Stephen Downes

"The fight over training data is not only about what gets taken from the commons," writes Ranjit Singh."It is also about what the system returns to us as the baseline version of culture." A similar point is also made in this paper by John Moravec on AI coloniality. I think this is true if we think of AI - or even a particular AI system - as a single undifferentiated whole. But it never is, and it's important to understand this. AI always works in a context. Sometimes it's a vague and ill-defined context, such as the prompt, "Write a short story about a significant holiday." Even here, a lot of work is being done by each word. Ranjit Singh focuses on the word 'significant', but I focus equally on the word 'holiday', which has the context 'American!' written all over it. Nobody does holidays quite like the Americans. I tried it here (in Canada) and got a story about New Years Day. I asked for a story about a significant writer and got Mary Shelly. For a significant deity, I got Athena (I was hoping for Ganesh, but you can't always have what you want). For a significant city, I got Istanbul. Here's my transcript. None of this disproves the original statements on coloniality, but I think it requires of them a lot more nuance.

The American Federation of Teachers (AFT) has released a 10-point document entitled, "Devices down,
eyes up, hands-on." It has its good points, says Lisa Nielsen. "Students need more active, human, hands-on learning. They need projects, movement, collaboration, civic engagement, career-connected experiences, and chances to tackle real problems." But the whole 'devices down' message sets the wrong frame. "The problem is not the device. The problem is passive learning, poor infrastructure, weak support, and policies that confuse classroom management with meaningful instruction." 

Paul Prinsloo comments on this piece, "This is not about naming and shaming. Rather it raises the question of why on Earth do you do this to your reputation. In my humble view, it was unnecessary. Alas." I'm inclined to agree. At the very least, why would not not be open about your use of AI in this specific instance? It could have been an object lesson in what the academic thought was a good 'non-shortcut' use of AI. Alas...

Jon Udel describes Bram ("Bram runs agents mindfully"), a "desktop app with three panes: a terminal where you use Claude Code and/or Codex, an agent pane that embodies a workflow (rendered by XMLUI), and an app pane that hot-reloads the app you are developing." This is basically also how I've set up my mixture of a VPS, VS Code and Claude in my own development workflow, so I can see the appeal. Why is this such a good approach? "It encourages agents to enact a git/gh-centric workflow that makes otherwise chaotic agent-assisted development feel safe, orderly, and accountable," says Udell. What that means is you can manage code sharing and collaborative development while allowing your agent to take care of the complexities of doing that. It also "helps you think clearly about the work you are doing, and proceed in well-defined chunks and sequences." Developing this way hasn't redefined my undertsanding of thinking and learning, but it has helped me understand them to deeper degrees of depth. Yes, it's like playing with fire. 

If the term 'technology' is understood as "orchestration of phenomena for some purpose" then the definition of 'educational technology' will be devoted mostly to describing that purpose, and the three paragraph definition (view here) offered by the 26 authors of this article (20 page PDF) describes it as a process where "learning and meaning-making are enabled, mediated, supported, and transformed." Most of the definition attends to peripheral - and parochial - concerns. For example, it addresses who is included: "researchers, practitioners, educators, communities, and institutions," that is, everyone but students. And for example, it offers "a core commitment that its theory, research and practice should be ethically grounded and critically reflexive," which honestly I see as an empty declaration absent a statement of what constitutes 'ethical' and 'critically reflexive'. 

"Billionaires poured trillions into AI because they are obsessed with the fantasy of a world without people," writes Cory Doctorow. Why? "Other people insist on having their own priorities and goals, and they mulishly refuse to organize their lives to suit your priorities." The beauty of AI is that it does what you want without needing to be persuaded (or paid). Where does that leave people? They become "the unnecessariat: workers who are surplus to requirements and can be vaporized or liquidated or warehoused or simply ignored." It all makes sense, says Doctorow, "provided you don't believe that other people are really, truly real."