Stephen Downes

This wraps up coverage of the lawsuit which we started in these pages some five years ago. "Proctorio submitted a Consent Dismissal Order (CDO) to dismiss the entire lawsuit." The injunction remains, but as Ian Linkletter describes, it doesn't prevent him from doing anything he actually wants to do, like link to public videos, or openly criticize Proctorio. "It cost my life savings ten times over," writes Linkletter, "and I am eternally grateful to the thousands of you from GoFundMe and the Association of Administrative and Professional Staff of UBC for funding my defence after I no longer could." 

It takes a bit to extract the relevant story from the paper (21 page PDF) but happily this article captures the gist: "the AI models struggled to match the level of casual negativity and spontaneous emotional expression common in human social media posts, with toxicity scores consistently lower than authentic human replies across all three platforms." So, um, I guess that's a good thing, though it speaks poorly about the human contributions to social discourse. Interestingly, it's not really a finding that has much applicability outside those social media forums where casual negativity and toxity are commonly found. Via Apostolos K.

Here's another development in the field formerly known as the metaverse: Google Gemini introduces "SIMA 2... an interactive gaming companion. Not only can SIMA 2 follow human-language instructions in virtual worlds, it can now also think about its goals, converse with users, and improve itself over time." One of the example worlds mentioned in the Google post is No Man's Sky, a gaming world in which I am active. It's easy to imagine an AI performing steps of various tasks and missions. Here's a discussion of this.

I would imagine that most people will read this as a statement that Disney will start creating and distributing AI generated content. That's not an inaccurate reading, but I would suggest it's incomplete. Disney is very protective of copyright, yet courts have ruled that AI generated content cannot be copyrighted. So what's Disney up to here? It seems to me they're trying to carve out exceptions to this principle, whereby they can, but others can't, use AI to create certain types of content, and specifically, content based on their existing IP. From there it's just a short step to establishing IP out of AI-generated content.

This appears to be the next step in what we used to call the metaverse - this announcement from Steam about its new controller, gaming PC, and most importantly, VR headset. It's light, wireless, and has something called foveated streaming, which means that it tracks your eyes and delivers higher resolution right where you're looking. They're planning for an early 2026 release so there are many questions, for example, how much they will cost. For me, the question is, can I use them with glasses (which has been my huge issue with VR up to now). Will they impact learning technology? Not right away, but there could be an impact down the road if they pass the gaming and usability test. Here's an hour-long video review.

Alan Levine links to this article from 2021 on two different products with similar names: Discourse and Discord. Discourse is software for hosting online forums, while Discord is software for hosting live discussions. "Discord is immediate and synchronous, while Discourse is gradual and asynchronous." There's a lot of overlap between the two, and as this article shows, they can be used effectively together to support virtual communities. That said, they each have a learning curve, especially if you're the host; the Ghost Forums implementation, highlighted in the article, for example, shows a lot of the thought that has gone into making the discussion board navigable and intuitive (which it certainly isn't right out of the box - contrast with OEGlobal Connect, and try to find the most recent posts). They also require community members to commit to the platforms, because they're not really integrated with social media.