people how to acquire wealth; and the sole measure of innovation ought to be whatever people will pay for. This function alone defines what people need. But (of course) it is not true.

The focus of this newsletter issue is a document (15 page PDF) on necessary conditions for digital democracy. It's divided into three sets of conditions: support, design, and external foundations (such as digital literacy). The emphasis is on trust and legitimacy, so support addresses things like procurement, accountability and identity. Design addresses hybrid participation, regulating AI, and multiple models of participation. All these make sense and would apply equally well to digital education technology. But missing from the account are questions of privilege and insider access. All the digital democracy provisions in the world won't make up for the lobbyist who meets with or emails the government official on a regular basis. Privileged access and influence undermines democracy faster than anything else, and this applies equally to education systems.

Ray Monk was the author of one of my favourite books, a biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein (The Duty of Genius). In this article he reviews Diana Kormos Buchwald and Michael D. Gordin's biography of Albert Einstein. That provides a platform on which Monk can relate the two seminal figures of twentieth century thought: "for Einstein, the attempt to grasp the world consists in the search not for the right words but for the right picture, a picture that would order other picture... Einstein echoes Wittgenstein, who emphasised in his later work that his aim was to provide 'the understanding that consists in seeing connections'...  to burrow beneath conscious thoughts, typically expressed in words, to the images that lie behind them and shape them, images of which we are often unaware." Despite Einstein, even to this day people are still unwilling - or unable - to abandon "fundamental intuitions about space, time, mass, motion and gravity." And yet - we've always known these are inventions, created in language, not found in nature.

Are we 'epistemic agents'? That is: can we decide what to believe and whether or not to believe something? A lot of people argue that we are not: "I believe what I believe, and that's it." But if there is the possibility that we can be swayed by, say, evidence or reasoning, and make the decision whether or not to change our beliefs as a consequence, then we are epistemic agents. That's the stance the author takes. But then, if we are epistemic agents, first, we can be held responsible for our beliefs, but more importantly, second, our ability to decide what and whether to belief can be undermined by false information, coercion, or other factors; these are cases of 'epistemic injustice', and we should not be held responsible for our beliefs in such circumstances. Where is the line? Mona Simion argues for 'epistemic minimalism', specifically, cases where a person is governed by epistemic norms (in other words, they can comprehend reasons and evidence), and where they can freely act on those norms. We see here a lot of overlap with the concept of 'informed consent', another way to approach the idea of epistemic agency. Why is any of this relevant? Because it is, arguably, minimally the responsibility of education to foster epistemic agency in a person; educational systems that do not do this are arguably unjust.

We often read that an AI, unlike a human, does not 'understand' what it is saying. But what is it even to 'understand'? There's no real consensus on this, and the best way to talk about it is to look at the varieties of understanding, for example as outlined in the book edited by the same author - here's the intro. In academia there's a sense that understanding amounts to being able to explain by means of a theory - this is known as 'objectual' understanding, but even here there are different ways of explaining - for example, do we limit our theory to causal explanation, or do we also take into account non-causal but environmental conditions for the possibility of the event (the kairetic criterion)? And then, there is what might be called first-order understanding, which does not involve theory or explanations, but is rather a more fundamental 'grasping' of the meaning and significance of something, as in 'I understand that murder is wrong'. Anyhow, this post was prompted by my reading this current paper on "non-factive objectual understanding' (NFOU)... the sort of understanding we have when we grasp the range of possible accounts of a phenomenon."