Stephen Downes

What I like about this course is that I was learning things only two clicks in (specifically, I was manipulating 3D models of proteins). There's no login (unless I want to mark segments as complete) and the course is fully open access. AlphaFold, by the way, is a tool "for advanced modelling, such as predicting protein-protein interactions, modelling large protein complexes and alternative structural states." The course is offered by EMBL-EBI Training on the ELIXIR Training Platform.(see more). There's a lot of stuff here; it can all be overwhelming, but this course will guide you through the resources they offer.

This is a tool that allows you to search for relevant topics from among the 1763 papers presented at the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2024) conference. It returns a similarity graph plotting the most relevant matches to your search. You can filter for specific paper tracks and, interact with the scatterplot to explore the different papers. "The system works by computing sentence embeddings on the papers text, then applying dimensionality reduction on the embeddings to compute the scatterplot. You can even change the dimensionality reduction and embeddings algorithm and parameters." You may also enjoy the way the source code for this is presented. It calculates "CHI 2024 papers similarity using sentence embeddings via HuggingFace Transformer.js and dimensionality reduction methods using Druid.js."

The 51th edition contains selected professional development opportunities that primarily focus on the use of technology in educational settings and on teaching, learning, and educational administration. 252 page MS-Word Document.

I thought this would be a paean to the joys of cognitive science in education, but surprisingly this short article (based on a longer research paper) not only describes some of the principles they authors applied but also the difficulties they faced while applying them. For example, they discuss the concern that the 'coherence principle', which "recommends avoiding redundant visuals or information", stands in the way of clarity, "where improving clarity meant making explanations longer, presenting ideas in more than one way."

This report speaks more to the broader futurist ambitions of this newsletter than to educational technology (EdTech) specifically. Apparently there's a brach of the Canadian government called Policy Horizons Canada (who knew?) and this report reflects what they see as potential disruptions, both in terms of projected liklihood as well as potential impact. The most likely risk is that "people cannot tell what is true and what is not", and it is projected as a short term and high impact risk. Another likely disruption? "Billionaires run the world". This is not surprisingly correlated with "democratic systems break down" and eventually "world war breaks out," which is the highest impact projection on the board. Also very likely in the medium term: biodiversity breaks down. None of this is particularly good, and if you're designing technology, it really is necessary to take all these risks into consideration. Also available as a 37 page PDF.

This article raises more questions than it answers. Questions like: why doesn't the author remind the reader that AI-detection algorithms are not reliable? Or, why are institutions still assigning essay assignments when it's so easy to use AI to complete them? Or, why do they continue to hand over student work to a third party that extracts value from this work for its own purposes? The article is just uncritical posting of Turnitin talking points. Why even bother with this?