Stephen Downes

Based on what I've seen from his work online, this would have to be a pretty good workshop. "Welcome to my resources for my NSPA AI Fast Track session, Crafting Better AI Prompts: Unlocking Efficiency and Accuracy for Scholarship Workflows. This page offers a few links and resources curated for your use." The resources listed, though not fully comprehensive, anre nonetheless useful. I'm positing it here to have a link handy for my own sessions coming up.

This paper documents the creation of a community of practice (CoP) around the development of a course-based undergraduate research experience (CURE) in biology. It highlights three major features of a CoP: engaging in activities of mutual interest, building relationships through shared activity, and creating common resources (though all are probably necessary, I would assign the most importance to the third). It also noted that the CoP additionally supported an increased sense of confidence and self-reflection among participants. These all had a direct relationship, I would say, in addressing the barriers listed preventing faculty from developing a CURE for their students.

This paper (16 page PDF) documents the use of a Learning Engineering Evidence and Decision (LEED) tracker to answer three questions. To paraphrase: How do practitioners track and cite sources of influence on design decisions? Requirements and Experience. How do practitioners communicate, revisit, and iterate these decisions? Stakeholder requirements and technical changes. When revisions were made to decisions, what sources of influences led to these changes? Changes to requirements, and experience. I think the study was worth conducting, but the overall pattern that emerges for me is that there isn't much recording of the basis for decisions other than the requirements document. "The exclusive concentration of decisions that cite Requirements: SME across CIF projects... reflects the strong presence of an instructor (SME) throughout the projects and how this influence was top of mind for LDPs when designing."

Todd Conway writes about the loss and recreation of his community before, during and after Covid. The strength of the article is the personal perspective; it isn't about 'learning loss' or any of the made-up phenomena that followed Covid, it was his own actions and experiences. I confess I am nowhere near as avid a seeker of community as Conway. So I'm a bit of an outsider looking at this perspective, which makes me all the more appreciative that it was shared.

Coming as it does from the Euiropean Union Intellectual Property Office, I think this report (436 page PDF) comes from a certain pro-protectionist perspective. It reads that way, at least. If I had to summarize it in a few sentences, I would say that it classifies content use for the training of AI as an instance of 'text and data mining' (TDM), which is allowed under European law, but from which content owners can obtain an exemption. It also notes that copyright holders enjoy protection for things like images and works (such as the 'Snoopy' character) whether or not the replicas were copied or produced by other means. The report also notes that there is no standard mechanism for declaring an opt-out from TDM not a mechanism for enforcing this opt-out. It feels to me that by favouring the status quo the report runs the risk of offering special privileges for large companies to opt-out and/or make special deals with commercial AI companies, while offering no protection for everyone else, while disabling the possibility of non-commercial AI that is unable to enter into these special deals.

This is a nice, detailed and not-so-short article asking why telephone and calculator keypads are organized differently (the telephone has 1-2-3 as the top row, the calculator 7-8-9 as the top row. It's also a great object lesson in how the design of digital environments we use today is based on a long history of similar devices from the pre-digital world, and how usability is defined into our tools over the years. Via OSNews, Apostolos K.