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Feature Article
Accessing Reclaim Cloud Containers by SSH and SFTP using Public and Private Keys
Stephen Downes, Half an Hour, 2024/03/14


I don't know why, but I've always had a mental block around using public and private keys to access things. It doesn't help that the instructions are really obscure and important functions (like the place where you select the private key file you're using) is buried three layers deep in the login menu. And correct me if I'm wrong, but there's nowhere you can find the -i option for Powershell (to reference, again, the private key file) described anywhere. This article, therefore, is for me. Step by step instructions, with tons of images, so I never forget how to do this again. Gak!

[Link] [Local copy]


Don’t look back in anger (or anything else)
Martin Weller, The Ed Techie, 2024/03/15


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The highlight of this post is a link to Audrey Watters saying I told you so. But the main point is Martin Weller saying "we should assume that generally tech revolutions in education end in a whimper, not a bang. Set your expectations accordingly." Yeah, there's a lot of "I told you so" going around about the demise of Udacity (though it's easy to forget that Coursera is chugging along) and to be sure there's nothing about the Udacity business model that is particularly attractive. If I had a main message to offer, it would be something like "most edtech revolutions aren't edtech revolutions at all". They're inventions of a fickle press that likes to fawn on elite university stars. No. Real edtech is the tens of thousands of people creating and posing new learning content everyday, not only on institutional platforms but also on blogs, video sites, social media, podcasting platforms, and wherever. Mostly nobody's writing about them nothing real in this field happens without them.

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Hashnode Creates Scalable Feed Architecture on AWS with Step Functions, EventBridge and Redis
Rafal Gancarz, InfoQ, 2024/03/15


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Hashnode is a social network and blogging platform for developers (though of course it could be used for other functions as well). This article describes how Hashnode developers built a scalable event-driven architecture (EDA) for composing feed data for thousands of users. What I found interesting was not only how they composed the feed, but how the feed is actually built ahead of time so it's ready for the users when they login. That makes a lot of sense, actually, though it means your feed is being rebuilt over and over even you don't login. By contrast, it feels (though I couldn't say either way) as though Mastodon only builds the feeds when users login. Less overhead. Slower responses.

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What I learned from looking at 900 most popular open source AI tools
Chip Huyen, 2024/03/15


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This is a great high-level overview of what's out there in the world of open source AI tools. Even though it covers a lot of ground, it's a quick read. No doubt there's so much more that could be said. Most useful is the introductory description of the 'AI stack' - "4 layers: infrastructure, model development, application development, and applications." We see the most open source projects at the application layer, and the further down the stack the harder it is for individuals to make contributions. Still, there's a ton of room here for individual innovators. Also from the same author: Machine Learning Developments and Operations (MLOps) Guide. See also: collection of open source and/or local AI tools and solutions.

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Sketchplanations - A weekly explanation in a sketch
Sketchplanations, 2024/03/15


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Alan Levine shared this link today. At first I was just going to look and move on, but after spending fifteen minutes reading these one-panel cartoon explanations I feel I have to link to it here. Most of the explanations are of phenomena I'm already familiar with, but they could be quite educational for someone with less experience, and they have the virtue of being accurate and illustrative. Recommended; have a look, at least.

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Should you order learning content by relevance or create structured pathways?
Chris Littlewood, Filtered, 2024/03/15


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This is advertorial content, so read it with a grain of salt. Still, it raises an interesting question, quoting a LinkedIn post from Nick Shackleton-Jones on why we shouldn't organize content using pathways, and offering a counter in the form of another LinkedIn comment and a study the author (putatively) conducted on his own. For my own part, I don't see why you couldn't do both. A lot of the time (such as when I was trying to use public and private keys yesterday) there's a logical order of things. I follow pathways a lot when I'm learning about tech. What I don't want, though, is to be locked into pathways. Make them a suggestion, not a requirement.

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Trung Dong's Aerial Street Photos Highlight the Fruit Merchants of Hanoi — Colossal
Grace Ebert, Colossal, 2024/03/14


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It's a really slow news day (hey, it happens) so here are some pictures of fruit vendors in Hanoi. Also, if that's not enough, here's Stephen D'Onofrio's Fruit Art from Kottke.

