Stephen Downes

Knowledge, Learning, Community

It's as though people believe there's a learning 'off switch' (though it only exists in other people). Like this: "A junior who made a mistake is one step closer to being a senior; a junior who let an LLM make a mistake (and had the LLM fix it for them) has probably learned nothing." What would justify this conclusion, authored by John Collinsworth (Nielsen doesn't link to it, though he quotes it extensively - boo, hiss)? The junior will still learn, but will learn a different thing. Nobody 'learns nothing' - human brains don't shut off like light bulbs. What's really happening here is that we're mking a value judgement, specifically, that the lesson learned from doing it by hand is more important than the lesson learned by doing it with AI. This 

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Stephen Downes Stephen Downes, Casselman, Canada
stephen@downes.ca

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Last Updated: Jun 24, 2026 09:37 a.m.

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