Stephen Downes

"Artificial intelligence will have a substantial impact on journal publication," according to this report (20 page PDF), which I wrote. The article "surveys existing examples, practices, and tools" but more importantly points to "the wider trend, which sees new practices being developed at every point of the research publication process. That is why not only are AI trends useful, so are trends that also challenge the model of publishing itself, such as the Octopus project." Indeed, for example, "Perhaps the journal should be something else entirely. Perhaps one part of it could function as a pre-registration of empirical research with another part devoted to replicating previous results, and yet another for theoretical integration (assuming we have a common understanding of the role of theory in an era of mass data)." Image: Scholarly World.

As Michael Geist observes, the Canadian plan for a ban on youth social media use is vulnerable to challenges on two grounds: "freedom of expression, since blocking an entire cohort of Canadians from accessing information and expressing themselves on social media infringes Section 2(b) of the Charter, and privacy, since enforcing the ban will require millions of Canadians to verify their age to use social media services." As noted here, a French court overturned that country's ban on similar grounds. "A different movement may soon emerge, one that rejects ill-considered bans as unconstitutional on both expression and privacy grounds," he writes.

After this overview there are five short pieces about media use and young people. It's a level-headed assessment and seeks to correct popular misconceptions (for example: "Our sense of how much time other people – for instance, our children – are spending on media is often inaccurate." And it argues that healthy use is defined by self-control, not screen time: "To promote healthful media use, we have to develop kids' sense that they understand the digital world, that they can control their interaction with it and that their interactions are purposeful.  With the exception of the very youngest kids, therefore, our goal isn't to reduce screen time as much as possible, but to help them develop habits that will let them balance the harms and benefits."

According to this short item, "WordPress.com maker Automattic is expanding into education with a new, free product designed for teachers and their classes called WordPress.com Education. The suite for classrooms includes a full WordPress.com domain for each student, plus free domain names (on the .blog or .art domains) and plug-in support." See also this item on TechCrunch. Reclaim Hosting, of course, has been offering Domain of One's Own for years, and Edublogs (Incsub) a similar service for even longer.

I hadn't read this 2024 article before, because (of course) it was behind a paywall, but via Fredrik Graver there's an archive link available, and so I was able to enjoy it in full. The premise, which I do not dispute, is that the system of 'meritocracy' in American society has failed. David Brooks offers several explanations, which divide into three categories (in my view): 'intelligence' measures the wrong thing, the game is rigged, and the result divides society into elite progressives and more conservative working class. The problem, for Brooks, isn't that the system divides the nation into a hierarchy - a stratification of society is inevitable, he says. It is that it divides it the wrong way, putting the wrong people in charge. Merit ought to based on four crucial qualities: curiosity, drive, social intelligence, and agility (the ability to learn from experience). To develo and recognize these, he argues, schools should emphasize project-based learning, an independent assessment system ought to be established, and what he calls 'opportunity pluralism'. I think there's a lot of merit in this article, but the faith in an elite, however defined, undermines it. You just can't put that much power into the hands of that few people, however defined. Society cannot survive as a scale free network; there have to be limits. Contemporary American society (and to an large extent, global society) represents a failure to set such limits, with a small elite living to excess, and the large majority suffering the consequences of that.

This article is based on the following premise, which I want to challenge: "Universities should assess independent competence (what a student can recall, reason through and explain without delegating the task) separately from AI-assisted performance." Almost everything a person does today is to some (usually large) extent delegated. We use motors to transport ourselves, books and articles and pen and paper to remember, calculators and computers to reason, and manufacturing plants to make. In many fields, and especially management related fields, accomplishing things through delegation is the core task. So the effort to assess what we can do independently isn't just futile, it's fundamentally misguided. The real issue is the way we pit the assessment of people with a lot of ability to delegate (i.e., the rich) against those with much more limited capacity to delegate (i.e., the poor). (The Washingtom post is usually paywalled, but it's letting me read this article, but here's the archive version, just in case).