Stephen Downes

This is the book-length version of the much briefer manifesto (64 page PDF) released last year. It's available in Pressbooks format or 197 page PDF. It is composed of 30 essays from various authors organized around the three major themes: rethinking teaching and learning; responsibility, ethics and power; and imagination, humanity and the future. I have mixed feelings about both the messaging and the purplish prose, but I do like the structure. And we don't have to fret silently if we disagree; there's an interactive website where you can respond to each of the essays (and it's nice to see people actually interacting on it). My favourite comment so far, on the section called "Curiosity surpasses completion": "I interpret this as learning is in the process, not in the product. In which case I agree. Could be made plainer English." The same (?) anonymous poster reaction to another chapter: "This is a bit abstracty as it stands."

At first, based on the title, I thought this was a great new way to help people attending a conference to experience different sessions virtually, so they didn't miss out on multiple simultaneous sessions that are the norm for a conference experience. Alas, no, it's just a standard presentation on how do design a self-paced module for a course, and looks at such standards as chunking, flexible resources, and keeping the cohort connected. But it would be a good idea to convert conference sessions into virtual experiences - not just a video recording of someone talking and showing slides, but something engaging and interactive. 

This paper (28 page PDF) is not only fascinating, it is well worth reading for those charged with expressing land acknowledgements. The paper serves three objectives: to describe the history of land acknowledgements in the Coast Salish region of British Columbia, specifically, the ch'ech'itsul code; to identify how traditional acknowledgements are being "culturally misappropriated" to contain references to "stolen land", to express personal feelings, and to describe remorse or regret; and to describe the correct form of a land acknowledgement for the region, consisting of three parts: to introduce and situate the speaker, to acknowledge the stewards of the territory, and to explain the intent behind the event. Where I live, some 3500 kilometres away, my home sits on land where the traditional territories of four distinct nations overlap: the Omàmìwininìwag (Algonquin), Wendake-Nionwentsïo, Ho-de-no-sau-nee-ga (Haudenosaunee), and Anishinabewaki, and is acknowledged in a treaty called the Crawford Purchase (1783). 

Good article on the emerging practice of learning and development (L&D) building their own tools, using AI, rather than buying from vendors. There are good reasons for this: it's fast, it's cheap, and you can get exactly the tool you want instead of settling for whatever the vendor has available The bulk of the article lists types of tools L&D teams are building, and the variety tells the story, everything from problem statement bots to job aid bots. 

You've probably seen the headline of a Microsoft employee calling AI scraping "the largest theft of labor in human history." Case closed, right. No. As Mike Masnick says, "An exec's statement doesn't change the underlying facts: fair use isn't copyright infringement, and even when something is infringement, it still isn't theft." I know that a lot of people disagree with this, on both counts. But it is well established that, for example, "the use of the books at issue to train Claude and its precursors was exceedingly transformative and was a fair use under Section 107 of the Copyright Act." There may be an argument for changing the law, or creating new law, though I don't think so. But training AI on legally acquired text is perfectly legal under current law, and it should stay that way, not for the sake of Anthropic and OpenAI, but for the rest of us.

This article discusses how we learn morals (and not some type of learning that is ethically good, though that may be a subject for another day). It tries to approach the subject analytically, without actually taking sides in any of the cross-cultural disagreements on what morals there are, how they're arrived at, and who is subject to the morality in question (for example: " There is a difference between representing 'this is something people shouldn't do' and representing 'this is something I'm required to stop people from doing'."). It just touches the surface of interesting issues such as innateness, statistical descriptions of morality, emotional resonance, and universalizability.