Stephen Downes

So now we know what Doug Holton did with his summer. This is the AI in Education Knowledge Base, a sweeping project that challenges the imagination. Core navigation is based on concepts that radiate out from a core AI in Education concept. Each concept is a markdown article on GitHub which I think is authored by an AI that interacts with the knowledge base. Concept articles are based on academic articles; these are summarized and stored on GitHub (again, I think, by AI). An important part of the structure, and probably also how AI works with the content, is the set of connections between concepts and articles, which creates a knowledge graph, using wiki notation. A set of skills informs the AI how to work with custom Astro wiki software. Readers interact with it through AI-based inquiries or via a set of generated FAQs. I really like the thinking behind this, but how useful is it in practice? The concepts and summaries aren't especially readable; they're clear enough, but there's a lot of padding and fluff. But you use your own AI to interact with it; the concepts and summaries are context, not content. More concerning is the claim to be a knowledge base. The articles are generally read uncritically, with everything in them presented as fact (or, at least, factoid). Via Alan Levine.

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Gary Ackerman writes that "theories are rules we should follow when designing educational technology systems." He then steps through the generation process in order to conclude, "After more studies have validated the theory, it may become established. This is when practitioners should begin using it. It is important for practitioners to wait until a theory is established before they begin to rely on it to guide decisions." In response, I note only that I have spent a lifetime arguing that rule-based systems are not appropriate for technology development or adoption (or most anything else really) and that a focus of developing theories as 'rules' would be very misplaced.

Interoperability is coming to password and passkey management (except, I guess, within the Apple world). Quoting directly from Slashdot: "Android is rolling out a system-level way to securely transfer passwords and passkeys between credential managers, eliminating the need to export passwords as unencrypted text files or manually recreate passkeys. The feature initially supports Google Password Manager, 1Password, Bitwarden, and Dashlane, with other providers able to integrate through Android's Credentials Transfer API." Important enough to me that I want to keep a record of this. Via Apostolos K.

Ben Werdmuller summarizes his post: "publishers are suing AI vendors, accusing them of theft. But are they giving the creators responsible for building their value a fair deal?" Against his Mastodon post I commented, "A large proportion - maybe even most - content read and used by AI was written for no commercial purpose at all, for free, by people just interacting on the Internet... We can't write rules that block people from normal interaction just because some writers & publishers put a toll on the road." I would go further to observe that journalists themselves do the same thing AI does - they record and draw from documents and events in the world, curating and interpreting them to help us understand. The journalist never talks about compensating their subjects; nobody treats it as 'theft' when a photographer records an accident scene. The ethics of all this are a lot more complex than "author write, AI steal". The same is true with respect to academic literature and learning resources. 

I was referred this from somewhere and I let it sit on my desktop for a few days while I revisited it and let it mature in my mind (I often do this with items; sometimes they make it to OLDaily a week or more after they were published and sometimes they never appear). It's a set of thoughts on Wendell Berry, who passed away recently. I hadn't heard of him before, but I find looking at this sort of thought interesting; it reminds me of Thoreau and also of a more thoughtful way to look at our interactions with technology and the world. There's a nice set of "standards for technological innovation in my own work" which reminds me of my own Nine Rules for Good Technology, but with a broader focus. The overall message, I think, is the idea of living deliberately - being thoughtful about what we accept and what we reject. The bulldozer story at the beginning of Berry's What are people for? is a good example of that, I think.