Stephen Downes

There has been a 'blog-or-die' meme circulating around, which is good for me, because it gives me more things to pass on in my newsletter. Not that Alan Levine needed a push! Anyhow, here he is talking about podcasting. He links to "the massive and open API enabled Podcast Index where you can search and find almost any podcast" and visit's Ed's podcast list, which I linked to a few days ago, and offers his own Cogdog's Podcast List (also good for me because it gave me Ed's last name). Thus inspired, I exported the OPML from my own podcast player to bring you Stephen's Podcast List, a set of favourites curated over decades of online listening.

This starts out as a good post but gradually decreases in quality with each successive paragraph, finally resting on the well-worn Socratic critique of writing, "forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it." The main (and interesting) point addresses the relevance of the question in the title in the first place: "Such questions matter (not because of any answers they may or may not provide), but because their framing is indicative of a techno-determinist mindset, which is itself inseparable from the marketing of edtech products." Why? "The only meaningful question concerns how the technology is used in specific settings with specific groups of learners," which is something, says Philip Kerr, that a meta-analysis can never address (why not? we'll never know...). Alas, instead of pursuing what might have been a fruitful discussion, we are taken on a tour of poor and increasingly threadbare allusions (a line of coke, mental effort, cognitive load, The Shallows, profit-driven corporations, Socrates).

The utility of this paper (28 page PDF) from the World Economic Forum is that it will give readers a common vocabulary to talk about AI agents. "An AI agent can be broadly defined as an entity that senses percepts (sound, text, image, pressure etc.) using sensors and responds (using effectors) to its environment." The paper describes the progression from simple rule-based agents to multi-agent systems that can sense the environment, adapt and learn.

Two researchers used AI to author 288 finance papers in order to show how easy it will become to hypothesize after results are known (HARK) in this industry (and presumably any other statistically-driven discipline). "The different versions include creative names for the signals, contain custom introductions providing different theoretical justifications for the observed predictability patterns, and incorporate citations to existing (and, on occasion, imagined) literature supporting their respective claims." Here's the full set of papers on GitHub. Education researchers take note: "The future of financial research may depend less on our ability to generate hypotheses and more on our capacity to distinguish meaningful insights from statistically significant but theoretically hollow findings." 41 page PDF. Via Ethan Mollick.

This is a really long but really important description of the internet we struggle with today. If it's too long to read, here's the main point: "We all live in the ruins created by the Rot Economy, where the only thing that matters is growth. Growth of revenue, growth of the business, growth of metrics related to the business, growth of engagement, of clicks, of time on app, of purchases of micro-transactions, of impressions of ads, of things done that make executives feel happy." This infects educational technology as much as anything else. I would like to think we can create an alternative, but time is running out. Meanwhile, if you do make it to the end, there's a good comparison between 'the rot economy' and Corry Doctorow's criticism of the web that's wqorth a look.

I'm not going to let go of this whole return-to-office (RTO) mandate thing that comes down from higher-ups. "A November study of over 3 million "high-tech and financial" workers at 54 companies on the S&P 500 index (PDF) concluded that RTO mandates could lead to employees doubting leadership's ability to lead and make decisions. Amazon workers were already questioning the "non-data-driven explanation" provided to them for the RTO policy." Count me as being among those with similar doubts. The main reason - so far as I can tell - for enfocing RTO mandates is to make sure we keep spending money we wouldn't otherwise have to spend. Which is no good reason at all. Via Apostolos K.