Stephen Downes

The story: "Anthropic recently released their Model Context Protocol (MCP), an open standard describing a protocol for integrating external resources and tools with LLM apps. The release includes SDKs implementing the protocol, as well as an open-source repository of reference implementations of MCP." It's important because this is the sort of way learning technology will integrate with AI engines.

When I studied history in school, it was told from the perspective of Europeans, as they gradually unveiled the mystery that was new world and the darkness that was Africa. The perspective of Indigenous people, who already knew these places existed, was not represented. Over time this perspective has shifted, but it needs to be more than just additive, write the authors of this paper (32 page PDF). They offer five recommendations: "(1) challenge hegemonic narratives, (2) value Indigenous ways of knowing and being, (3) reflect on privilege and positionality, (4) engage in the ethical dimension, and (5) focus on the future." I note that 'ways of knowing', as presented here, is probably better characterized as 'ways of experiencing'. Image: Donna Ward.

This is a long interview with Jon Dron, and well worth the time it takes to read. It's too rich to summarize, but I found this bit salient: "I have written nothing without AI input for at least 25 years. Every time you run a search in a search engine, or visit a social medium, or use autocorrect you are using AI. AIs have participated in our cognition for a long time."

One of the 'predictions' from yesterday has come true today. It was a pretty easy prediction, given that OpenAI had already entered o3 into competitions. "These models improve reasoning capabilities over prior models, offering developers new opportunities to solve increasingly complex tasks. o3 sets a new benchmark in technical performance, particularly in coding and mathematics."

The main takeaway here is that we're lucky Musk can't buy Wikipedia, because we know what he would do to it. This article in Newsweek could be a lot more balanced, as it finds only "one self-identified behavioral psychologist" who is not named to respond to the criticisms. Anyhow, I made a point of donating today. Via Fredrik Graver.

This list is interesting not so much for the predictions - more AI in education, personalized learning paths, and obvious things like OpenAI announcing o3 (which already exists), Google announcing Gemini 2.0, etc. - but for the list of people who pretty much never reach these pages because they're active mostly behind the login barrier that is LinkedIn. And as readers know, my policy here is to as much as possible offer links that take you straight to the article, no logins, accounts or subscriptions required. Also, as I looked through their LinkedIn pages, it struck me how the profiles listed a university affiliation and a business or company. It's like being a university professor isn't enough; you have to have a side hustle. Anyhow, some of the preductions are text, some are video (wothut transcript).