Stephen Downes

I'm going to take Sudhir Gupta's criticisms of Khan Academy as granted, because I think the points are valid. The method - which assumes reliable internet connectivity and sustained, individual device access, and digital literacy - runs the risk of subsidizing the rich rather than helping the poor. As Gupta says, "showcasing Navodaya schools as 'India impact' feels misleading... They represent the exception - the already-well-resourced institutions." Fair enough. But the proposed solution - 'Teacher Mode' - requires even more investment, specifically, human teachers. Going back to the technologies that were too expensive in the past won't address this even more pressing problem in the future. Mass media - books, radio, television - get us part of the way. Mass personal media will be needed to get us the rest of the way. But how to do that, while avoiding the worst excesses of 'personalized learning' and social media - that is the question.

This is quite a nice paper (15 page PDF) that looks at the role of social media in learning. It is typically found to be limited by institutional constraints, as higher education institutions prefer their own platforms and methodologies. But "such assumptions limit conceptual understanding of how learning is organised and sustained in contexts where institutional provision is fragmented and digital infrastructure is unreliable," like, say, Liberia. Here, we see social media play a very different role. "Social media platforms function as de facto learning infrastructure (and) are frequently appropriated to support academic coordination, explanation, and peer learning in higher education contexts." The Constraint-Responsive Social Media Learning Framework (CR-SMLF) outlined in the paper describes this.

In this statement from the Chinese Minister of Education, three priorities are outlined: "promoting a shift in higher education toward greater emphasis on competency development and value guidance," which is a response to AI; "promoting a greater emphasis on cross-sector integration in higher education," and third, "promoting a greater emphasis on openness and cooperation in higher education." On the third, the statement adds, "Divergences and even conflicts in thinking and cultural values persist among different civilizations and nations. In an interconnected human community, the principles of openness and cooperation, understanding and trust, and innovation and creation among universities are values to uphold and directions to follow."

I read the Washington Post article, which you can find via an archive, and then waited for the inevitable response. It came this morning. The gist of the Post article is that students are using 'loopholes' to power their way through degree programs in just a few weeks instead of the months or years it normally takes. Here's what George Veletsianos writes. "These learners aren't gaming a loophole. They're demonstrating self-direction, time management and strategic planning... They are demonstrating it on the assessments their own institutions designed to measure it." And I think this is a good point. Some people might argue, "well you need the extra time to acquire the skills and competencies that just aren't measured on the test." But what skills? What competencies? If you need them, and you can't test for them, what distinguishes them from magic?

I would like to think that, as Mike Caulfield says, "the magic tricks phase of prompting is over," but as long as there's a LinkedIn, there are going to be 'magic tricks' articles. But what Caulfield is saying here is that we don't need that any more (if we ever did). "Your value add is, for the most part, figuring out how to do things, and figuring out how to explain them in a way that someone other than you can do them... Your special power is in better understanding the things you already know. Focus on how to do the thing." Yes. That's how I'm using Claude to write software, and how I actually write these posts by hand. There's no trick. (That's also how I feel theories in education generally- in this article that role is filled by all the cute acronyms). (p.s. Cast Away is one of my favourite movies ever and it's just this analysis that makes it so clear why it is.)

This is just a sandbox, so it might not last the week. Who knows? But it's just another example of the blossoming of code happening at the moment. This particular application, Jellyboard, is a post-it not board on an infinite canvas that lets you group and link notes. That's it. Super simple. Really effective. Here's one created by Matthias Melcher on the virtues of two-pane layouts.