Stephen Downes

According to this article, "Pressing Prompts is an open collection of teaching activities and resources designed to help higher education instructors engage students in discussions about the social and ethical implications of artificial intelligence." It's divided into topics such as 'Can we trust AI?' and 'Is AI biased?' and doesn't try to answer these questions so much as to structure activities and resources to support student discovery around them. 

I like the ambition of this project though I fear future maintenance because of its dependence on Node. Still, I like how a lot of attention has been paid to ease of installation and startup. "FediHome is a self-hosted, single-user Fediverse home — blog, photos, video, audio, and a live following feed, all on your own domain via ActivityPub. 1.0 marks the project production-ready: a test suite + CI gate every change, the security-audit findings are resolved, the dependency stack is current (Prisma 7, Next 16, Fedify 2), and a public demo runs the exact code at fedihome.social." Here's the source.

This is a good overall summary of an informed perspective on AI in education that avoids the cliches and sees AI as something that is fundamentally new, and not defined by simple metaphors. I appreciate this perspective. Not that I agree with it all - my first reaction on reading the first part was to post this on Mastodon: "Some day in the future philosophers will agree that 'meaning' is a construct invented by logical positivists to play the same role previous (and no longer accepted) constructs like 'noumena' played in earlier metaphysics." Anyhow, Dron also says, "no more cognitive offloading: it's cognitive redistribution," whicch I agree with, and "the answer is not to keep humans in a loop (but) to think of genAIs as being part of the web of people, tools, processes, structures, theories, models, appliances, devices, and other artifacts that extends our cognition," which also makes sense to me.

"Let's stop pretending," writes Hamish Campbell, "we need to be honest, the community side of the Fediverse is a mess. The instance as a community, was a good idea, but just that an idea, it never worked, as the was no code that was needed to build the links that mattered, no mod tools, nothing." The existing fediverse, he says, is built on control, when it should be built on trust. "We need to balance collectivizing resilience. Just like with food, we need shared kitchens, food co-ops, and community gardens – not just individual allotments." I tend to favour a third option - not individualism, not collectivism, but cooperation, based on connections rather than commonality.

OK, I don't really get it, but I can imagine playing with this device is a lot of fun, as Doug Belshaw has done here. From the web page: "rabbit r1 is a pocket AI device powered by rabbit OS3, and a native physical way into OS3. unlimited AI conversations, translation and voice recordings for $199." Rabbit OS3 is something like an AI-based operating system where you decide what you want and the OS assembles the resources needed to do that.

This is I2IDL's new glossary of digital learning terms, including learning engineering, xAPI, interoperability, learning analytics, learning science, and more. Sources: Learning Engineering Body of Knowledge (LEBOK), Modernizing Learning by J.J. Walcutt, J.J. & Sae Schatz with Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL), The Science of Remote Learning by Jim Goodall and Aaron Kessler, Exploring Learning Engineering Design Decision Tracking by Lauren Totino and Aaron Kessler, IEEE LTSC, IEEE xAPI, IEEE xAPI Profiles, IEEE ICICLE, and the UNESCO Thesarus.