OLDaily

Presentation
Delivering Solutions for Education in a Rapidly Changing Digital World
Stephen Downes, Sept 28, 2022, Digital With Purpose Summit 2022, Online, to Lisbon, Portugal

I was a part of this panel along with other members of the Covid Education Alliance (CovidEA). This session explores the ways in which digital solutions are currently used in our learning systems and how their uses can be expanded upon. Panelists discuss the priorities and concrete actions needed to transition to effective, sustainable education systems that prepare students and learners for the future.

[Link] [Slides] [Video]

Story Swap
Jennifer Jarson, ACRLog, 2022/09/28

This is a fun post. I noticed first the sweeping redefinition of the word 'story' to include "allegories, analogies, anecdotes, images, memes, metaphors, and more", none of which (except anecdotes) I would consider an actual 'story'. No matter. I'm onboard with this redefinition, especially as I read through the contributions from various people that followed - literature review as a container ship, fact checkers reading laterally, accessing music as a process, the weight of information, etc. (Image created from the text of this OLDaily post by DALL-E).

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DALL-E image generator is now open to everyone
Benj Edwards, Ars Technica, 2022/09/28

As the article says, "DALL-E launched frenzy of image synthesis development but was invitation-only until now." Now you can play too. Sign in here. See also: How-to Geek, TechCrunch. The image for this post was created by DALL-E using the prompt "Stephen Downes working on an article for OLDaily in the style of Picasso" (and maybe I should make it the new newsletter logo). Related: Getty Images bans AI-generated content over fears of legal challenges (which suggests to me that Getty Images would like to sue someone over all this, but isn't sure exactly how).

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A Sweeping Plan to Fix Everything Still Wrong With Student Debt
Kevin Carey, Slate, 2022/09/28

Kevin Carey offers a mostly reasonable approach to addressing the student loan crisis in the Unites States. His proposal breaks down to three major parts: a system of focused grants for colleges and public universities in exchange for $0 tuition rates, and two mechanisms to require institutions b subject to a "gainful employment test" at the undergraduate and graduate levels. These latter criteria are well-meaning: to push back at scams. Students "were victimized by... a lawless environment in which individual universities, some among the most prestigious in the world, deliberately choose to rip them off." Universities, says Carey, should also share the risk and "be liable for 50 percent of the cost to the taxpayer of any graduate school loan that goes into default." I want to push back against the 'employability' criterion - not only is employability notoriously hard to predict, it's not wrong for people, including those from lower demographics, to learn philosophy or boat building. What's wrong is a system that charges such huge fees for people to acquire such an education.

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So, this is a thing…
Jon Dron, 2022/09/28

Jon Dron's post moves in two directions, as does most discussion in the field. On the one hand, it tracks the development of AI-generated student essays being marked by AI systems, with classes taught by AI teachers. "The result is going to be a set of ever-worse copies of copies," he says. On the other hand, the desirable path is "about people, learning to be people, in the presence of and through interaction with other people... about creativity, compassion, and meaning." I don't think the AI picture is as dystopian as h projects, nor is the humanitarian picture as utopian. AI can help feed and educate the world, while humans are responsible for cruelty and war. We in education need to situate ourselves in this reality, and not pine for some pastoral past that never existed for most of us.

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