Stephen Downes

This article takes us from the idea of the MOOC as " making high-quality lectures and course materials widely available" to an image of the university as a monastery. I think Josh Brake gets some things right along the way - criticizing xMOOC model (our MOOCs were never like this, of course) and pointing to the difference, raised by 'work-related' and 'control-related' technologies (which reminds me of my own distinction between free learning and control learning). And this is right: "we should think primarily not about how our students should directly use a given technology, but how that technology can be used to coordinate and facilitate the set of things that they are doing." But I think he he takes a wrong turn when says "what we want our students to do in our classes is not primarily to build a set of skills, but a certain set of character traits that enables them to push themselves to grow." Maybe I'm just misreading what he means by 'character traits' (but the monastic turn is not reassuring).

I wonder whether this is a new type of open educational resource (OER). Composed of questions and answers from Illustrative Mathematics 6th - 8th grade math curriculum, FoundationalASSIST contains "full question text, actual student responses (not just right/wrong), records of which wrong answers students chose, and alignment to Common Core K-12 standards." There are 1.7 million interactions from 5,000 students. To access the database, submit a request here. The dataset is licensed under CC-BY-NC-4.0 but "you need to agree to share your contact information to access this dataset. This repository is publicly accessible, but you have to accept the conditions to access its files and content." E-Trials provides access to a number of similar datasets. Via Learning Engineering.

There's a thing called Postel's Law that states "Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send." The idea is that when we design systems we should expect and plan for variable (and sometimes plain wrong) input while at the same time being as stringent as possible when sending output. I take this to be Alan Levine's expression of the same principle when it comes to attributions: "We do not need mechanisms to deliver gratitude, we ought to make it our regular action. Putting aside expectations allows the serendipity of receiving unsolicited thanks much more powerful." So - similarly - I don't expect people to fall over themselves expressing gratitude. The idea - or the art - is what matters. At the same time, when I get something from someone, I typically use a 'via' attribution, so people know where I got it. And it's for the same reason as Alan Levine - I want to give people a route they can travel through to maybe get some serendipity. Following links is the soul of the web; being conservative on the web means being liberal with attributions.

Geoff Cain retires, says some nice things about me (aw, shucks) and describes his new life. "I currently have a couple of unfinished novels that I have been working on that I am going to finish..... I have also been involved in art in various media, but in my retirement, I am focusing on acrylics and watercolors. It is not the end of my teaching, of course, because part of being involved in art is participating and sharing in community. I will be moving this blog to archive it somewhere and then pick up the New Adventures of Geoff somewhere else." You beat me by seven days, Geoff.

I just want to mention this article because I think these concepts are about to enter a period of considerable redefinition. What made me think this way was author Peter Ellerton's assertion that "intelligence contains almost no content knowledge" while I distinctly recall intelligence tests I have taken asking for very specific content knowledge (including in one memorable example the definition of 'ookpik'). Meanwhile, Ellerton reports, "critical thinking contains a substantial body of content knowledge," which I'm pretty sure isn't true at all. Finally, he writes that "expertise develops primarily through deliberate practice," which is partially true, though expertise is also (partially) describable as one's position in a community. For my own part, I think in the future we'll see 'intelligence' defined as 'natural capacity for pattern recognition' while critical thinking is based on mastery of a particular type (of sets of) pattern recognition, while expertise references consonance with one's own pattern recognition with others in a specific domain. Or something like that.

This appears to be a press release from the University of Surrey edited for inclusion in Phys.org and describes research into what counts as meaningful feedback in the age of AI. It's interesting in passing to note that this sort of institutional press release is often the difference between a paper getting noticed and it languishing in obscurity; my soon-to-be former employer should take note. Anyhow, the work is based on the team's 2025 international manifesto on feedback in the age of AI (note that the link in the article is wrong; I point to the correct resource here). I personally find the manifesto to be pretty light, and would recommend a more substantial inquiry into this subject. Similarly, the story doesn't mention 'connection' specifically, though it does describe an approach that "treats feedback not as a set of comments, but as an ongoing process of dialogue, reflection and growth." Here's the link to the full paper, though it might be behind a paywall (I can't tell from my office).