Stephen Downes

Reddit is shutting down its RSS feeds today, blaming scrapers. That's almost certainly not the real reason. According to Reddit's CEO, "Reddit will become a mostly logged-in site, starting with tests outside the US. On the earnings call that day, he laid out why. People who are logged in can be shown better-targeted ads, they're harder to scrape, and they already bring in more than 80% of Reddit's revenue." It's all about the money, which is always the risk when you depend on a commercial platform to form community. "It's you, signed in, looking at an ad." This post links to a number of actual sources for popular Reddit feeds (after all, a lot of Reddit posts are just copypasta from the original source).

This policy paper (40 page PDF) makes the case that a graduate tax would be a better alternative that student loads for higher education funding. I can see the logic - as the report says at one point, students who earn less, and therefore received less benefit from their higher education, end up paying more money, because their repayment periods are longer. That makes sense to me. But what I wonder is, why create a special tax at all? Surely, if a person is making more money, then a progressive form of income tax (or even, to a lesser extent, sales taxes) would result in them paying more taxes, and even enough, presumably, to cover the cost of educating them in the first place. Indeed, how is it even fair to require that students assume the risk in funding their education when students have the least ability to repay and when their education is in fact a wider social benefit?

This link points to the University of Calgary download page for this article (because we can't have just a plain download, that would be too easy). The article itself reports on the results of a three-year visualization exercise. The authors argue that "reflective visualization practices offer opportunities for (1) deepening the role that value systems play in visualization teaching, research, and practice (including ethical, cultural, and personal values), (2) developing pedagogical activities in which diverse approaches to data visualization are used to acknowledge the role of values, and (3) nurturing critical reflective practices." I found it interesting that the learning process involved 'practice and reflection' (which probably shouldn't be noteworthy, but so much learning is done differently). And I do appreciate a good visualization. That said, I didn't link to the main page for this exercise because I found it basically unusable - not all visualizations work.

This study looks at a project-based learning (PjBL) course in a technology enhanced learning (TEL) environment and concludes that students "demonstrated higher adjusted post-test creative thinking scores than students in the conventional PjBL condition." Obviously this result is very localized, and this paper depends a lot onb how the assessment was structured and what, exactly, was meant by 'creative thinking scores'. These were measured as a combination of four creative thinking outcomes: fluency, flexibility, originality, and appropriateness. The concept is interesting, which is why I linked to the study, but presenting it as though it were a medical experiment (which language like "because the instructional condition was assigned to intact classes, this difference reflects an observed association rather than a definitive treatment effect") left me wanting a less formal presentation (which would probably more accurately represent the research conditions). 

I'm on board with the idea of calling it 'AI Awareness' rather than, say, 'AI literacy'. But the bulk of this description is centred around how how block AI. As in this passage: "Creating boundaries for how humans use data has a long track record via gates, paywalls, passwords, and other moats. We're going to now have to do the same thing for autonomous agents." I have two issues. First, it's not clear that this is the perspective we want to take. There is much more to understanding (and being aware of) AI than how to switch it off. Second, even if we agree that this is the right perspective, we can and should apply our thinking to a much wider domain of potential adversaries - credit bureaus who troll our spending histories, advertising companies who create identity profiles, political agencies (and Facebook) who tailor personalized messaging. All these are potentially harmful. We should thinking about data awareness as much as we think about AI awareness.

My first thought on reading the title was that the news does not have to fit a commercial for-profit model, and so entrepreneurs aren't always needed. I draw on a long-standing analogy with education, where this is much more clearly true. Ben Werdmuller makes the case through a descussion of news product design. "In most newsrooms, the Product lead needs to lead strategy, product, platform, technology, brand, design, and audience; they need to figure out how to build revenue into the offering; they need to be hyper-focused on the underlying needs of the people and communities they're addressing." This, though, is a broader role than we see in most digital operations. It needs "people with the right kind of prototype-driven, experimental mindset and a bias towards action." These, he says, are entrepreneurs, people who "aren't afraid to take big risks, have the cross-functional skills to execute, and can forge radically collaborative cultures that are centered on the needs of their communities." I see the point, but I'm stiull not buying it. This is a classically provider-consumer based model; that's why there's "big risks". When a community is building for itself, though, what we perceive as 'risk' looks completely different.