Stephen Downes

This is a bit of an update on the topic of fake news and misinformation. The use of the term 'psyop' is a clever way to externalize (and militarize) the use of language as a weapon. Reading through the three steps, however, I was first struck by it being centered on U.S. politics (the first step is "pay attention to media messages that paint groups of American people as foreign, or somehow not quite "real" Americans"). This is known more generally as 'othering' and can be used anywhere. But I was also struck by how dated and clumsy the mechanisms are. Misinformation today is far more sophisticated, personalized and targeted, generated by AI, used to create not just othering and criminalization but also loyalty, affinity, identification and many more attitudes, and used widely for commercial, political and military purposes. Via Ben Werdmuller.

The first educational technology was language, and despite having used it for so long we still have much to learn about it. This survey article looks at three papers addressing the question of what words are and what they do, beginning with David Kaplan's Words and considering some objections. Kaplan is mostly interested in the role of words as names for things, but there's a lot more to words than that, even in the case of words that name - just ask Max Power. David Strohmaier argues that our study of words should be more empirical and less theoretical - "empirical complexities cannot just be ignored away by focusing on those areas least accessible to empirical investigation" - and while I don't disagree we would need to discuss at some length just what would count as empirically relevant in such a discussion.

I don't make political posts here on OLDaily, for some very good reasons, but I am interested and informed about the ongoing trials of western democracies and the challenges they face. This post from SSIR talks about adopting a 'founders mentality' in order to rebuild the structures of society. But that points to the problem as well as the solution - no doubt we need to renew democracy, but this will not be accomplished by a small group of well-connected individuals drafting a manifesto. Today's democracy does depend on such groups, and that's a big part of the problem. We need to learn to govern ourselves inclusively, creating a society that works for all, and that's a different set of skills from the ones we learned about working and negotiating in small groups and teams.

More coverage of the emergence of live news coverage on platforms like Twitch, YouTube and TikTok, this item from the University of Oregon, where the research was conducted. I'm a regular viewer and financial supporter of Reporting from Ukraine, a good example of this. "Twitch users relish communicating live with each other and the streamer through a text-based chat room. That 'liveness' redefines the concept of 'live news' in that the content producer and audiences parse news together in real time, each contributing content or sources and together analyzing information. This relationship forced the three channels to make operational decisions toward balancing engagement with editorial independence." Via Michelle Manafy.

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."