Stephen Downes

Simon Willison discusses the latest AI fad, Jev, also known as "System One" models. "I'm with Maggie Appleton," he writes, "I think 'decision models' is a better name for these." Is basically black box AI. "Jev is an interesting variant on the usual LLM format: it still accepts text inputs, but instead of text output it returns floating point numbers corresponding to categories, yes/no questions, ratings, and associated confidence scores." As Willison notes, "It's great for anything that can be expressed as a classification task—think spam detection, suggesting labels, prioritization and ranking." Ah, that describes (sadly) so much educational activity (people have been going gaga over it in LinkedIn).

We typically think of work integrated learning (WIL) as similar to an apprenticeship where the student is effectively employed by some company while also completing their studies. That's fine if define your identity as 'employee', but what if you're thinking more broadly than that? There's still a value in WIL even if it doesn't mean "working for someone else". This paper (15 page PDF), I think, addresses that "by positioning first-year, non-placement, community-engaged WIL as an identity-forming process rather than solely a late-stage employability intervention." As the authors write, "earlier, curriculum-embedded engagement with community and professional contexts may play a formative role in shaping how students begin to understand, relate to, and envision future professional identities from the outset of university study."

Miguel Guhlin presents "a project I'd been working on since May as a side-project. It started as a way to capture the idea of "instructional rasquachismo" (see a 15-minute version of my preso). The work wasn't my main focus at the time, a weekend and evening project, but as I worked to make tools I could and would use in a classroom, I realized that I'd gone a long way past the idea of having an interactive whiteboard tool that works in your browser." Two things of note here. The first is that you could just start using these tools - the data saves locally and it "does NOT collect any personal data and students/staff do NOT need an account." Second (and probably more importantly), you could create your own version of this if you were willing to spend a little on AI and some time deciding what you want. 

The U.S. government "wants US social media companies excluded from digital duty of care laws, which would give Australians the option to opt out of algorithmic feeds." Why would this matter? The algorithm is the difference between a social networking service that connects users with people and resources they want and a social networking service that is a channel for advertising and political messaging. Obviously there's a lot more money to be made by the latter, but it also causes a lot of harm. The public interest and social education are fulfilled much better by the former. At some point, instead of simply banning social media for children, people need to have the right to define and build their own algorithms, serving their own interests, without corporate and political interests intervening in the process.

This report (72 page PDF) is a few years old, and it's the end point of a series of links I traced from Sam Chaltain to the ecosystem lab page to this intro. It speaks to "a growing movement among school leaders to reimagine learning in ways that center the child, prioritize equity, and recognize the integrated nature of community," According to the authors, learner-centered ecosystems "are networked systems that support children and young people to find, build, and navigate their individual learning journeys while tapping into the connections, community, and resources that have widely been left out of the conventional public education experience." This has all the words that appeal to me. In addition, the ecosystems in question are place-based and teacher and community led. 

As this story reports, "Venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz is launching a school called The Horowitz Andreessen Academy aimed at aspiring founders who have just graduated high school and have not yet attended college." I like this description: " this is like if Y Combinator (the most famed startup school) and Peter Thiel's Fellowship Program (a famed program for young people who opt to build companies instead of attend college) had a baby." They've raised $42 million to fund it and are starting with a cohort of 50 students wealthy enough to pay elite-level tuition and looking for an inside track to connections and job opportunities. See also: the a16z newsletter announcement.