Stephen Downes

This is yet another RSS reader (YARR) that I'm mentioning here for a few reasons. One is the beautiful design, which shows what people can do these days. Another is the way feed data is stored locally (with an option to sync) which is how I built my own (comparatively very ugly reader). And third was the use of Turbopack, "an incremental bundler optimized for JavaScript and TypeScript, written in Rust, and built into Next.js", which should serve as a reminder of how much web infrastructure is available to people now that they can use AI without spending years (literally!) learning how to make it work.

I use a few bookmarklets I have written myself as part of my newsletter workflow. One sends items to Pinboard to read later. Another (which I am using as I type this) provides a direct way for me to write these posts right from the article I'm reading in my browser. This article is, as the title suggests, a guide to bookmarklets. This article discusses bookmarklets that change the style of the web page by altering the cascading style sheet (CSS). There are also some links to cool bookmarklets, like this set of web development bookmarklets.

I've mentioned this before but as things get increasingly fluid using 'students' as your survey population may become increasingly misleading. I think that's partially the case here. In addition to the generally positive remarks about AI (95% are using AI tools) we read, "students report that AI is enhancing their learning - rather than replacing traditional study methods." That's exactly what you would expect to hear from students, Properly So-Called. They are uniquely those people who have been able to access and succeed in higher education institutions. But what about the rest of the world? The report (30 page PDF) is behind a spamwall but you can access it without filling out the form here.

According to this article (20 page PDF), "AI-enhanced features, such as real-time feedback, simulations, and reflective prompts, enhance understanding of project management concepts while fostering EI capacities such as empathy, collaboration, and conflict resolution." The mixed methods study is based on an online survey with 152 responses collected. Some interesting observations about personalization: "Meaningful personalisation depended on user input. While adaptive tools can tailor content, their effectiveness hinges on learner engagement. As one participant observed, 'Personalization? It's about how you prompt it. If you're vague, you get vague'... Participants noted that precise, iterative input was essential for meaningful, context-sensitive feedback."

This is from a couple of years ago and published behind a paywall so I didn't get to see it until a search unearthed an open access PDF. The concept has been around for a while, at least since Lazar's 2009 article, and probably longer. It describes social science in terms of massive data sets, agent-based simulations, digital records of human behavior, connections and networks, data text analysis, new modalities (audio, video, images, GIS, sensors), and archival data. It is understood theoretically as a process of mapping signals and known constructs to each other, though I think there's room for new approaches here. Good article, clearly written and accessible. 31 page PDF. See Katherine Ognyanova's website for a lot more related work. Also see Lazer Lab, "based on the idea that how people and organizations are connected together is critical to understanding the functioning, success and failure of actors and systems."

A bit of a theme has emerged in today's newsletter, and it has to do with the ablative effects of AI (Anil Dash does not write about this, but I'm getting to it). In statistics, there's this idea of 'regression toward the mean', which in writing becomes 'regression toward the bland', or as Claudio Nastruzzi terms it, semantic ablation. Well, that's not me. But... why? It wasn't simply protection from AI, because when I was growing up, AI wasn't a thing. But what was a thing was television. Except - I hardly watched it all either as a child or a youth or even through most of my years of university. I would put on some headphones and read or write or code. I was a very serious and studious young man, and very socially inept. Still am. But I also have insights into the world (that I think are) worth having that weren't ablated by relentless commercial media. But now I read Anil Dash (as I finally talk about the article) describing how to protect children from the harms of AI. And - fair enough. Protect them from exploitation and manipulation and regression to the bland. Keep them off X/Twitter (and Meta, and TikTok). Stop schools from using LLMs (not just chatGPT). And - let's see if you can do this for them and for yourself - turn off the television.