Stephen Downes

"As a technology director," writes Miguel Guhlin, "what solutions might have I vibe-coded if I had Claude AI or ChatGPT at my beck and call INSTEAD of paying money to expensive companies?" How about this? "Kid Pix + digital whiteboard + CMAP Tools, all mixed in together." Three hours of work and something usable was thrown together, thanks to ChatGPT. Run it though a couple more versions and an edit by Claude, and something reasonable emerges. Is it perfect? Is it commercializable? No - but it doesn't have to be. You can play with it here.

This article begins as it should with a discussion of Ben Werdmuller's Elgg social software. Eventually, it gets around to its main point: "The key lesson to be drawn from this is that, if the architecture is sufficiently and cleanly modular (as Elgg's is), then it may now be more effective to recreate components from scratch than to maintain the ones you have already written." As a community, we've thought a lot over the years about what this architecture looks like. Jon Dron discusses what he calls "a new paradigm for building plugin-based social applications." Quite right. This is important to me because that's exactly the philosophy I'm using to design CList - you can see the architecture emerging here. The major difference, though, is that I want individuals to be able to design their own environment, and not to be locked into whatever a community decides. An autotecture, if you will, instead of an ochlotecture.

This is useful work. "We examine the potential for AI to assume multiple roles within a community of inquiry - supporting instructional design, guiding learners as an independent resource, assisting instructors through analytics, participating in discussions, and sustaining dialogical partnerships with students." This maybe takes the argument a step too far: "we contend that AI can contribute to worthwhile educational experiences only when framed within a coherent conceptual perspective that emphasizes skeptical engagement, collaborative reflection, and the preservation of human purpose." (Always be wary of statements of the form 'A only if B' - such statements often reflect a conflation of necessary and sufficient conditions). The paper as a whole is a worthwhile overview of AI's use in supporting learning communities.

My experience with Answerthis.io was not nearly as productive as Terry Anderson's, which was reported in the current IRRODL, mostly because half way through answering it stopped and asked me for money. Still, Anderson reports that "The tool does a credible job of summarizing ways that other scholars have used the theory. It looks to be both accurate and thorough. In a couple of minutes, AI was able to scour the literature and find applications of the theory, made by others, that I had not heard of nor could have imagined today, much less than when I originally wrote the paper." However, he adds, "It shows that assigning tasks such as this as an assessment activity in a senior undergraduate or graduate course hardly seems worthwhile, given the time and effort taken by a teacher for assessment." And, of course, when you're preparing a literature review for a publication, it's important to have a human do it, not a machine. That's what graduate students are for.

Obviously it's not a serious question. But it's worth reflecting on the similarities between humans and LLMs. "As I learn more about how they work, I sometimes pause and wonder if there's a chance that I (and this can be extended to other people, but I will speak from my POV) can be some sort of LLM." Yes, it's true, "the idea of humans thinking about the latest invention as the way of how brains work is not new." But this time, we actually designed the latest machine to mimic the physical structure of the brain. We can learn from that. Short article; worth reading.

There's a bit of a theme in today's OLDaily revolving around the image in this post, "Let kids do work that matters." This image occurs in the context on a discussion of what counts as 'deeper learning', which is here presented as an objective for schools. It's a hard ask; "If you ask people to do high level work in classrooms in the current culture, they will do low-level work and call it high-level work." We converge on a definition that amounts to "three virtues: mastery, identity, and creativity." It's not a bad definition of 'deeper' but is it a good definition of 'what matters'? So much of our foundational landscape is changing these days, shaped in part by AI but also by a softening of some core myths in society - of the role of jobs, of how we manage power, of what constitutes 'meaningful'. When Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said, "We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition," he was referring to the breakdown of the international rules-based order, but when he cites Václav Havel's The Power of the Powerless it becomes clear that he's talking about how each of us sees ourself in relation to others.