Stephen Downes

This article addresses an ongoing review of the the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers but at the same time uses the exercise to differentiate between what teachers and AI can do. Obviously everything suffers from overreach here, but the exercise is still worth a look. For example, how do we depict Standard 1, "know students and how they learn"? Kelly Ilich responds, "Being modelled by a system is different from being known by a trusted adult," which is true, but how often does the adult simply fall back on a common stereotype? And how limited are modern AI models, really? Similarly, for Standard 2, "know the content and how to teach it." it makes sense to "emphasise the teacher as a designer, interpreter and responsible steward of knowledge," but what happens when doing these properly requires skills well beyond the ken of the average instructor? Yes, with Ilich, I think the test should be to ask "what must teachers now be and do so that children flourish in a world shaped by it?" but my focus is on society, not only teachers.

Peter Suber cites this article (11 page PDF) saying "Preprints are increasingly treated as legitimate, autonomous objects of citation independent of their later publication status... I'm fine with this, and so are the authors of this study." So am I. As Suber writes, "I'm from the humanities, where it's common to cite unpublished letters and manuscripts, countless fiction and nonfiction genres never subject to peer review, and even an occasional 'personal communication to the author'. Cite your best sources, or your actual sources, and let readers judge their relevance and credibility." Indeed, we might think of citation of a preprint (the way I'm doing here) as a form of unofficial, distributed and decentralized peer review. 

I think this article taps into a genuine problem identified in two important essays - AI 2027 and Europe 2031 - but falls far short of a solution. The problem is this: "A small number of people make decisions for everyone else, without their input. Neither essay asks what ordinary people actually want from this technology or proposes a way of finding out." Quite so. Indeed, I dare say most people wouldn't see much difference between a society ruled by AI and a society ruled by wealthy out-of-touch elites. But asking AI companies themselves to "help bring democratically written global and local constitutions on AI into being, because right now no government is moving fast enough, or has the will or standing, to do it alone." The reason is that AI is only one of many issues that would benefit from the people having a genuine say in the outcome. The real question here is: could AI help society become more democratic? But I don't really see people addressing this.

This is a good paper (25 page PDF) focusing on the meso and macro effects of digital badges, drawn from a study of 83 studies. I liked the literature review in particular, which is a good overall framing of how digital badges support new learning opportunities and recognize mastery of skills. Readers might like the badge taxonomy provided (illustrated). It's worth comparing this set of factors with the findings described in the fifth section, as there's a pretty clear mapping there. Most work on digital badges is qualitative or mixed methods; the mapping I would think opens an avenue for more quantitative work.

We probably know this intuitively, but this limited study shows "competition undermined the collaborative turn-taking mode while enhancing cooperative and paired gaming modes, highlighting the need to carefully match collaboration structures with competitive elements in designing game-based learning." Competition does have its benefits - where would we be without sports? - but not everything needs to be defined through success in competition.

By impact "we mean qualitative changes journalism may contribute to, such as increased awareness, narrative reframing, accountability, community organizing, behavioral shifts and policy reform," writes Jazmín Acuña in this summary. Impact journalism is a process by which impact is planned for, taken into account while writing and publishing, and followed up on through audience engagement. The full report (28 page PDF) details (after lengthy introductory material; findings and trends begin on page 15) impact journalism as a trend that is under-institutionalized and needs to be developed, especially after publication. I can think of analogies in education, which we might call "impact education", or "impact pedagogy", which follows the same principles. Via News Alchemists.