Stephen Downes

"Every instructional designer I know keeps a folder of half-broken spreadsheets built to cope with work that should have been automated a decade ago," writes Curt Zilbersher, "so I'm building them properly and giving them away. After twenty-eight years in this field, this is the part I want to give back." According to the site, these are all "free, single-purpose tools for instructional designers. No account, and your files never upload. Estimators, converters and inspectors for the unglamorous half of the job."

I'm sure the media will be full of explanations for the decline, all to some degree partially true and partially false. This article mentions socio-economic factors, digital distraction and use of AI but not (interestingly) Covid. Interestingly, "Across OECD countries, almost two-thirds of students reached the relevant proficiency level in computational problem solving. But only half reached this level while also demonstrating basic proficiency in science, reading and mathematics." Read the full report here.

"Online used to be a place you could leave," writes Wira Indra Kusuma. "We designed the exit out of it because an exit reads as a leak." But without that exit, we can never really log off and the online world becomes just another layer of the real world, one we can never escape. "We used to be able to log off because someone left the door open. Now, if people are still allowed a moment to stop, we are the ones who have to put the door there. And we had better know why it is worth putting back, before we forget it was ever there without anyone having to ask." I'm sure this all appeals to this line of reasoning, which is why I'm passing it along, but my own response is ... meh. I want the online world to remember - I want my bank account balance to persist, I want my credentials to continue to be recognized, I want the power to stay on and email to keep coming to the right address. Yes, it used to be the case that we couldn't count on any of that, but today saying "I want an exit" is like saying "I want to leave society".

This is pretty funny. Nothing to do with learning technology, unless you're very into programming, but I can't resist passing it along. "Bespoke, a statically typed and uncompromisingly civilised programming language for developers who believe that machine execution should never come at the expense of good manners. Informally it is known as The Queen's Code: Victoria's, naturally; the etiquette committee has yet to approve the twentieth century. Source files use the .charming extension, and the compiler reserves the right to be disappointed in you."

It's important to understand that the headline in this post is dramatically overstated, and that it's not nearly true yet that "the future of enterprise software may not involve enterprise software's own screens at all." The possibility, though, is out there, and this item shows what it might look like. Following a partnership called Claudeforce that was announced last month, the two companies launched a project to allow a user to interact with a Salesforce CRM from within Claude, not using the Salesforce interface at all. A Claude Skill called Salesforce Development enables "building apps and agents on the Salesforce Platform: metadata, Apex, deploy/retrieve, security, and reporting." We can immediately imagine how this approach could be used with other management applications, including especially learning management systems and learning experience platforms.

This is a brief article that argues convincingly that the 'Next-token predictor' picture is the wrong mental model for LLMs. Consider, writes Garrin McGoldrick, a chess-playing LLM. "Given a new position, it predicts the move a grandmaster would most likely play next. That is a next-move predictor." By contrast, "Given a position, it chooses the move that leads to the highest probability of winning. Unlike the first system, it is not trained only on games that grandmasters already played. It also learns from games generated by its own exploration." Calling this a next-move predictor, he says, "would be strange". Both systems will give you a 'next move'. But one of them is basing its next move on more than just statistical probability from past events. And that's what contemporary LLMs do today. Via Doug Belshaw.