Stephen Downes

People haven't really been talking about  'quantum ed tech' yeat and probably won't in the near future, but from what I've seem quantum computer technology, quantum algorithms are really weird, and as this article suggests, there will be a quantum internet some time in the future. The argument here is that while government has been funding basic research, it needs to fund industry in order to develop practical applications. Personally I think that's a bad idea - it's too early for that, and the companies will just take the money without producing any tangible result. And when the technology does reach the stage of practical application, companies will jump in with their own money, as we've see with AI. Let's first get the technology right, and maybe even think ahead of time about how it will be managed.

Today: 88 Total: 88 Christine Mui, Politico, 2024/05/21 [Direct Link]

I guess I shouldn't be surprised by the alarm this feature is raising: "At a Build conference event on Monday, Microsoft revealed a new AI-powered feature called "Recall" for Copilot PCs that will allow Windows 11 users to search and retrieve their past activities on their PC. To make it work, Recall records everything users do on their PC, including activities in apps, communications in live meetings, and websites visited for research." This is the trade-off, though. To provide these great services, the AI will have to have access to your personal information. It can't just make stuff up! You can and should be able to turn it off. But then you have to do without the service. But that just cedes the advantage to people like me who will turn it on and have access to these far-reaching capacities. Privacy! Hah! I grew up in a small town, I know how to live without privacy.

Today: 92 Total: 92 Benj Edwards, Ars Technica, 2024/05/21 [Direct Link]

This is a project from a long-time member of Tim Berners-Lee's SoLiD project, Sarven Capadisli. "dokieli is a clientside editor for decentralised article publishing, annotations, and social interactions." It has all the strengths and weaknesses of the SoLiD project itself: it looks great, has some really neat features, but the user interface isn't very friendly, the documentation is unhelpful, it has been years in development without deployment, and it can't actually be used by people for practical purposes. But do have a look - the web page is also a content editor, and there are some nifty features.

Today: 102 Total: 102 Sarven Capadisli, 2024/05/21 [Direct Link]

The website EdTechnica describes itself as "The Open Encyclopedia of Educational Technology" and is part of the EdTechBooks website. It contains about 30 articles on ed tech topics written by various authors. This article describes the project and asserts, "As an OER, EdTechnica extends the 5Rs of openness—retain, reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute by also attending to the 3Rs of social justice—recognition, representation, and redistribution." The articles are of acceptable quality, though over time I would expect to see more rigour and standardization.

Today: 46 Total: 299 Bohdana Allman, Royce Kimmons, Camille Dickson-Deane, Aras Bozkurt, Melissa Warr, Jill Stefaniak, Monalisa Dash, Fanny Eliza Bondah, International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education, 2024/05/20 [Direct Link]

According to this article, "Compared to traditional video, environmental stories told through metaverse technologies, including virtual reality and 360-degree video, can better motivate people to act on environmental threats." It's based on a research report (8 page PDF) by Daniel Pimentel and Sriram Kalyanaraman. All very well but it should go without saying that if VR can motivate environmental activism, it can also use misinformation to do the opposite.

Today: 83 Total: 347 Molly Blanchett-U. Oregon, Futurity, 2024/05/20 [Direct Link]

To quote Matthew Tower, "A new type of homework assignment: write an essay that is better than ChatGPT's answer to the same prompt." According to the article, "Students in two courses at the University of Nevada, Reno, are going head-to-head with ChatGPT by answering the same prompts as the AI and aiming to get a higher grade." Tower finds this "super compelling" because "You have to 1) understand the assignment, 2) are effectively deterred from using ChatGPT because the ChatGPT answer is a given, and 3) have to think about what makes your response 'better' than the stock robot answer." I have to admit, it's creative, even though the assignment might boil down to finding a better prompt than the one the instructor used.

Today: 36 Total: 297 Lauren Coffey, Inside Higher Ed, 2024/05/20 [Direct Link]