Stephen Downes

According to Maarten Boudry, the problem with teaching students how to spot fallacies is that they start seeing them everywhere. "They hurled labels and considered the job done. Worse, most of the "fallacies" they identified did not survive closer scrutiny." And the gist of the article as a whole is that "human reasoning is far more sophisticated and subtle than the theory of 'fallacies' suggests." As someone who has taught and written about fallacies, I am inclined to agree with both parts of this. But I never abandoned the teaching of fallacies, though I did adapt my method. Identifying fallacies is a three step process, I said. First, you can learn to recognize the 'signs' that a fallacy is present. But signs are often misleading; you need to reconstruct the reasoning to confirm that there is, indeed, a fallacy present. Finally, you need to show not simply that the fallacy is present, but to use your understanding of the fallacy to show that the reasoning is incorrect. If you name the fallacy in your response, I would say, you're doing it wrong.

I am at least partially influenced by the fact that I did read Paul Churchland when I was younger, and came to much this sort of belief: "It is very common to see confident assertions that LLMs mimic language use but do not really understand or use it the way that we do, that LLMs do not really reason or think, that they cannot know or understand things. On examination, these claims are often grounded in a folk-psychological understanding about how we think, know, or use language, or, at best, in ideas from philosophy or cognitive psychology that are profoundly disengaged from any understanding of the underlying mechanisms of the brain." 

This article starts by quoting in full a post of mine that has gotten some traction on LinkedIn describing "the impact of AI on higher education." It was preparation for an event I'll participate in later this year. The thrust of David Truss's comment isn't to agree or push back, but rather, to ask, who will get us to this vision? Who is this 'we' of which I speak? "'We' won't get there following the guidance of financially lucrative edu-tech business," he writes. "'We' won't get there like we did with Web2.0 tools in the late 2000's and early 2010's, on the backs of tech savvy educators leading the charge. 'We' won't get there because of some governmental vision pushing a new AI enhanced curriculum." Fair point. If the model of 'educators' is 'teachers working in schools following institutional guidelines' then they are unlikely to move us from point A to point B. No, I was thinking (and this should surprise no one) of 'educators' as 'people like me' - working as educators but not typically in education. I have long said that change will come from outside the system. I don't doubt today that this remains true. 

I have long been fascinated by the observation that the fields I cover here are composed of what might be called 'communities of communities', that is, clusters of writers and practitioners that tend to coalesce into smaller cooperative networks while still being connected to the wider community. This article (29 page PDF) in Higher Education both embraces and resists that idea when it comes to a history of its own contents. It wants to be a systemic review, but the data don't coalesce into a single overarching theme. We see an ebb and flow of ideas and concepts, along with the citation networks of practitioners that swirl around them. "The early 2000s saw... the onset of institutional and methodological transformation... 2006-2015... indicates a shift towards macro-level analyses, emphasising structural, political, and social dimensions of higher education... 2021-2025... suggests a renewed orientation towards measurement, pedagogical modelling, and teacher-centred research." (p.s. the diagrams could have used much tighter editing; the headings of table 2 are incorrect, the hierarchical structure of Figure 3 is masked by lines flowing for no reason behind blue circles, the prominent (and hyphenated) 'higher-education' in the word cloud is suspicious, and the flow from concept to concept in Figure 7 appears to be arbitrary).

This article promises to help instructors "learn how care-based, culturally relevant class openings build belonging, strengthen faculty-student relationships, and increase student engagement from the first minutes." It struck me as I read it how the centre of focus and attention is on the instructor throughout. My approach is different, more direct, and (if I may say) less performative. Near the beginning of most of my talks or presentations, I say something like "this presentation is about you, not me." What that means, I say briefly, is that participants can change what's happening at any time - ask questions, make comments, challenge arguments, switch to a different topic. I tell them what I have planned, and ask if that's OK. Most audiences just go with the flow, which makes sense, because they've come to take advantage of my expertise, but sometimes they want to do something different, and I'm always game for that, because what we're doing is something mutual, together, and not 'me doing something to them'.

This article fits into a category of articles I might call 'humans still doing things machines could probably do better'. Recently I saw an article ask, "why do we still have children run in gym class when an Uber could take them the same distance in a minute?" I reflected on my own experiences being taught (badly) gold, curling and dancing by a gym teacher. Anyhow, in this article Tom Woodward practices carving linoleum to create prints. I like the "mediocre" birds, the misshapen elephants' ears, the revisited can of sardines. I like the mistakes, the scrawl, and the originality. It reminds us that evolution happens in the errors; design didn't produce the human brain, mistakes did. And as Woodward says, "Learn all the stuff. Do as many things as you can. Avoid repetitive stress syndrome in your brain, body, and soul."