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Dark Patterns are now illegal in India
Paridhi Agrawal, Bootcamp, Medium, 2024/03/14


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I'm not a fan of India blocking news videos from Canada, but I am a fan of banning dark patterns. " Dark patterns are misleading tricks in website and app designs that lead users to make unintended choices, like unwanted purchases or sharing personal data." The great big screen that Medium throws up in fron of an article making look like you have to subscribe to read is an example of a dark pattern - just click on the 'X' in the upper right and you can skip the screen completely. Anyhow, this article offers a nice list, with examples, of dark patterns. Via Dave Lane. See also Todd Libby, who has issues with the term 'dark patterns' and recommends 'deceptive patterns' instead.

Related: OK, I don't have the time or resources to build a whole marketing campaign around this concept (the way eg. 'enshttification' was promoted) but I do have a new term to offer and this is it: "cultural dark patterns" (or (nods to Libby) "culturally deceptive patterns"). Which means 'persistent ways of representing cultures as 'exotic' or 'old' (or sneaky, or criminal, etc.) in such a way as to bias perceptions about the culture. See here (Slovenian, but easily translated in your browser). Via Mitja Podreka.

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Introducing SIMA, a Scalable Instructable Multiworld Agent
Maria Abi Raad, et al., Google DeepMind, 2024/03/13


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Generative AI might be about to touch my life more personally than ever - inside my video game world. I am a passionate and long-time player of No Man's Sky (NMS), an immersive procedurally generated space exploration simulation (which means there are billions of planets in the game). One nice thing about NMS is that there are no in-game purchases. I have hundreds, nay, thousands, of hours in the game. According rto this article (31 page PDF), SIMA, a "Scalable Instructable Multiworld Agent", will be tested in some of theseworlds, including NMS. I'm not sure what to think about that. On the one hand, it will be cool to bring in more interactive elements. On the other hand, the content may be polluted by AI agents trying to sell stuff. 

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Adobe Education Exchange
Adobe, 2024/03/13


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Doug Belshaw has some comments about Adobe's announcement of new (LinkedIn-ready)digital credentials. "While it's great that they've suddenly discovered digital credentials... we'd be naive to think that this is a benevolent act," he writes. "Digital credentials could and should be used to recognise lifelong and lifewide learning. They can be used to showcase the breadth of our experience in a holistic way." However, "That's not what brands are interested in... Brands are interested in capturing and enclosing you as data points to be packaged up and sold alongside their proprietary products."  But as Weblearning says, "if public higher education wants to use innovative credentials (open badges, digital certificates etc). They also have to commit to integrating the open recognition infrastructure (the backpacks) with their controlled recognition infrastructure." That, however, has been a step too far for educational institutions, who are forever protective of their turf.

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EU Parliament passes AI Act in world’s first attempt at regulating the technology
Alexander Martin, The Record, 2024/03/13


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Summary of the AI Act approved by the European Parliament today. As mentioned previously, it is a risk-based approach, categorizing AI by the potential for harm, and limiting use accordingly. For educators, there are some implications: "banning biometric categorisation systems based on sensitive characteristics and untargeted scraping of facial images from the internet or CCTV footage to create facial recognition databases... also prohibited will be the use of emotion recognition technologies in the workplace and schools, as well as social scoring and certain kinds of predictive policing based on profiling individuals." Via Ben Werdmuller.

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Complexity bad: An interview with HTMX creator Carson Gross
Matthew Tyson, Infoworld, 2024/03/13


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This one gets into the details of front-end web interfaces, so it's too technical for most but represents a fun read for those of us who design them. Two really big takeaways: first, a reference to and discussion of Hyperscript, "a newer language for handling common scripting needs on the JavaScript front end." And second, HTMX, "the HTML extension syntax that replaces JavaScript with simple markup." There's also an interesting discussion of REST, which originally meant 'REpresentational State Transfer' but now means something like "JSON APIs over HTTP". All of these address functionality I work with on a regular basis, so it's super-interesting to me - but daunting, because I'm just getting caught up on modern Javascript.

