Stephen Downes

This is "an edtech worker's account of what got left behind." I spent most of the article what company it was she was laid off from (it's probably Kiddom, though she never says). "We're automating the humanity out of our jobs and leaving the annoying parts," she writes. "We're using technological band aids instead of meeting our issues at the source. Tech CEOs love to make sure their employees are grinding away generating AI slop. They also love to watch their employees suffer. 'Let's bring everyone back into the office. Who cares if we don't have enough desk space? Who cares if they have to commute hours at a time? Who cares if they were hired as remote employees (and paid less for it?) We have lunch and happy hours! Why aren't they more grateful?'" Via Audrey Watters.

Audrey Watters blends two things: the soon-to-be-released book Vaporware, Inc (paywalled) by David Karpf, and the twenty-year anniversary of the Shift Happens (more) video by Karl Fisch (she credits Scott McLeod). Karpf argues that the tech billionaire class is in the storytelling business. "What they're selling is not so much technology (and, my god, it's certainly not science) as much as it is story -- a story about the future that, as the subtitle of his book puts it, is their attempt to control the present." That's also what was happening in Shift Happens. "That shift could be seen in 'more' – more data, more devices, more TV viewing, more text messages, more eBay revenue, more MySpace users. More and faster. 'We are living in exponential times,' the presentation claims." It's all a sales pitch, of course, more about pumping stocks than helping humanity. "The rationale for ed-tech adoption is framed, in this storytelling and elsewhere, almost singularly about 'job readiness' marks an abdication of any other, civic or democratic mission for schools. 'We are currently preparing students for jobs and technologies that don't yet exist,' the text reads – a made-up claim that Benjamin Doxtdator countered in a marvelous essay about several years ago." She concludes, "What ed-tech has forgotten to prepare students for: their present lives. Their humanity." That's true. Of course, there's no money in that.

Just one of those things I find fascinating. "In a draft of the book written between January and June 1707, he included a short passage about binary arithmetic, creation from nothing, and ancient Chinese figures associated with the Yijing (a.k.a. the I Ching). He then crossed this passage out, before a fair copy of the Theodicy manuscript was made." Taoist writings have influenced my own view of the world, and I wonder what would have followed had the binary form been popularized much earlier in our intellectual history.

This is a transcript of a talk given to the Macdonald-Laurier Institute in Ottawa ddressing the causes of the decline of traditional media. I think the proposal that it was a "market failure" is a straw man; most people I read pretty much agree that the news media did not manage the transition into the digital age well at all. It was " a failure of thoughtful market assessment, a failure of imagination, and a failure of innovation." The media used to drive what people thought was a social consensus, but "did it present a true sense of our collective psyche? Or was it only a gauze hiding unresolved cultural fractures?" It's not a perfect article - the reference to Plato is wrong, for example (it was Socrates). But it does point the way to a new media - "Village demonstrates that local news can be profitable and self-sustaining without a subscription paywall, and that local advertising can serve both as a source of useful community information and as support for the local economy."

According to this opinion piece, "the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) leadership delayed and obstructed our efforts to produce two critical resources on generative AI in the months leading to the dismantling of the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC)." This action follows a lengthy dispute between the two memberships over two documents, A primer on generative AI for student writers, and Guidelines for writing teachers regarding issues of academic integrity, plagiarism and generative AI. Neither is particularly problematic, except they assert that the decision whether to use AI or not should be left to the student; the teacher's priority should be to emphasize learning. And the effect of dechartering the CCCC serves mostly to make these documents much more widely known (a phenomenon known as the Streisand Effect).

A few weeks ago Philippa Hardman tested Articulate's Frontline and concluded AI models have "learned what design artefacts look like, but not the design reasoning and decision making." But is this true? This time, Hardman applies the test on Frontier models. The setup: she defines what 'good' instructional design looks like and describes a potential training scenario that includes a series of tasks the AI should perform. The result: "the two best AI models designed like expert or experienced instructional designers... Both were able to work out what was really causing a problem, advised against training when it wasn't the answer, chose the right approach and planned how to measure whether it worked." That doesn't mean it was perfect. "Factual acuracy varies a lot from one model to the next (and) none of the models I tested reliably stood by their own advice."