Stephen Downes

This preprint is tantalizing but far too short for what the title promises. Basically, the idea is to use generative AI to automate the process of giving multi-modal feedback on assignments. The instructor works with the AI, which may offer correction (for example, recommending the instructor focus on effort rather than outcome). And what's key is the idea of offering feedback in multiple modes, such as 'talking heads', rather than just text. I can't comment on the implementation because we don't really get anything in the way of details (this paper is a classic example of why we shouldn't simply count publications, because things like this can be pumped out in a day; we should actually consider what the publications contribute to the literature).

Just a note on what the reform crowd is up to. The Mastery Transcript Consortium "provides a mastery transcript that replaces traditional high school transcripts. Instead of a list of courses and grades, learners share competencies with colleges and employers." ETS (formerly Educational Testing Service) companies "deliver learning and assessment solutions around the world." The real big deal in this space will be when AI performs skills and competencies assessments based on real-world data and nobody is needed in the middle to own the process.

"We're experiencing an epochal shift in technology, on the order of magnitude of the Internet's commercialization," writes Eric Goldman (19 page PDF), "but this time, the regulators are intervening early, in a massive and unrelenting way." Hence the prediction in the title. Regulators will misunderstand the technology while seeing to control and censor the outputs. It doesn't help that incumbent technology companies are seeking to preserve their advantage. "Misdirected or malicious Generative AI regulations jeopardize all kinds of algorithmic activities, from personalized content to algorithmically sorted search results - things that we rely upon many times a day." Related: audio interview with Goldman about the talk.

During the playoffs I like to keep track of the scores, so I do a search. P{roblem is, there are four games, but Google only displays three results. It's so frustrating. I have to scroll way down to get a link to the actual website that displays all the scores. If Google has its way, I might never get to that website at all. As Kottke summarizes, "it's better/cheaper to provide potentially wrong answers to keep you clicking within Google than it is to send you away for the right answers." And an answer doesn't have to be incorrect to be wrong. It just has to be something I don't want. Like incomplete scores. Or summaries instead of sources.

I agree with this part of the post: "There is a tendency here to imply a zero-sum principle to humanness: the more the tech can do the less it means to be human. This feels wrong to me and isn't helpful in an educational context." But I don't agree with what I think is the main point, which is to focus on human creativity as the differentiator. We'll find, I think, that we can't think of human activity in the age in a nice neat Bloom's taxonomy package. We'll be looking at completely new human activities outside the domain of the taxonomy - valuate, maybe. Or obviate. Whatever. When it's not zero sum, it means we're adding something that wasn't there before. And that's what I expect.

So of course we want to know what the list is, but by the time we get to it on page 7 we find the list is actually derived from another paper (Liu et al., 2020, which compares them between Chinese and U.S. based instructors) and this paper measures Canadian faculty and student rankings of them (there's also an appendix with each practice described in more detail). At the top of the list is "students' and faculty's shared contempt for disrespect", otherwise, I feel (based on my reading of the two lists) faculty emphasizes unprepared teaching while students stress ineffective teaching. 18 page PDF.