Stephen Downes

Tony Bates lauds this video by  Anna De Liddo describing social technologies designed to address complex social problems (aka 'wicked' problems, though I hate that term). He suggests starting at the 10 minute mark, but I would recommend jumping ahead to 20. There's a paper on Democratic Reflection that presents "a tool for nudging citizens' democratic engagement with political election debates" but which is  unfortunately behind an expensive paywall (not very democratic, if you ask me). There's a presentation of the tool by Alvaro Martinez Perez and here's a paper (42 page PDF) describing one of the projects, the Cohere CI Dashboard. Also, if you're not familiar with the Open University's Knowledge Media Institute (KMI), be sure to check out their projects and technologies.

The original title for this article was "Exclusive: ChatGPT is creating 'absolute chaos' in education. OpenAI and Wharton are teaming up to educate teachers about using gen AI effectively." The current title captures the story more effectively. And the real story is in the pairing of OpenAI and Wharton. "The new class is co-taught by (Lita) Lilach and Ethan Mollick of the University of Pennsylvania—who have dedicated their lives to AI education. They are the co-founders of the school's generative AI lab." Here's a video promo for the course.

According to this article Australia is pressing forward with plans to bar everyone under the age of 16 from accessing social media. As the story reports, "While the last few years have undoubtedly seen young Australians struggling with online misinformation, re-sharing of personal images, cyber bullying and even explicit AI deepfakes of their likeness, the wide-arching ban has been criticised as an overly broad response to such issues." Additionally, the implications of age verification are beginning to sink in. "The technology currently trialled for the initiative would effectively require users of all ages to run through an age assurance check," a plan that has a significant impact on personal privacy, as well as a means to essentially 'lock down' the internet. Via Kate Bowles.

This article outlines (badly) the sorts of changes impacting higher education institutions, but the main focus is on what it calls 'change fatigue', "a state of emotional and physical exhaustion brought on by frequent and intense changes," symptoms of which include 'combativeness', 'agitation', 'incivility' and more (coincidentally the same symptoms created by low pay or toxic work environments - but I digress). The response, called the Energy Commitment Model, is based on the idea that "once an employee reaches a sufficient level of desire, the individual will engage more fully with the change." To me, it reads like a psychological model created by economists (even the diagrams look like economists'). And it's the usual: "additional focus on open and transparent communication regarding self-care and workload management."

The PLC Directory is "a self-authenticating Decentralized Identifier (DID) system which is strongly-consistent, recoverable, and allows for key rotation." It was developed by Blesky and now holds some 20 million or more DIDs created when Bluesky accounts were created. As Laurens Hof argues, it is one of the "chokepoints" in what is intended to be a decentralized system. Bluesky writes, "While PLC originally stood for "placeholder", the system has been in production use for several months (and while) it is conceivable that the method will evolve or be replaced over time by a successor method, we feel that the current system provides value and is worth consideration as a persistent identifier for other applications." But really, what's needed is to decentralize this as soon as possible, with something akin to the Domain Name System (DNS) stat before it gets too large to change. PLC code is here.

I'm always interested when student activities engage with 'real life', because this is where they learn how the world works, and also develop the networks that will help them through life. This interview with Sharowat Shamin about student politics in Bangladesh is a case in point. What's really interesting, though, about the interview is the overlap between all this and the effort to land civil service jobs, where not only is the competition intense, but also "the constitution requires positive actions, like quotas, to help marginalized groups including religious and ethnic minorites." It's not perfect, but then again, Bangladesh has 160 million people in an area the size of southern Ontario.