This article effectively draws a link between what it means to learn a discipline and the concept of epistemic justice. "In mastering a discipline, learners need to master the 'underlying game' associated with disciplinary epistemes reflecting ways of thinking and practicing within a particular discipline." Quite right. Consequently, "If these disciplinary epistemes are based on epistemic hegemonies from the global north, then they are potentially exclusionary by definition and will ensure that certain learners either never grasp the 'underlying game' or have significant difficulty in doing so." To oversimplify (only a bit), there are two approaches. One is to change the learner. That's colonization (of the person from the South by the values of the North). The other is to change the game. That's decolonization. The challenge, though, lies in how to decolonize a discipline without undermining its factual basis, utility or relevance. The discipline may, for example, devalue "knowledge that is derived from everyday experiences or common-sense ways of thinking," but it may do so for a very good reason. Image: Loring.
Today: 17 Total: 443 Julie Rattray, Higher Education, 2024/04/29 [Direct Link]Select a newsletter and enter your email to subscribe:
Stephen Downes works with the Digital Technologies Research Centre at the National Research Council of Canada specializing in new instructional media and personal learning technology. His degrees are in Philosophy, specializing in epistemology, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of science. He has taught for the University of Alberta, Athabasca University, Grand Prairie Regional College and Assiniboine Community College. His background includes expertise in journalism and media, both as a prominent blogger and as founder of the Moncton Free Press online news cooperative. He is one of the originators of the first Massive Open Online Course, has published frequently about online and networked learning, has authored learning management and content syndication software, and is the author of the widely read e-learning newsletter OLDaily. Downes is a member of NRC's Research Ethics Board. He is a popular keynote speaker and has spoken at conferences around the world.
Stephen Downes,
stephen@downes.ca,
Casselman
Canada
This is an interesting question. Companies collect information about you, and you can demand to see what they've collected and correct it if the information is wrong. But what about what a company believes about you? For example, the data might be 'Stephen missed a payment on May 18', while the corresponding belief might be 'Stephen is a bad credit risk'. My rights with respect to the first seem to be different than my rights with respect to the second. And to the extent that these beliefs are increasing generated by AI, we are developing a new class of information - 'generated information' - what we might not even be allowed to see, much less correct. Image: ChatGPT 4, "a line drawing of an AI with 'opinions'".
Today: 20 Total: 445 Tony Hirst, OUseful.Info, the blog..., 2024/04/29 [Direct Link]This report (28 page PDF) focuses on four major ways the authors believe AI will serve education: personalized learning content and experiences; refined assessment and decision-making processes; optimization of teacher roles through augmentation and automation of tasks; and teaching both with and about AI. I'm not seeing this as especially visionary, despite the urgency of messages like "education systems must adapt to prepare young people for tomorrow's technology-driven economies." The meat of the report, I think, can be found in the nine case studies that form the second half of the report; I think they could all have been developed well before the current flurry of developments in AI (and indeed, probably were).
Today: 22 Total: 609 World Bank, World Economic Forum, 2024/04/29 [Direct Link]GÉANT is a "collaboration of European National Research and Education Networks (NRENs)" that delivers "an information ecosystem of infrastructure and services to advance research, education, and innovation on a global scale." Today they announced their "decision to stop activities on the main GÉANT profiles on the X social media platform (Formerly Known As Twitter) as of 2 May 2024." Why? "We have seen Twitter go through radical transformations, changed ownership, morphing into X and into a completely different platform which increasingly amplifies hate speech, fake news, scams, extreme views, and illegal content. Verification badges that were once a symbol of trust have lost all meaning, essential features were dropped or limited to paying users, and costs seem to have been cut at the expense of security, privacy, and content moderation." If you are still using X/Twitter, you should ask, what are you supporting?
Today: 16 Total: 426 GÉANT CONNECT Online, 2024/04/29 [Direct Link]This is in response to a contribution to an OAS meeting distributed in my office this morning. It is of course my set of opinions only, and not reflective of any official policy or practice, though I would add that most of these have been undertaken to one degree or another by various levels of Canadian government organizations.
Today: 8 Total: 738 Stephen Downes, Half an Hour, 2024/04/26 [Direct Link]I want to say something like 'this paper describes a core tenet in connectivism' although of course we never conceived of it in anything like the richness and detail collective intelligence across 'scales and substrates' described here. This, in particular, is crucial: "collective intelligence is not only the province of groups of animals, and... an important symmetry exists between the behavioral science of swarms and the competencies of cells and other biological systems at different scales." The way networks work is tied up in the way evolution works, and these are tied up in how we describe learning and cognition generally. Or - how we should describe learning and cognition (as most people still labour under the mythology of folk-psychological information processing types of pictures such as 'executive function' and 'cognitive load' theories).
Today: 7 Total: 771 Patrick McMillen, Michael Levin, Nature, 2024/04/26 [Direct Link]Web - Today's OLDaily
OLDaily Email - Subscribe
Web - This Week's OLWeekly
OLWeekly Email - Subscribe
RSS - Individual Posts
RSS - Combined version
Podcast - OLDaily Audio
Websites
Stephen's Web and OLDaily
Half an Hour Blog
Leftish Blog
MOOC.ca
Stephen's Guide to the Logical Fallacies
gRSShopper
Let's Make Some Art Dammit
Email: stephen@downes.ca
Email: Stephen.Downes@nrc-cnrc.gc.ca
Skype: Downes
Professional
National Research Council Canada
Publications
Presentations
All My Articles
My eBooks
About Stephen Downes
About Stephen's Web
About OLDaily
Subscribe to Newsletters
gRSShopper
Privacy and Security Policy
Statistics
Archives
Courses
CCK 2008, 2009, 2011, 2012
PLENK 2010
Change 11 - 2011
Education Futures - 2012
Learning Analytics - 2012
REL 2014
Personal Learning - 2015
Connectivism and Learning - 2016
E-Learning 3.0 MOOC - 2018
Ethics, Analytics - 2020
Stephen Downes, Casselman, Canada
stephen@downes.ca
Last Updated: May 02, 2024 06:37 a.m.