Stephen Downes

Instead of trying to define change in ways that are 'comfortable' for educators, we should perhaps be thinking about how to prevent something like this becoming the norm: "The British Council has been accused of exploiting hundreds of agency teachers on zero-hour contracts forced to compete for lessons in a 'feeding frenzy' every week... up to 350 teachers based in the UK, US, Canada, Australia and India have to race each other to book fluctuating numbers of classes released every week." It's not hard to imagine a '2025 vision' where public education at all levels is replaced with an 'Uber of learning' for the majority (and lavish personal education for the privileged few). See also: Current Affairs.

"Lately," writes Steve Hargadon, "I've noticed something unsettling: younger people I encounter - cashiers, students, and others - struggle to do relatively simple math in their heads." Naturally, the argument is extended to AI: "Today we're seeing a similar loss in intellectual capacity with the use of AI, specifically large language models (LLMs). A spate of recent articles has documented how the use of LLMs can have the effect of reducing the writing and thinking capacity of both students and adult workers." I don't think we've seen this reduction in the writing and thinking capacity, certainly not as a result of the use of AI; it simply hasn't been around long enough to have had that effect. The articles are projecting a loss of capacity, not reporting on one. But here's the thing. In my 20s, I worked in food services and retail, and at that time, I noticed people struggling to do simple math in their heads. That was in the 1970s, before calculators were available. I also notice people don't solve cryptograms in their heads, like I do. Because of writing, people don't think in their heads. Not until they really need to (or want to). So don't blame it on tech.

I like the way this article argues that there are different types of change, with different actors implicated, and at different speeds, though I think the discussion here in incomplete and serves to comfort educators perhaps more than they should be comforted. After all, while there's no doubt many types of evolutionary change happening, and while these changes are gentle and calming, the way things are going it seems likely that they will be overwhelmed by much larger changes not anticipated in this article. The list of transformational changes - which include federation, harmonization, and acquisition - is missing a crucial possibility: annihilation. None of the 'transformational' changes anticipate, for example, a 50% or greater budget cut. But these days, especially worldwide, that's certainly a possibility (not one, mind you, that I endorse; but preparing for a pandemic doesn't mean you're cheering for the virus).

I mean, I can't let this post go uncommented, presented as it is in a style that couldn't be more opposite to my own tastes, a sort of mustard Courier font against a black background, resembling the CRT monitors of yore. Especially when the topic of the post was how that design was achieved for Hugo - a static web development tool I don't use - using Claude. To be sure, the mustard is better than the lime green originally selected, and it is kind of easy on the eyes to read, but there's no way to present images in it without a garish clash of format. And the spacing and text size are actually pleasing to the eye, but only because Courier is not really an easy-to-read font. Opinions on design are strictly my own of course :) and I like the way this is all explained. (p.s. D'Arcy, the map command in the meta author element isn't executed, it's just printed in plain text; see your source).

According to this article, " BigTech wants to use U.S. anti-China rhetoric and U.S's push for AI Supremacy to veto Open-source models that might threaten its own global dominance and cash-cows." Martin Dougiamas opines in Mastodon, "Michael Spencer here encapsulated some of the disgust I feel about #OpenAI distinctly anti-Open monopolistic intentions (which is part of a much larger problem of greed in US corporate culture)." My take is that AI has been for decades a global endeavour, that it should be an open endeavour, and that nobody really 'owns' the basic principles researchers have worked out. And these days, I feel no more sanguine about U.S.-based AI than Chinese AI.

Steve Boots ran an interesting video today on why the right dominates online media. One good reason, of course, is that it is much more difficult to find financial and (especially) corporate support for left wing media, since the left promotes social values in addition to, or instead of, economic values. But another reason is equally relevant: writers on the left are much more likely to criticize each other for (say) not being sufficiently left, or left in just the right way. Much the same could be said of proponents of open learning. Now I don't mean to make an example of Rob Farrow here; this is just the next article I happened to encounter. The premise here is that the reason to support openness is to support "the struggle for equity in education". It's important, in this article, to support openness in the right way: "While open education offers a promising pathway toward greater equity, it too must reckon with its own limitations and biases, leveraging openness as a critical lens on existing and historical practice." I think we can be looser in our requirements. If someone supports openness, I think that's great, and don't feel the need to put them through a values test.