Stephen Downes

This is another item with a familiar theme. Smart TVs and now computer monitors have increasingly been surveilling customers and pushing advertisements where they're not expected - or wanted. "LG's and Samsung's smart monitors use the same ad-serving OSes that their respective smart TVs do, meaning they're poised to use automatic content recognition (ACR)." It's easy enough to say that we shouldn't buy them, but if history is any guide, the objective is to ensure there are no other alternatives on the market. "It would be outrageous if dumb monitors were one day as rare as dumb TVs."

The only reason this is in the news is that it's Harvard. The story is that the university is using AI clones of its instructors to offer $600 boot-camp entrepreneur courses in what it calls HBS-Foundry. There's a much longer (and probably paywalled, though I was able to read it) story in the New York Times, but this five paragraph summary will do. Using AI avatars is a trend that has been building for some time now - see here, and here, and here, and here - so it's ridiculous for someone like Bryan Alexander to claim, "Since parts of US higher ed have the chronic condition of Harvard envy, some will try to do this on their own". It's the old story here, where Harvard does something other people have been doing, and is then credited with having invented it.

As Cory Doctorow says, "the 'art' of all of Trump's deals can be summed up in a single word: 'renege'." And so the utterly predictable has happened again. So we in Canada find ourselves at odds with a trading partner that, as Doctorow has noted, has always had the advantage. "The systems that Trump has dismantled as unfair to the US were, in fact, sources of tremendous advantage to America." And as he has previously, Doctorow recommends upending that advantage by undoing the agreements and legislation that have enabled that advantage. "Canada made itself easy pickings for America's tech giants, who wiped out Canada's tech sector while making Canada geopolitically and economically dependent on – and vulnerable to – the US and its tech companies." I'm not sure I want to see Canada respond to the U.S. by burning down its tech industry, as a successful enactment of the Doctorow proposal could do. But given that Americans keep on electing governments and funding corporations that exploit and renege - for Trump is by no means alone in this regard - I'm not sure I don't.

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.