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Presentation
Open Education and Innovations in Teaching and Learning: Future Directions
Stephen Downes, May 15, 2024, 2024 Open Education Bootcamp, Online, via Zoom

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Conversation between experts on the topics of open education, artificial intelligence, and the future of open.

[Link] [Video]

Skills Transcripts at Scale: Why The ETS & MTC Partnership is a Big Deal
Tom Vander Ark, Getting Smart, 2024/05/15

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Just a note on what the reform crowd is up to. The Mastery Transcript Consortium "provides a mastery transcript that replaces traditional high school transcripts. Instead of a list of courses and grades, learners share competencies with colleges and employers." ETS (formerly Educational Testing Service) companies "deliver learning and assessment solutions around the world." The real big deal in this space will be when AI performs skills and competencies assessments based on real-world data and nobody is needed in the middle to own the process.

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Generative AI is Doomed
Eric Goldman, SSRN, 2024/05/15

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"We're experiencing an epochal shift in technology, on the order of magnitude of the Internet's commercialization," writes Eric Goldman (19 page PDF), "but this time, the regulators are intervening early, in a massive and unrelenting way." Hence the prediction in the title. Regulators will misunderstand the technology while seeing to control and censor the outputs. It doesn't help that incumbent technology companies are seeking to preserve their advantage. "Misdirected or malicious Generative AI regulations jeopardize all kinds of algorithmic activities, from personalized content to algorithmically sorted search results - things that we rely upon many times a day." Related: audio interview with Goldman about the talk.

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Google is redesigning its search engine — and it’s AI all the way down
David Pierce, The Verge, 2024/05/15

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During the playoffs I like to keep track of the scores, so I do a search. P{roblem is, there are four games, but Google only displays three results. It's so frustrating. I have to scroll way down to get a link to the actual website that displays all the scores. If Google has its way, I might never get to that website at all. As Kottke summarizes, "it's better/cheaper to provide potentially wrong answers to keep you clicking within Google than it is to send you away for the right answers." And an answer doesn't have to be incorrect to be wrong. It just has to be something I don't want. Like incomplete scores. Or summaries instead of sources.

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The problem isn’t AI, it's the zero-sum future we're being sold
David White, 2024/05/15

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I agree with this part of the post: "There is a tendency here to imply a zero-sum principle to humanness: the more the tech can do the less it means to be human. This feels wrong to me and isn't helpful in an educational context." But I don't agree with what I think is the main point, which is to focus on human creativity as the differentiator. We'll find, I think, that we can't think of human activity in the age in a nice neat Bloom's taxonomy package. We'll be looking at completely new human activities outside the domain of the taxonomy - valuate, maybe. Or obviate. Whatever. When it's not zero sum, it means we're adding something that wasn't there before. And that's what I expect.

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We publish six to eight or so short posts every weekday linking to the best, most interesting and most important pieces of content in the field. Read more about what we cover. We also list papers and articles by Stephen Downes and his presentations from around the world.

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