Stephen Downes

I'm sure this article will resonate with a lot of educators because (a) it speaks to how AI takes away from learning, and (b) because it introduces the concept of care to expertise. But I think each of these is an error. For the first, Shaun Bell asks, "what does 'learning' mean when access or retrieval is effortless, when drafting is outsourced, when a conversational agent can simulate understanding on demand?" I've argued before that learning isn't (and never was) any of these things. For the second part, Bell sets up what is needed: "the scarce resource becomes something else: sustained attention, relational responsiveness, and giving space and time for the slow formation of judgement." And this sets up the case for care. But the model Bell is working with is the care of a parent for a child - and that just seems to be to be the wrong frame in which to view either care or expertise. Via Paul Walk.

This is a longish article revisiting an issue we've covered on numerous occasions here: the broken system of academic publishing. This is a great line: "These days, Springer Nature, Elsevier, Wiley, and the like are basically giant operations that proofread, format, and store PDFs. That's not nothing, but it's pretty close to nothing." One interesting note: the pattern of use  of the (pirate site) SciHub matches the pattern of researchers with the best access to legitimate sources. "Why would researchers resort to piracy when they have legitimate access themselves? Maybe because journals' interfaces are so clunky and annoying that it's faster to go straight to SciHub... for-profit publishing only 'works' because people find ways to circumvent it."

This is a useful article meant for journalists but worth reflecting on for all of us. It outlines the PEER mnemonic (based on a previous post) for remembering the following four types of source: Power, Expertise, Experience, and Representative. Part of the issue with journalism (in my own opinion) is that writers unimaginatively return to the same old sources in each of these groups. That's why I prefer the PEER'D alternative, where D stands for diversity. Good journalism tries to get sources from a spectrum of each type of source - not always the same authorities, not always the same expertise. I think especially they should avoid deferring to (what they believe) is the 'elite' level for each of these, because this usually reflects wealth, connections and influence more than it does actual power, expertise, experience or representation.

Jon Dron applies something like a systems analysis to the question in the title, asking essentially, "what does it mean for higher education to work?" In one role, teaching, it doesn't perform especially well, due to conflicts with its other roles. But in another role, 'surviving', it has done remarkably well, having persisted for centuries and having expanded around the globe. I do question, though, whether this is true: "The main technological features that universities acquired in the first century of their existence are still fully present, in virtually unaltered form.  Courses, classes, terms/semesters, professors, credentials, methods of teaching, organizational structures, methods of assessment, and plenty more are visibly the same species as their mediaeval forebears, and remain the central motifs of virtually all formal higher education." Are they really? I wonder about that. (I suppose I could ask ChatGPT...)

This tool, which the website source reveals was created by Perplexity computer, compares 20 AI literacy frameworks across 9 domains. The domains are: technical understanding, practical application, critical evaluation, ethical reasoning, societal and systemic awareness, human agency and identity, governance and participation, cognitive and metacognitive processes, and sociocultural and critical orientation. My question is: what makes these good dimensions of AI literacy, over and above the fact that they may be extracted from the 20 literacy frameworks viewed? Minimally, a typology should be comprehensive and non-overlapping. But more to the point, what exactly is a 'literacy'? My own view is that a 'literacy' is a type of pattern recognition. What alternative characterization would a presentation like this offer? It seems circular - a 'literacy' is what people say is a literacy.

Colin Beer is usually sharper than this, so while I agree that knowledge and skills (as he defines them) are not enough, I think we need some clarity regarding what he calls 'dispositions' (it's not that he's wrong so much as he's fuzzy). He writes, "Dispositions represent the values, tendencies, and attitudes, such as motivation, mindset, professional identity and agency, that dictate how a professional actually navigates the "swampy lowlands" of practice. In simple terms, dispositions are the habits of mind and heart that shape how we show up when work gets hard." Dispositions are best described as tendencies, which may result from habits, or which may be subconscious tics. They should be contrasted with attitudes, which are states of mind regarding such things as values and truth. Expertise (in, say, the Dreyfus sense) is a matter of disposition, while professionalism is a matter of attitude. It's certainly arguable that an education should (help) shape both, but they are very distinct things, and are approached very differently.