Stephen Downes

Yet another helpful resource from the eCampusOntario Open Library, this pressbook is subtitled 'Strategies and Exercises for Meaningful Use in Higher Ed." The first 'chapter' is just a few paragraphs; the second contains a useful listing of AI engines and links to some AI databases. You'll also like the section on developing AI integrated projects, with ideas for some 17 fields of study. My main criticism is that it's so short - if you're going to take the time and effort to write an ebook, do a proper job of it.

I'll just quote Dave Cormier on this, with approval: "This new regulation takes the most flexible and powerful information retrieval tool of all time and bans it from the places where our kids learn to learn - Ontario schools. Cell phones are super distracting. You might be reading this now when you should be doing something else. Just ignoring the devices is not going to help us get any better at controlling our usage or learning to do a better job finding/evaluating/assembling information. We are going to make our schools into imaginary places that have no connection to how knowledge is made. We need to adapt, not lock ourselves into a box."

The comment culture has all but disappeared, notes Alan Levine. There's no one reason. "Not that attention is my purpose or goal, but really, there is so much more stuff out there, that we are swimming in it. But heck, a small but of validation goes a long way, and I don't see much by some heart click icon." True. But as I comment, the platforms drive comments - it used to be, people world link to their blog post on Twitter, people would follow and comment. The platform drives the comments - but this is much less the case in Mastodon, though I suspect this will change in time.

This is a short and not especially useful article, but it does contain one sentence that stimulates thought: "Readily-available training can help institutions take advantage of AI tools." Now it is true that there have been formal programs in AI for years (most norably the Norvig and Thrun AI course) but so much has changed in the last few years universities have not kept up - hence the need for 'readily-available training' which is almost exclusively informal and online. AI isn't the first discipline to outpace the capacity of institutions to respond, and it won't be the last, but the current situation underlines the need for institutions to adapt to the faster pace of knowledge and learning needs.

I haven't tried either of these tools - I have a GPT4 account and use that. But I've been hearing that both of these are a step up. Here's the review: "Both tools have a lot to offer. If you need citations as part of your responses, Perplexity Pro wins hands-down. But be careful to not rule Gemini Advanced out, though. Its integration into Google Workspace means you will be using it in the future, one way or another." Each of the is about $20 a month, as is chatGPT-4. Your AI costs could add up faster than a cable bill if you're not careful.

I made a comment during a talk earlier this week (slides, audio coming soon) that we cannot become ethical people merely by avoiding risk. That's why I challenge risk-based definitions of ethics in AI research and practice. We have to hope for and work toward something better. That's at the core of a lot of punk-based rebellion, and I will confess, if it has 'punk' in the name, I'm probably on board, because it implies building and doing and making for yourself. With that preamble (emphasis on the 'amble') I introduce this paper, which tries to do better: "cultivating hopepunk and solarpunk attitudes within the field of higher education and educational technology, as well as rewidening and rewilding higher education using utopian imagination, the article (20 page PDF) points towards more hopeful, preferable futures for the people and the planet."