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Entangled eclecticism: a sociotechnical‑pedagogical systems theory approach to learning experience design
Matthew Schmidt, Yvonne Earnshaw, Isa Jahnke, Andrew A. Tawfik, Educational Technology Research and Development, 2024/03/12


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By 'eclecticism" the authors mean 'diverse' and by 'entangled' they mean 'connected', as in "the complex and interconnected ecological relationship between humans, technology, and the environment." There's obviously a lot of overlap with connectivism (not mentioned in the article) but the authors come from a much more traditional perspective, arguing for a "carefully selected and curated... heterogeneous mix of theories and models." The result (23 page PDF) is a proposal that described three interconnected ('entangled') dimensions of learning experience design: the technological, pedagogical and socio-cultural. There's a lot to like here, but we still have a picture of instructors and designers delivering learning ("we maintain that these dimensions are interdependent, synergistic, and must be considered as a complex, interconnected ecology when crafting learning experiences that guide learners to achieve their learning goals") never seeing that it might be the learners that are diverse and interconnected.

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Are the LMS & VLE dead! Accenture and Udacity draw new line in sand
Donald Clark, Donald Clark Plan B, 2024/03/12


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Donald Clark weights in with a comment on Accenture's acquisition of Udacity, posing the question of whether it means the LMS is dead. I never really thought of Udacity as an LMS, but the question is still relevant. The first part summarizes the acquisition and questions its merits, the second part offers eight reasons people hate LMSs (here's what chatGPT produced when I asked it for a similar set of reasons). Finally, he says, "to be fair a VLE or LMS was often the prime mover for shifting people away from pure classroom delivery." Also, "There will always be a need for single solutions." However, what we have seen is "this has descended into the mess that is the all-embracing, death-clutch that is 'Talent management'." We need "more dialogue than monologue," he writes. May that's what AI brings?

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Open access repositories in transition: strategies of professionalization
Heinz Pampel, Marcel Wrzesinski, FIS & EPUB, 2024/03/12


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This article is in German but is easily translated in your browser (12 second video instruction here). Here's the key point: "Repositories as passive databases are unattractive to research and teaching. The degree of integration of a repository in the scientific workflow determines the success of the repository." The article outlines a project being launched to move open access repositories (OAR) forward. "The central result of the project will be practice-oriented recommendations as an impulse for the further development of a science-led open access culture."

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Pearson Expanding Generative AI Study Tools to More Pearson+ E-Textbooks
Campus Technology, 2024/03/12


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This short article tells us that "since learning company Pearson introduced generative AI (Gen AI) study tools in beta testing to its Pearson+ e-textbooks in fall 2023, the feature has become increasingly popular, and the company has announced plans to add at least 40 more titles in math, science, business, and nursing for fall 2024." According to Pearson, the tools include text summarizers and explanations along with practice activities and flashcards. It's not surprising commercial textbook producers would adopt AI; the real question is how (and whether) open educational resource (OER) producers will do the same. See also: Khanmigo.

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Setting Boundaries for Sharing Freely
Christy Tucker, Experiencing eLearning, 2024/03/12


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This is something I've thought a lot about. At some point my day job will end, but my pension isn't all that great (forget everything you've heard about 'gold plated' public service pensions). So, like Christy Tucker, I'd like to keep paying the mortgage. That means getting paid... for something. Not for OLDaily - I'll never charge money for this. Nor for my articles and things like slide decks. For me, as with Tucker, "most one-to-many interactions are free." But what then? Not that I get many invitations any more, but if you want me to speak at your conference, I'll need you to cover the expenses. Should I create paid courses? Custom workshops? Join more project proposals like Democrat-Horizon? Write on-demand research reports? All these are interesting ideas that let me keep working from home (or wherever) and let me keep my freedom (from the bank, at least).

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Nova Scotia and the Politics of Listening
Alex Usher, Higher Education Strategy Associates, 2024/03/12


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One difference between me and Alex Usher is that my RSS works and his doesn't, which means I'm often late to see what he posts on his newsletter. Another is that when he was involved with student politics he led an effort to rename the student union building after William Shatner, while in my case I led an effort to sue the university for a shade under a million dollars to roll back and repay illegal student fee increases. Nothing against renaming the building, but what you see depends a lot on what you think is important. That's why I scoff at his claim in this article that "Nova Scotia is attempting is not something any Canadian government has previously done."

Under Alberta's Conservative governments, universities were always "essentially utilities, subservient to the state." As a member of the University of Alberta's Board of Governors I could see that in action weeks after week. The same sort of annual budgeting Nova Scotia faces now. That's why it has been a theme for me over the years that in order to survive (let alone regain their independence) universities must not only claim, but actually be, indispensible to the public. They do this not only by training nurses (because after all, a government that underfunds health care won't give them jobs anyways) but by lowering fees, opening access and extending their reach into the community. Image: The Gateway, from last year.

