Stephen Downes

Some truth from Julian Stodd: "Our desire to keep people at the centre of our organisations is noble, understandable, but ultimately not borne out by history or experience." We have always been happy to outsource labour - to machines, to overseas workers, to whatever. "Once labour becomes substitutable, the market will substitute it. Just ask anyone who owns a wheelbarrow." And few outside labour unions have complained; the people who opine and write and make decisions about such things have been insulated from the consequences and haven't really cared. Until now. Now it's the organization itself that can be replaced. Most service organizations exist because there is an information assymetry, writes Stodd. We pay for their services not because we want to but because we have to, and if AI redresses that assymetry, then we can and will stop paying them. Even if the people in question are the people who opine and write and make decisions.

Doug Belshaw captures here some core questions about learning and memory. "In Borges' story Funes the Memorious, the protagonist falls from a horse and acquires a perfect memory... As Borges writes: "To think is to forget a difference, to generalise, to abstract. In the overly replete world of Funes there were nothing but details.'" But what Borges calls 'forgetting' others might call 'filtering', and what's interesting to me is that it's the opposite of what most people think of as abstraction, where generalization is a process of inductive inference reaching (ideally) to universal principles and the essences of things. That's where my thinking usually lingers, but Belshaw also takes this in the direction of organizational memory, AI, and dashboard design. "There is a useful distinction to be drawn between legibility and significance: Legibility means that something is capturable as data... Significance means who important that data is in terms of actually mattering." The details are legible. The generalizations are significant. But they're not (contra the universalists) simple. "They're difficult to quantify not because they're 'vague' but because they're complex. It's difficult to put a single number on complexity." A rich post.

The question being posed here is whether there is, "in certain forms of sharing, a more or less well-disguised colonialism?" The three authors each offer their own view. My own view aligns most closely with that expressed by Darrion Letendre, who says "colonialism is a problem because its very foundations inherently contradict what open education strives to be: inclusive, communal, accessible, openly licensed, and easily adaptable." The other two authors each raise the issue of reciprocity, but from different directions: one where we take without giving back, and the other where we give without taking back. These are, if you will, two aspects of openness: sharing of your own stuff with others, and being open to receiving what other people have to share. I think both are important, but I don't think it should be thought of as transactional. Anyhow, do take the time to have a look at this. See also SSIR, Autonomy, Culture and the Voice of Silence.

"One of the challenges of building instructional design portfolio samples is the lack of a Subject Matter Expert (SME)," writes Christy Tucker. "If you're working on your own, you don't have a SME to collaborate with like you would for a real project." She adsdresses this need with the help of an AI. "But these days you have the option of using AI (specifically, an LLM) as your stand-in SME and collaborator. You can use an LLM as a thought partner to brainstorm ideas, generate briefs, perform a hypothetical needs analysis, gather information, and provide feedback." This article demonstrates how that works using the discipline of 'stormwater protection' as an example. I think it's a pretty good idea, and a good example of using AI creatively to fill a real need.

This is kind of fun. Some background: "EGOT stands for Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony... What makes the EGOT so compelling is not that someone won four awards. It is that each award represents mastery in a completely different domain. Television. Music. Film. Theatre." The fun part: "What would be your personal EGOT? ... four achievements, spanning different parts of your life, that when taken together would signal something rare and meaningful?" I won't focus on the 'achievements' so much as the different domains. For me it's: journalism, education, computing, philosophy. What are my achievements in these four areas? That's easy: OLDaily, MOOCs, gRSShopper and Connectivism, respectively. I'm not sure what the EGOT would be for those four, but I am pretty sure it doesn't matter. The main thing, for me, is being able to combine these in interesting ways, and I've been able to do that, and build a career out of it. 

A number of well-known journalists are finding their names, and presumably their talents, used without permission by Grammarly's AI editing tool. "Instead of producing what looks like a generic critique from a nameless LLM," Wired reported last week (archive), Expert Review "lists a number of real academics and authors available to weigh in on your text. To be clear: Those people have nothing to do with this process." I have no idea where this would land legally. These days, who knows? But it's definitely ethically dubious; there seems to be a difference between 'editing in the style of Jay Rosen' and 'painting in the style of Picasso'. But what that difference is, exactly, is difficult to pin down. What about 'Physics lectures in the style of Richard Feynman'?