Stephen Downes

This article offers less a 'framework' and more a mantra. Here it is: "students should be allowed to use all resources - including LLMs - during preparation. However, the production of final evidence of learning should occur under supervised conditions within the school environment and under teacher oversight." What strikes me about that 'framework' is its sheer impracticality. The reliance on humans to scrutinize and evaluate in-person student production was been historically a huge limiting factor in education, and it would remain one in the future under this model.

This article applies an LDA analysis of articles from a set of relevant journals (listed, figure 6) in open and distance learning to describe historical trends in the field. As someone who has been present for all of that history, the topic is naturally interesting to me. And I don't see the trends as particularly surprising - 'web based learning' was big in 2006, not so much now. AI was almost irrelevant in 2006 and tops the leaderboard today. There's a bit of cross-categorization here: I'm not sure 'health education' belongs on the same chart as 'MOOC' and 'technology-based education'. I wish also there was some sense of the specificity of the terms used. The biggest surprise? The emerging and continuing rise of 'technology acceptance'. I'm also curious about what a similar analysis from a broader set of resources would produce, and of course, what a similar analysis of OLDaily would produce.

As Brave reports, "AliExpress wasn't recording users but instead playing a silent sound and measuring how users' specific devices processed it in order to fingerprint them." Clever. But we have a word in Canada that describes such practices: greasy. The sort of underhanded behaviour you expect from people who are fundamentally untrustworthy. 

I am not socially magnetic. I've learned to live with that. But the concept interests me, especially when it's presented as a "set of learnable behaviours", as it is here. The two behaviours? "The first was communal behavior: how warm, friendly, and well-intentioned someone appeared. The second was agentic behavior: how confident, assertive, and willing to take the lead they seemed." Fair enough. But the two words doing most of the work in this characterization are 'appeared' and 'seemed'. In my case, I'm not willing to fake it. There are cases when I'm not going to be warm and friendly, and there are times when I'm quite unwilling to take the lead. Abuses of power, especially, turn off the 'socially magnetic' part of me. 

I've written a fair amount about the duty of care in our use of AI, and this article reminds us od what we're missing when we don't take it into account: "higher education has created a labor model that treats human beings as disposable cogs"; "we only focus on the AI is cheating discourse and pour our efforts into pursuing academic integrity cases"; "few campuses have offered guidance about how faculty, staff, or administration should approach the question of AI in their daily interactions and task." You can't challenge criticisms of AI by attacking the messenger as I do here, but still, one would expect more consistency from them.

I mean... he's not wrong. "There were always more people thinking than people allowed to be heard. That is the whole horde. AI has let a few more of them through the gate, and the people on the wall have discovered that being heard was the only thing that ever made them special. So they point. So they scream." Who are 'they'? "The prestige thinkers who cite one another and praise one another, who pass one another around the podcasts and the panels and the conferences, and who have amplified one another for so long that their shared assumptions have started to feel, to them, like the structure of reality." Good article, much tighter than most of his writing generally.