Stephen Downes

Good article with lots of good ideas, and a few maybe not quite so good (the trick, as always, is telling which is which), along with a key point: "Part of the problem here is that every Fediverse server in the network is a full-blown platform, rather than a client.... The primary side effect of every Fediverse server being a platform instead of a client is that every platform needs its own account to be used." What we want, I think, is "user accounts (that) are free-floating, peer-to-peer identities."

This is the third of a three part series (part one, part two, part three) from Matt Crosslin. The tone of the articles is, I think, well reflected in the title. In the first two he criticizes people he calls 'AI Cheerleaders', including mostly myself, responding to our criticisms of AI scepticism, including mostly his own. There's too much to address here in a short post, but readers can judge for themselves. In the third, he responds to a critique authored by ChatGPT identifying (numerous) fallacies in one of his articles. His response, in part, is that "using ChatGPT in this manner is just a major misunderstanding of how to use logical fallacies. My post in question is a rebuttal and alternate viewpoint (if that wasn't obvious from the title), not a logical argument." It is not often I see writers argue by saying they are not offering a logical argument.

Based on what I've seen from his work online, this would have to be a pretty good workshop. "Welcome to my resources for my NSPA AI Fast Track session, Crafting Better AI Prompts: Unlocking Efficiency and Accuracy for Scholarship Workflows. This page offers a few links and resources curated for your use." The resources listed, though not fully comprehensive, anre nonetheless useful. I'm positing it here to have a link handy for my own sessions coming up.

This paper documents the creation of a community of practice (CoP) around the development of a course-based undergraduate research experience (CURE) in biology. It highlights three major features of a CoP: engaging in activities of mutual interest, building relationships through shared activity, and creating common resources (though all are probably necessary, I would assign the most importance to the third). It also noted that the CoP additionally supported an increased sense of confidence and self-reflection among participants. These all had a direct relationship, I would say, in addressing the barriers listed preventing faculty from developing a CURE for their students.

This paper (16 page PDF) documents the use of a Learning Engineering Evidence and Decision (LEED) tracker to answer three questions. To paraphrase: How do practitioners track and cite sources of influence on design decisions? Requirements and Experience. How do practitioners communicate, revisit, and iterate these decisions? Stakeholder requirements and technical changes. When revisions were made to decisions, what sources of influences led to these changes? Changes to requirements, and experience. I think the study was worth conducting, but the overall pattern that emerges for me is that there isn't much recording of the basis for decisions other than the requirements document. "The exclusive concentration of decisions that cite Requirements: SME across CIF projects... reflects the strong presence of an instructor (SME) throughout the projects and how this influence was top of mind for LDPs when designing."

Todd Conway writes about the loss and recreation of his community before, during and after Covid. The strength of the article is the personal perspective; it isn't about 'learning loss' or any of the made-up phenomena that followed Covid, it was his own actions and experiences. I confess I am nowhere near as avid a seeker of community as Conway. So I'm a bit of an outsider looking at this perspective, which makes me all the more appreciative that it was shared.