Stephen Downes

As Scott Leslie says, this is a thoughtful post on the Instructure hack. Like Phil Hill, D'Arcy Norman leads with Instructure's public communication regarding the incident, which was (and continues to be) not good, with most people interpreting their claim to have "reached an agreement with the unauthorized actor (ie, ShinyHunters) involved in this incident" to mean "they paid the ransom." Though, what else were they going to do? Along with many others, Norman points to the technology monoculture as a point of failure. "It looks like Instructure manages 3 different Canvas environments: 'production', 'beta', and 'test'. And all 8,800+ institutions appear to share those three environments." But the major lesson to be drawn, he writes, comes from UBC. "The UBC response is truly remarkable... (they) quickly put together a cohesive set of resources to support instructors in rapidly adopting different online platforms to meet the pedagogical needs in their courses." This is a lesson in maintaining expertise and developing resilience, even while working with external partners.

I thought this was a decent article though the examples are contrived (as so often happens in articles about education). There isn't (and never was) a Ms. Chen or a Priya or a Fitz or a magical sense that detects when feedback is created by AI. Sure, some things are 'cringe', but that can happen when a human writes (it would be like me trying to use the word 'rizz' meaningfully) and it reflects less than careful proofreading more than the sure and only sign of AI. The 'Ozempic' example here is to convey some sort of social disapproval of the use of drugs for weight loss, as though willful exercise and diet is somehow more socially acceptable. The argument here is that "admitting AI use carries the social risk of being seen as less capable, less creative, or less genuine. But we can move the needle by engaging young people directly. A well-designed nudge reframes disclosure from a moment of 'getting caught' into an act of ownership." Maybe. Maybe new norms will emerge - but note, they will emerge, not be 'constructed' through some process of collective meaning-making and choice.

Writers are always hopeful that their age represents fundamental change that that their work has identified the nexus of that change. I am not immune to it, I confess. Neither is this paper, which argues that just as "the transition from small hunter-gatherer societies into complex civilizations gave rise to the first Axial Age," which "opened the depths of individual interiority," today's "planetary polycrisis of climate chaos, mass migration, increasing warfare and transformative AI represents a rupture of comparable magnitude," through "the systematic cultivation of ordinary people's inner development, moral imagination and civic agency." Again, though, this is an argument that sees the future as a return to the past, a subsumption of the individual to the collective. "We now must reimagine our existing institutions and create new collaborative structures that our sectorized setup mostly lacks." 

Dropped today, "This specification describes a data model with which one or more recognized entities, such as one or more persons and/or organizations, can be described as known to perform specific actions, such as issuing or verifying a verifiable credential." The idea is to provide "a cryptographically-verifiable and privacy-preserving mechanism" allowing credential-holders to prove their credentials are recognized. "The specification is designed to interoperate with existing 'trust infrastructures'... while enabling new decentralized ecosystems to be built using verifiable credentials." 

This is a transcript where David Webster talks about "how to make our bit of the world (be that classroom, VLE site, or tutorial meeting) one that promotes and rewards actual thinking and nurtures concentration and an actual appetite for disciplinary engagement." It's a good article and worth reading in full, but I want to focus on one bit near the end. Webster says, "If we want students to care about understanding or thinking, they need to encounter people who visibly care about understanding - who are rapaciously curious. If we want them to tolerate uncertainty, they need to see uncertainty handled without panic. If we want them to revise their thinking, they need to see revision as a sign of seriousness rather than weakness." I've long talked about the role of the educator being 'to model and demonstrate'. That's what this is. That's where our focus should be. That (I hope) is what I've always tried to do in this newsletter.

This post begins as a criticism of the idea that "the fediverse holds this very specific opinion" and evolves into a discussion about chronological feeds where "you replace algorithmic amplification with sheer volume. If those same 3% of vocal, toxic, aggrieved accounts are posting twenty times a day while the 97% of us post once or twice, who dominates your timeline?" It's a fair criticism - I've found the same effect in my RSS feeds, which is why when I built my own, I privileged accounts that post infrequently. In this post jaz-michael king makes a case for curation, but what's missing though is a consideration of how we should be able to shape our own algorithms (which is essentially what I did) rather than rely on the platform or the machine.