Stephen Downes

You know how there are those applications where you load some data and then get a graph or chart as output? How about one where you do the same thing, but get a text article instead? Voila! Robot journalism from data. Have a look at this incredible example. Scroll down in the right pane to get some links to editable demos. This isn't the first such; as Tony Hirst comments, ""Robot Journalism" was thing I spent a fair amount of time tinkering with... Many of the approaches relied on templated and/or rule based systems (example with durable-rules) for generating text from data sets." But the presentation and framing are what really work here.

Subtitled: " Stop Teaching Tools, Start Transforming Minds." Interesting article on how to teach the teachers about AI. As the subtitle suggests, it's more about learning how to adapt to a new way of thinking than it is to learning how to use a new tool. "The academics who most gracefully navigate this transition won't be those who master the perfect prompt or memorise the latest features. They'll be those who dare to have their assumptions challenged, who turn their anxieties into experiments, who let their professional identity evolve through - not despite - their engagement with AI." This of course has always been true of technology, not just AI. Those who best navigated social media, for example, where those who experimented with it, challenging their own apprehensions and finding out for themselves whether they were reasonable.

While their quality may vary, AI agents are definitely here. Any doubt you may have about that should be removed after reading this article and playing with the many many examples of AI agents provided. We get a long list here, divided into categories such as computer and browser use, voice interfaces, document understanding, testing, monitoring, simulation, vertical agents (such as an AI researcher), and more. There's also some background into how agents work and tools used to develop them. All of this leads to the inevitable question: is your website agent-friendly?

When I taught critical thinking to beginning students I would always start the same way: by highlighting how much of the field they already knew. "Brakeless trains are dangerous," I would say. "And this train has no brakes. Your conclusion?" That this train is dangerous, came the inevitable response. I'd run though a series of them, eventually landing on some cases - always the same cases - that tripped them up. The woman bank teller, for example. In this interview, Roman Feiman says "a lot of those mistakes are due to how the tests, games, and questions are set up" but my own view is that it's because the students' knowledge of logic is learned from experience using associative reasoning (that is, the kind of reasoning a neural network would perform). They can be taught higher-order logical principles, but it's no something that they possess innately.

Before Britain exited the European Union (Brexit) EU students could access British higher education at lower fees. After Brexit, we had what Alex Usher calls "one of the greatest financial experiments ever conducted in global higher education." Fees for most EU students were substantially higher. The result? It's in the headline. Higher fees mean fewer enrolments, especially for students from less wealthy nations or families. There's an impact on the student, obviously, but perhaps not surprisingly Paul Wakeling focuses on the impact on the classroom experience for domestic students and the impact on British soft power.

Miguel Guhlin points to this article arguing that "despite the blossoming body of evidence suggesting technology in schools might actually hinder learning, Australian education has been fooled by the vacuous claims of tech companies and relinquished control of our classrooms to those who care only about lining their own pockets." It's important to remember that schools serve two important functions: the first is to provide a free public education for everyone, and the second is to ensure all children are supported and cared for, especially if parents work. We could probably replace the first part with learning technology. But the second is a lot harder to support without schools, as we learned during the pandemic.