Stephen Downes

Doug Belshaw responds to a my post on this article about AI literacy. It is useful both for its clarity of vision and comprehensive approach. Belshaw sees "literacy as inseparable from the social contexts in which it is practised" and draws on examples such as Wenger-Trayner's Community of Practice model to illustrate this. Communities have their own literacies, and "ethical considerations are not separate to literacies, but instead are part of what it means to be literate in these spaces."

Bryan Alexander summarizes and then criticizes a Chronicle article by Scott Latham that can be summarized with two pullquotes: "Professors need to dispense with the delusional belief that AI can't do their job" and "I can think of no plausible scenario in which there will be an equal number of faculty members in 10 years as there are today." Alexander responds with a traditionalist stance: the lack of a working business model for AI, potential issues with copyright, regulation, energy use, resistance from faculty, AI as a threat to democracy, and resistance to dependence on screens. I could respond to all of these (again) but none of these objections holds. The only thing protecting today's faculty will be the slow speed of change; the future always arrives later than we think. That said, the greatest weakness in Latham's argument is a lack of imagination. When new technology arrives, we can either serve the same client base with fewer staff (which is what Latham predicts) or a much larger population with the same staff (which is my vision for the future). Learning technology has at least the potential to make higher education accessible to everybody; the greatest threat to that vision is the university itself, which for centuries has defined itself as serving (only) the elite.

More than half this paper focuses on the problem, which is well known: the under-representation of knowledge and perspectives from marginalized communities in academic research. The authors draw on a model for a distributed university as a mechanism for addressing that need. I wasn't clear on reading this whether the authors were looking at knowledge created by under-represented communities, or merely drawn from them, or through some process of co-creation (all three are mentioned) and the difference to me would be significant. I think, though, that the overall idea is sound, though much more attention would need to be paid developing the solution than is offered here.

Dave Cormier has written a book and Terry Anderson has given it a generally positive review along with a thorough description. "The book outlines the need for three illusive but necessary 21st century literacies. The first is surprising: It is a requirement for humility.... The second literacy is the need to cultivate sources of informed trust. No source, guru, or teaching is always correct for all time... The final literacy is to always think about the values that we hold and share that are always at play in our thinking and discourse."

According to this article, people are having their online presence enhanced by a reputation management firm operated in New Jersey. They exhibit "a similar pattern of spam and false web content surrounding them. Website registration records, online advertising data and connections between fake social media profiles indicate that pattern points to a New Jersey reputation management firm called cleanyourname.com." While the world complains about AI, humans continue their centuries-old pursuit of scams and deception.

The more higher ed depends on public support, the more it needs to focus on public scholarship. This approach "emphasizes community-based research, where colleges and universities collaborate closely with local, state, and regional partners to address real-world issues." Supporting this work are Research Information Management Systems (RIMS), also known as Current Research Information Systems (CRIS). These "track publications and scholarly activities of faculty (to) give an overall picture of the research and scholarly enterprise of an institution, and they offer faculty tools for collaborating (and) publicizing their work." RIMS systems include Converis, Pure, Symplectic Elements, and the open source Profiles and VIVO.