Stephen Downes

The headline here is that "a year after 250 CEOs demanded mandatory AI education, industry leaders are zeroing in on the durable 'human' skills they can't hire for." That sounds good, but as always, I would warn against depending on industry leaders to define what should be taught. For one thing, it's often wrong. But more importantly, their advice is intended to benefit them, not the students. Consider this: "what we need is to figure out how to teach the human skills – how to teach future-proof skills that set an employee up for success no matter what domain they find themselves in." Why would this be important. Well, it could be because technology is changing so rapidly. But from where I sit, it's just as likely that employers want to hire human cogs they can quickly 'retrain' and slot into positions the employees never expected to be doing when they were hired - a lot like the way Facebook transferred software engineers into data-labeling peons.

I'm not sure 'disjuncture' is the best word for the contradictions being described by Glenda Morgan in this article on the differences between what teachers think they are delivering and what students think they are receiving. But the point is still valid. For example, "When asked whether they were incorporating real-world projects into their courses, between 58% and 73% of faculty said they were, depending on whether workforce readiness was a high priority for them. Yet only 26% of students reported completing a real-world project in a course." Considering the difference in employment between those who did, and did not, receive workplace experience, you can see ho important this is.

If you wanted to make a keynote feel more like indoctrination than an opportunity to stretch the mind, I can't thing of a better method. The '3 fresh strategies' come strain from that playbook: first, facilitated pre- and post-keynote sessions, to frame it; second, a curated Q&A session to screen participant interaction; and third, mandatory poster sessions. Now I admin, I might have been a bit jaded, after reading the sixteen Principles of Learning authored by presenters Jenn White and Josh Kurzweil. I mean, maybe this approach is good for children (though I doubt it). But speaking for myself, I would find such a tightly regimented professional development event to be a form of torture.

Michael Feldstein offers a useful summary of what 'multi-agentic AI' might look like in education: "Imagine a team of learning designers, each of which has particular skills and is assigned to perform a particular task on the way to designing a course. Imagine also that they have workflow and communications tools so that one designer can know when there's work waiting from another designer." He also touches on the cost of the multi-agentic workflow, especially across institutional boundaries, as there's no real way to moderate it - costs are shifting from flat-rate to per-token, where users are charged for content both input and output, the scale of both of which are determined by the individual agents.

This is rather technical, but is an example of building compatibility in the 'interfaces' between different application domains. "Standard Schema does not standardize error formatting, metadata, defaults, JSON Schema generation, or schema introspection. If you need those, you still have library-specific work to do.... There are too many JavaScript schema libraries. The fix isn't fewer libraries. It's an interface they can all agree on."

I have talked in the past about the similarity between neural networks and human brains (as recently as a few days ago) and while there is overlap, they are not the same, and this article is careful to draw the distinction. At the same time, there is a lot of overlap, and we can learn from that. "By moving away from seeing AI models as finished computational models of the brain and instead leveraging them as model organisms that we can perturb and evolve, we move closer to cognitive neuroscience that doesn't just describe the brain but truly understands its mechanics."