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Who pays for 'authenticity'?
Helen Beetham, imperfect offerings, Substack, 2024/03/12


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Helen Beetham's post on 'authenticity' in AI is filled with relevant points, as always. And as always, while I really appreciate the nuance and consideration that goes into her work, it also leaves a lot for me to disagree with (note: that's a good thing; I wish everyone were so grounded and detailed with their thoughts). The main take-away, for me at least, is the description of the use of (what might be called) pre-prompting to nudge generative AI toward acceptable responses. There's also an extended discussion of the use of AI to replace experts. But it all comes back, to me at least, to what we mean by 'authentic'. We would like AI to be 'authentically' ethical - but what does that mean? I think we have a sense here of what it is not, but picturing an AI as some sort of ideally progressive persona who 'naturally' (rather than artificially?) resists prompts or internal tendencies toward offensive behaviour doesn't really do the job either.

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Ruth Barcan Marcus
Ballarin, Roberta, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2024/03/11


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My main association with modal logic is dentistry - specifically, after recovering from anesthesia for some particularly bad dental surgery, I recited some of the major systems of modal logic (pictured; the three dimensions are reflexivity, transitivity, and symmetry) as a check to make sure I hadn't lost anything during my unconsciousness. I hadn't, but I'd be hard-pressed to recite any of it today. Anyhow, Ruth Barcan Marcus contributed to the foundations of these systems (and the whole concept of modal logic took me through a tour of counterfactuals, possible worlds, relations and connections that informs my work today). She also authored what is to me the final statement on moral dilemmas, which as, as summarized here, "inescapable; and not because of our moral and cognitive limits, nor due to a fault in the moral code, but just because we cannot escape our condition of agents set in a world that we do not control."

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Philly Teen Gave Fruit Flies Anxiety to Understand What Makes Us Anxious
Jim Fields, The 74, 2024/03/11


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I've judged science fairs here in Ottawa and through this experience know that many many students can reach this level of achievement (even those in public school! though you'd never know it from the marketing on sites like the 74). That said, I do like the imagination here: Gavriela Beatrice Kalish-Schur made fruit flies anxious and observed the results by targeting "a certain brain pathway called IRE1". You can see the whole story on the YouTube video.

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MediaWise’s peer-to-peer global network launches in Canada
Jennifer Orsi, Poynter, 2024/03/11


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I've long supported the work MediaSmarts is doing and see this as a logical continuation. They're partnered with Poynter to create a Canadian teen fact-checkjing network. "Through short videos that will resonate with their peer group, teen fact-checkers will use — and teach — the tools real journalists employ to separate fact from fiction, like reverse image searches." The trick, of course, is getting people to watch and learn from the videos, and this is going to mean getting teens to engage with them in some way. I also wish there was a focus beyond teens . But one step at a time, I suppose.

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Fostering children’s agency in their learning futures: Exploring the synergy of generative AI and sensory learning
Natalia I. Kucirkova, First Monday, 2024/03/12


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I'm pretty comfortable with the concept of sensory learning, "an understanding of learning that centres the individual contribution, and joint interplay, of all key human senses (vision, hearing, touch, smell, gustation and proprioception)... building upon the idea that our sensory system (known as the sensorium) is centrally implicated in how we perceive and understand the world in collaboration with others." The proposition here is that the AI turn re-emphasizes the importance of sensory learning. Meanwhile, agency - thought of as "self-efficacy and control... and children's active participation in learning" - should, according to the author, "be central to recognizing the importance of sensory learning as an emerging paradigm in reimagining learning futures." There are important insights, and I think we'll see a lot more thinking along these lines in the future.

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The De-Google Project
Tim Bray, Ongoing, 2024/03/11


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I'm of the same mind as Tim Bray when it comes to trying to find alternatives to Google when it comes to online services. I have a Google Workspace account, I use Google Maps, YouTube, Gmail, Drive, and Google Docs. For me iot's not the money (it's not too expensive and I'd be paying for these services no matter what) as it is my feeling that I just can't depend on Google. I'm rather everything I did was cloud-hosted and self-managed, but I have to say, it's not easy to do that. But it's getting better. Slowly.

