Stephen Downes

I was reviewing something I had written the other day when I realized I had used the word 'delve'. What did this mean? Had I succumbed to parroting the AI style? Wasn't I afraid of being labeled an AI user? Neither: it was just the word that seemed to fit. I left it in. So anyhow, this article wrestles with a similar dilemma for academic writers. What happens to creative thought when AI is everywhere? "Users become both architects and artefacts." I had a few responses to the paper: one, a visceral dislike for the writing style; another, wherein I commented on LinkedIn, "Makes you pine for the days when only the rich could afford intellectual dishonesty and unearned advantage." Another, where I considered the possibility that there was a genuine issue being raised that addressed both human and AI content equally. In the end, all I was left with was 'meh'.

The most recent bit of AI jargon is something that might take you back to the days of the Amazon Echo and Alexa: skills. Today's version, however, comes from Anthropic and is being (quietly) adopted by OpenAI. "A skill is just a folder with a Markdown file and some optional extra resources and scripts, so any LLM tool with the ability to navigate and read from a filesystem should be capable of using them." Here's where they show up in OpenAI. "Skills are a keeper," says Simon Willison.  

I didn't have much money when I was young so for me reading meant buying used mass market paperbacks. These were at best temporary books, and would often fall apart. But I wasn't building a library to decorate a house! Anyhow, with the arrival of the internet I was able to read as much as I wanted essentially for free, and I stopped buying them (I remember the point in time exactly - I had read the first two Game of Thrones books and was waiting for the third to come out in paperback... and it never did (maybe it did eventually, but I waited years). No way I was going to pay for a hardcover, so that was the end for me.) Anyhow, Ben Werdmuller writes, "ReaderLink, the largest book distributor in America, is going to stop carrying them - and we'll notice the effect immediately."

Alan Levine makes a point of offering a Hat Tip for the OER Foundation. He writes, "The courses shared through OERu are built on the web first approaches of collaborative authoring via a wiki and a dynamic distribution system based on open protocols. This is a credit to the vision and commitment of Wayne Mackintosh over 16 years. And so much was built and share in not only the tools, but the methods, but technologist Dave Lane, who always shared his expertise with me for years and years." I do hope someone in the world can step forward to host the content and services.

It is truly a disappointment to read that Open Education Resource Foundation (OERF) and its services are being terminated. Reading the note, it really feels like it was killed rather than starved - funding was withdrawn, but in such a way that there was no way for the organization to try to find alternative funding (now I could be wildly misreading this; that's just how it comes across to me). "The OER Foundation maintains an extensive Free and Open Source Software technology infrastructure, specifically 48 instances of 32 different web application services in support of its charitable mission, operating across eleven servers (one physical and 10 virtual) located in Germany and the United States. Web traffic data shows that this infrastructure supports in excess of 140 million unique visitors from over 120 different countries a year." Staff have a week to find new jobs. Image: Alan Levine.

The purpose of a ranking system is often to create a market rather than to merely describe it (fans of university rankings take note). This is brilliantly demonstrated in this report showing how a Google Maps depiction of restaurant popularity quietly tips the scales in the direction of "relevance, distance, and prominence." It's this third that is more interesting here (since, again, it features so heavily in university rankings). "In the language of digital economics, ranking algorithms act as attention allocators, steering demand toward some firms and away from others."