Stephen Downes

"In January," writes Giorgio Liapakis, "I gave an AI agent $1,500, full control of a Meta Ads account, then walked away... The product was a small AI/marketing newsletter called Growth Computer, and the brief was to get qualified subscribers at the lowest cost possible." I'm in the middle of my own subscription campaign, which at 12% of my target is struggling a bit *but thank you to those who have signed on), so this story piqued my interest. Not that I want to get into the online advertising game. Anyhow, did it work? "The results are directional, not definitive. But the system worked." Still, "Where humans stay essential is setting the right objectives (see: paperclip problem), taste + brand judgement, and defining what 'quality' means beyond the metrics. And knowing when to break the rules, which is arguably the most human skill there is."

This article could fill us in on the details a bit more but it contains some useful links to presentations, including Tanja Niemann on the initiatives led by Érudit and Coalition Publica, as well as Juan Pablo Alperin on the Public Knowledge Project (PKP). "In Canada, recent policy and funding developments have created a uniquely exciting landscape for community-based publishing. The time has now come to rally around a shared vision of diamond Open Access (OA) so that we can collectively benefit from these opportunities."

A myth, in the sense intended here, is "a commonly-held but false belief, a common misconception". I think that the seven myths may be false beliefs (I have quibbles around the edges of some) but I don't think that they are commonly held. I mean, does anybody think "AI tools are neutral, objective, and unbiased?" Or that they function logically? Or that they are empathetic? That there are no social or ecological issues? I think AACE needs to do better here. Restating seven popular criticisms of AI, and branding their counterpoints as 'myths' is misleading and unhelpful. People already question these seven items. The more interesting question is what we should say about AI in the light of these criticisms. 

This gist of this article is that Wes Fryer used AI to create an infographic from a sketchnote photographed from a whiteboard. What I liked was the description of the process from beginning to end - it was more than just typing a prompt, it was developing the idea and having AI transform it into something useful and accessible. Did the effort succeed? Well, I found the image to be a compelling presentation of Mike Caulfield's SIFT method - stop, investigate, find better coverage, and trace claims. I thought the text could be bigger, but if it's on a big screen and being presented by an instructor, it might work well. I think we're seeing more of this - embedding AI into a process, rather than farming out everything to AI (I mean, the latter method would work, but the results will be ordinary).

Good overview of the state of online learning in the UK by Neil Mosley. There's no real central theme here, but there's a lot of shuffling of parts and explorations into how to adapt (especially with respect to transnational education (TNE)). It's worth considering some remarks from the Open University's new Vice-Chancellor, David Phoenix, while announcing that it would be abandoning plans to move to the centre of Milton Keynes and begin offering undergraduate courses in person: "What we don't want to do is replicate what everybody else is doing. We want to design facilities for what education might look like in the next 20 years. And I honestly think in the next 20 years there will be less need for people to go and spend three years within a campus-based environment." I agree.

Dhawal Shah tells the compelling story of the courtship dance and eventual merger of Coursera and Udemy. Each of them considered other suitors, each of them could have walked away with much more than they ultimately got, and it is not at all clear to me that their merger will solve the problems of their declining valuation (though, that being said, there is a market out there for what they do, they do earn revenue, and so long as they stay out of crippling debt (brought on by, say, unwise acquisitions) they should at least survive.