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Charting The Unknown
Bryan Mathers, Visual Thinker, 2024/03/11


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Short article with some detailed diagrams summarizing Bryan Mathers's session at Galway, Ireland, as part of the CESI conference. "The gift of a cartoonist is this: just by creating a few lines on a page, we can communicate powerful ideas. Even better, you already know how this universal visual language works."

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Beyond blended
Helen Beetham, Sheila MacNeill, JISC, 2024/03/11


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The theme of 'beyond blended' does less to unite this report (39 page PDF) than might be expected. As nearly as I can judge from reading the report, the term 'beyond blended' refers to "a more precise and nuanced vocabulary for describing different aspects of 'blended' learning." This vocabulary is, in the first instance, based on four aspects of learning that can be 'blended' (this is my own paraphrase): time (synchronous and asynchronous); space (place and platform); matter (tools, facilities, learning media); organization (groups, roles and relationships). Beyond that, the report can also be read as a series of sections on what can be learned from the pandemic, six pillars for designing, other design frameworks, etc. And that's what's produced in this update, as relayed by Elizabeth Newall in the Jisc blog, with links to these sections as stand-alone resources.

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State of Higher Ed LMS Market for US and Canada: Year-End 2023 Edition
Phil Hill, Phil on EdTech, 2024/03/11


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Phil Hill has released his latest summary of the North American LMS market. "The market continues to be a matter of Canvas and Brightspace winning new accounts, Anthology Bb Learn and Moodle losing accounts, with more variety for smaller institutions."

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Accenture to acquire Udacity to build a learning platform focused on AI | TechCrunch
Manish Singh, TechCrunch, 2024/03/11


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Normally I wouldn't care, but this marks the end of one long story in the MOOC saga. "Accenture announced today that was acquiring edtech startup Udacity to build a learning platform to teach clients about AI." We know what happens to products once they're acquired.

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AI-Generated Marilyn Monroe Chatbot Can Hold an Extended Conversation With 'Realistic Emotions' and Expressions, Company Claims
Todd Spangler, Variety, 2024/03/11


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What's key here is, first, there's a lot of video of Marilyn Monroe available to help with the illusion, and second, "Digital Marilyn is able to read users' emotions and respond accordingly via Soul Machine's proprietary camera and microphone technology." It's only chatGPT 3.5 so the emotion detection is probably pretty clunky, but I would imagine the result is still rather uncanny. I can easily imagine a service like MasterClass, which features famous people teaching courses,  adding avatars like this to its lineup. Via Fredrik Graver.

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Making Code Explain Itself – Observability Through AI
Elizabeth Lawler, Shane Hastie, InfoQ, 2024/03/08


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I'm linking to this only because it make me realize that if we make code explain itself, we are requiring it to be able to reflect on its own internal processes, building in the possibility of self-reflection, which would have the unintended side-effect of creating self-consciousness.

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Our AI in Education Maturity Model - an update for 2024
Michael Webb, JISC, 2024/03/08


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The shift from the previous version three years ago is from the acquisition of AI tools to staff training and skills. As it stands the model is looking like SAMR for AI. At the most 'mature' level we read that "there will be two main outcomes. The first is that AI will support the delivery of learning that optimises opportunities and outcomes for all learners. This represents a more nuanced take on the idea of personalised learning. The second outcome is that the right tasks will be automated, freeing staff time for creativity and human interaction." Optimized and transformed.

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Open Access fees are exorbitant
George Veletsianos, PhD, 2024/03/08


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Honestly, honestly, stop publishing in journals that charge you thousands of dollars to publish. I know, there's the argument, "the system is structured in such ways that my junior co-authors would benefit from being published in this journal." No; your colleagues benefit from publishing with you. Meanwhile, you are the one making the journal valuable. High-profile academics who publish in expenmsive journals are just enabling them and making it harder for early career academics. And we can't depend on "Google scholar's approach of identifying articles and placing publicly-available versions in search results." We both know Google can be paid to do something else.

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How your brain filters out distractions to focus
Brown University, Futurity, 2024/03/08


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Cognitive load theory takes another hit. "When people talk about the limitations of the mind, they often put it in terms of, 'humans just don't have the mental capacity' or 'humans lack computing power,'" Ritz says. "These findings support a different perspective on why we're not focused all the time. It's not that our brains are too simple, but instead that our brains are really complicated, and it's the coordination that's hard."

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Copyright 2024 Stephen Downes Contact: stephen@downes.ca

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