Stephen Downes

Here's the crux: "academic 'excellence' alone won't guarantee a successful career. Luck and having connections in the field is almost equally important, if not more." This leads to the phenomenon of 'networking', in which relationships become commodities. Counter to this, though: "we should shift our perspective to see networking as a vehicle for real human connection rather than merely a means to an end, that is, creating a network." What we see happening on LinkedIn is networking; what we see in (say) the blogging community is connection. "If we focus on the intrinsic value of what networking can be, we will eventually come across like-minded people who share similar values and passions. Finding connections like these will add the most genuine value to our academic lives."

I've seen this perspective presented a few times over the last three years and it makes sense to me: AI is to today's coding languages and today's coding languages were to Assembler and Machine Language. We can, in other words, just think of AI as moving the development of software to a higher level of abstraction. OK, so who cares, it's an old argument. Yeah, but it made me wonder about the analogous argument for writing (say) documents and articles. I mean, you generally don't just AI to write some random article. From what I can tell, people who use AI to write have some idea of what they want to say, and they use AI to develop the article for them based on that. Now, in my view, what I'm really interested in is what they give to the AI as a prompt; I can figure out for myself what it might look like as a full article. But for people who don't have experience at that level of abstraction, the article might be necessary. Something to think about.

If we take this research (14 page PDF) at face value, on what grounds do we oppose the use of AI in Tanzania? "The data presented below, gathered from 120 secondary school teachers across Tanzania, reveal a substantial perceived improvement in multiple educational dimensions when comparing traditional teaching methods to AI-driven personalised learning systems." I take note especially of how AI-driven learning addresses the challenges found in this context, and specifically, the limited resources that can be brought to bear to provide any sort of individual attention at all.

Following up on a LinkedIn post from Jörg Pareigis I rambled through some of the documentation on the Open Networked Learning course. "By building on the frameworks of PBL and Networked learning, we want to further explore how these frameworks can be utilized to create open, collaborative and online learning environments. An intention in designing the course is to develop a community of practice that can enhance understanding of what personal learning networks and environments can mean and how these can be built." Though of course nobody is calling it a MOOC, it shares some things in common with our experiments from the 2000s, including the ARRFF model (that they fall FISh, illustrated) and free registration. Its next start date is February 23.

In keeping with my longstanding policy of not caring where an article was published, I have on occasion listed MDPI and (much less frequently) Frontiers journal articles here. My criteria for listing articles here are simple: what makes news is the fact that it's new... it reflects a rising trend, it describes a new approach to online learning, it recenters our thinking. I will say, though, that it's hard to keep up with the volume of articles from these sources, and it's easy to be sympathetic with the opinion posted in Nature recently that people should publish fewer papers. But that's not the problem; from where I sit, the real problem is that most academic publications are just authors going through to motions because that's what they're paid for (same with the LinkedIn posts that constantly reiterate the same themes over and over). But as Malgorzata Lagisz writes in a short follow-up, "For individuals to stop publishing and wait for institutions to fix broken incentives and prestige obsession is not the solution. Perhaps we should just let the increasingly dysfunctional publishing system collapse. Maybe then something better can take its place - something community-driven, transparent and not-for-profit." See also: the Discourse is a DDOS Attack via Harold Jarche.

This is nice. This is a Python "command-line tool for managing Pressbooks textbook content. Pull chapters locally, edit them with AI coding assistants, and push updates back, including automated WCAG 2.1 accessibility remediation. (It is) built for higher ed faculty and instructional designers who maintain OER textbooks on Pressbooks and want a faster, more powerful editing workflow." Designed by Joel Gladd using Claude Code.