Stephen Downes

Philippa Hardman reports, "Last week, Articulate launched Frontline, its 'biggest product update in history'. The product is positioned as, 'An AI-native product built for teams who create training outside of L&D'." Hardman also documents the responses from instructional designers, which aren't hard to imagine: first, "a sense of being designed out of our own industry"; second, " closer to betrayal"; and third, "a suspicion that the claim itself doesn't hold," that the tool doesn't really have 'instructional design expertise' built in. Hardman considers the third response at length. "The expertise isn't the output, e.g. the course. It's establishing whether there's a performance problem and what's causing it, deciding whether training can fix it." Then she tests Frontline: "What evidence is there that Frontline encodes the right process and decisions, in the way an expert instructional designer would make them?" There is no diagnosis step, she concludes. The design remains the same even when the goal changes. The assessment doesn't match the objective. Frontline does a very small part of the instructional designer's job - "one subsection of one phase" (illustrated). 

Interesting article (9 page PDF) beginning with the observation that "philosophy of education remains a highly elite, Eurocentric field, like most others" and continues with a look at what it would mean to take a global view of the discipline. Or "maybe philosophy of education should not strive to be global in the sense of being more internationally diverse or representative." Only if we are focused on conceptual analysis, only if we embrace "the transcendentalist delusion: a belief that thought can be separated from its specific, embodied, and geo-historical source," can we think of a 'global' philosophy of education. "There is not just one sense of what it means for philosophy of education to be a global field; diverse orientations to the global invite us to consider different strategies for effective intellectual development, participation, and engagement." Good discussion. See also: Liz Jackson
& Duck-Joo Kwak, Is philosophy of education western?

Victor Kumar posted: "You should never offload cognition. Always think for yourself. That's why I don't read." The reference is to Schopenhauer: "When we read, someone else is thinking for us: we merely repeat his mental process..." The point, says Martin Lenz, is that "we seem to have handled cognitive offloading through various means quite well in the past, suggesting that AI, and especially LLMs, might just turn out to be the next form of refined tool use." Ah, but there's a tipping point. We should be cautious. "We've reached a level of offloading in food production where we increasingly allow for outright self-harm by stuffing ourselves with fast food." The same could happen with AI. It's not cognitive offloading itself that is the problem; it's what happens if offloading turns into self-harm.

Just for fun: "Air Theremin - a browser theremin played in mid-air: tilt your phone, or wave both hands in front of the camera. Pitch, volume and timbre follow you, with note snap, cave reverb and recording." Like any musical instrument, it will take a lot of practice to learn how to play anything worth listening to. But yes, it is fun. Via dogtrax.

I like Julian Stodd though his work comes in fragments, making it hard to see the whole. This short post is one of few giving a broader perspective (and it helps to read the two or three posts preceding it). Here he outlines "a clear picture of a shift, away from ownership, structural technology, and control, towards a focus on collaboration, application, and more rapid experimentation." His recommendation: "develop specific expertise in certain new areas – like supporting experimentation, focusing on collective capability, and narrative aspects of learning – whilst letting go of a great deal more." I would use the term 'cooperation' instead of 'collaboration', but otherwise am more or less aligned with this perspective.

According to this summary article, " the CommonsDB pilot has proved that purpose-built, content-derived registries operate reliably at production scale." Importantly (to me, at least), "A recurring theme throughout the event was the rejection of centralized, single-source databases in favor of a distributed, federated network of community-governed registries." There are many moving parts in a system this complex, and the intent is to show "that open standards, cryptographic trust, and federated networks can deliver a scalable, public-interest copyright ecosystem." The full set of slides from the conference is available here.