Stephen Downes

On the one hand, educational leadership (or any kind of leadership) looks too complex and messy to be served well by the standard formulae often offered by AI. On the other hand, the tools are on the desktop and they can make life easier. We need to get past the idea that it's a simple choice between eschewing AI entirely or embracing it in everything. "We have to stop treating AI as either a silver bullet or a forbidden toy. Educational leadership in this era means holding two opposing truths at once: we need these systems' analytical horsepower to keep pace with a changing world, and we need our own stubborn human intuition to keep them honest." This article looks at some of the applications of AI in an education leader's life, and while a bit simplistic, still suggests how AI may play a role in the future.

I think the argument in this article is probably sound, though we need to be careful about drawing too many conclusions from it. The assertion is essentially that the research to date, and especially the meta-analyses,are not reliable. There are many reasons this is the case, including bad methodology, poor comparisons (eg., "AI + Something versus nothing), unrepresentative data, changes in AI technology, etc. But we should also be cautious about the assessments. We have an MIT researcher, for example, saying "her team has collected almost 900 studies on AI in education and determined that only 20 of them were of high enough quality." Well, anyone could do that (I sort of do it every day). But what counts as quality here? That is an open question in many ways - it's not like medicine, where both human bodies and treatment interventions are describable and quantifiable. So take all of the research, including the criticisms, with a healthy dose of scepticism.

I think this is why a lot of people hate AI. "Kyle is the entire lifecycle of AI-assisted theft enacted by mediocre white guys who've always stolen the work of young people, people of colour and women their whole lives, but who now have access to a machine that does it breezily and effectively. Kyle is the person, the act and the output. Kyle is the feeling: the deep, unchecked joy he feels when he's cheated his way into success rather than earning it." I get it. But the underlay is an entire culture centered around this sort of think. AI just accelerates; the real issue was (and is) the culture. Anyhow - do view the Microsoft ad in this article and judge for yourself. Via Alan Levine.

We have of course completely missed the 31 day October challenge, but no matter, you can pick any starting day you want. This project was prompted for me by a video from the prolific JoseMonkey ("I find people who ask to be found"). It's a short 4 minute tutorial on how to edit the OpenStreetMap (OSM). This service does a lot of things Google Maps doesn't do, including a robust search API that helps people like JoseMonkey find this in the videos people send him. The challenge web page suggests people check the Discourse Thread if they need help, but I didn't really find that helpful; what would be cool is an AI that provides instructions for each day's theme (but not an AI that actually edits the map - this is one of those things I think we need people to do).

I'm really sympathetic with educators' frustrations trying to keep up with rapidly changing AI technology. Some of the recent changes: "OpenAI will retire CustomGPTs at the end of the year. It will also get rid of Prism, their collaborative writing interface for scientists... they've changed the interface and hidden features like Study Mode that were once prominent via a drop-down menus." There's a digression in the article to explain AI agents and to recommend Han Lee's explainer, It's a-Me, Agentic AI. Marc Watkins has an agent "curate a newsletter, emphasizing what stories matter, how they're connected, and how I might bring these into the classroom." Again, I don't rely on AI for any of this, depending instead on my own hard-earned pattern recognition skills to find and filter sources. It's a choice each person must make for themselves. 

Ajay Chavda has developed a lot of commercial websites using WordPress but in this article he reports that he is moving on. The article as a whole is a list of WordPress's weaknesses and failings. I can relate, having done my own share of WordPress dev over the last few years. Some of the issues are minor, but some would require a major revision. Turning off the advertising in the admin interface is easy. Sandboxing plugins, on th other hand, isn't something you just do overnight. I agree with the the users who hate the Gutenberg content editor. Chavda is moving to Hatamoto (and this post is on the Hatamoto website, so take it with a grain of salt) but I think a lot of people are looking at Ghost as an option.