Stephen Downes

This is a link to a LinkedIn article, for which I apologize, but I wanted to highlight this. Csaba Szabo takes note of a paper called 'How contemporary academic structures constrain scientific creativity and hold back early-career researchers' and its 57 authors. Szabo writes, "What is remarkable is academia's ability to take a set of complaints that have already been repeated for years, repackage them as another publication, distribute the authorship over 57 CVs, generate another citable item, and thereby reproduce almost perfectly the very system the paper is criticizing." Quite right. Szabo should have also noted that this useless scientific output is behind a paywall. That's why I won't link to it directly (you'll have to search for it, like I did, because there's no link to it in the post, and I'm not going to click a dozen times to get through 88 comments to find the ubiquitous 'link in first comment').

Leaving aside the internal U.K. politics, which are beyond the scope of this newsletter, the contrast in the two approaches, and the option selected by most governments, is interesting. "In the UK's Growing Up in the Online World consultation, young people's most consistent demand was mandatory labelling of AI-generated content. The government response never mentions labelling, watermarking or provenance, and neither did 23 peers in the House of Lords debate on AI and children." There have been attempts to label AI-generated content, but in a murky "you can't see it" sort of way. After seeing the debates and policies around food labeling, I can't see anything clear and straightforward being developed. Nor can I see the social media bans enduring for any significant length of time.

This is a fast-moving story that begins with Google removing search from schools that ban AI and ends uncertainly as it's set against the background of a dramatic election that completely shifted the balance of power in the U.S. "In a blog post titled "Designing responsible AI for learning," Google said it's bringing AI into its Classroom offering with a product called Guided Learning. The New York Times published a story saying that the company will turn off search for schools that reject AI entirely." Google says it intended to give schools more choice, but this sounds like the opposite.

Maha Bali is of two minds in this post. On the one hand, when it comes to talking about AI in education, she writes, "I have to focus more on supporting others to reach their own conclusions, rather than try to enforce my own, through dialogue and experience and reflection." On the other hand, there's the whole list of problems of AI use, which she lists again in this article. She would like to see collective action, "and yet we can't get everyone to agree on one thing, because not only are harms and benefits of AI different per discipline, it is also different per human being using it."

What strikes me about Tim Klapdor's six dimensions of learning is how much overlap there is with my own critical literacies (note that I am not suggesting anything wrong here; I appreciate the similarity, nothing more). The middle four especially. I like the idea of a 'perceptual' dimension of learning; I want to think about that more. And I'm not sure I'd make 'creating' a separate dimension; to me, read-write are just two sides of the same coin. Overall, the broader system Klapdor is constructing is a useful frame (paraphrased): the dimensions and domains provide the structural framework; the learning types translate that framework into a learner-centred perspective; and then the learning patterns then provide building block.

Good discussion of micro-credentials, and in particular, how we trust that a micro-credential is worth anything in the first place. After all, anyone can issue a micro-credential (I actually built it into some of my MOOCs years ago). But why trust them? Wendy Palmer looks to food lables as an analogy. "I keep coming back to the food certification example. We have different standards and certification arrangements for different purposes, whether that's organic production, food safety or country of origin. Each tells us something different about the product. We don't expect one certification to cover everything, but we do need to understand what each certification means, who is responsible for it and what standards have been met."