OLDaily

AI, Experiment and Pedagogy - Why we need to step back from the critical "Punch and Judy" battles and be scientific
Mark Johnson, Improvisation Blog, 2021/06/14

There's a lot to agree with in this post, starting with the assertion that we should step back from the pro- and anti-AI camps and look at this whole thing more reasonable. AI is an incredible field to study not because it will produce robot teachers but because it has the potential to provide genuine insight into how we learn and who we are. But we'll get there only if we adopt a scientific stance, but a facile misinterpretation of Hume and depiction of "experiment as a thoroughly rational and cognitive operation - which it almost certainly is not." No, "scientists are engaged in something much more subtle when doing experiments. Science is really a 'dance with nature'." Quite right. Quite right.

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What Google’s AI-designed chip tells us about the nature of intelligence
Ben Dickson, TechTalks, 2021/06/14

The gist of this article is that recent AIs have outperformed humans in computer chip design, which may be read as 'the virtuous cycle of AI designing chips for AI," but also has some interesting comments to make about the important role analogy plays in human reasoning. It also discusses intuition as "a very complex and little-understood process that involves experience, unconscious knowledge, pattern recognition, and more." And it considers how these differ when manifest in a reinforcement-learning designed AI as compared to a human. In a nutshell, humans need (and use) modularity in a way that machines don't.

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Concept Mapping: a Powerful Tool for Building Actionable Knowledge
Marek Dudáš, EmergingEdTech, 2021/06/14

This article feels like a 'guest post' promoting a specific product, though it allows me to address some wider points. There's this space where graphs and concept maps interact and as I've been working on an open graph for gRSShopper I've come across a number of approaches, including not only concept maps but also more restrictive approaches like ontologies and linked data. As I read this article (or, more accurately, looked at the images) I was struck by the vagueness of the lables being used in the connectors - things as varied as 'the most important is' to 'is not just a' to 'means'. My feeling right now is that this approach is too loose - you're not going to find any useful associations if you just use lables willy-nilly. By the same token, I find Semantic Web style lables too restrictive. Not every association is a semantic association. I think, overall, that there are different types of connectors for different purposes (though this may one of those claims that is either false or trivial).

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Truth and Reconciliation Updates
Alex Usher, Higher Education Strategy Associates, 2021/06/14

Alex Usher steps very carefully though this discussion of the implementation of the calls to action in Justice Murray Sinclair's 2015 report on Residential Schools. In particular, Usher points to recommendations that universities offer programs in Indigenous languages and offer specific curricula to doctors, lawyers and journalists on residential schools, Aboriginal-Crown relations and intercultural competency and anti-racism. And, notes Usher, while institutions did a lot of things, most notably they mostly failed to do these things. Why not? He perhaps wisely doesn't press. But I think we should, because it could be at least argued that these curricula would undermine the fundamental structures of power and culture the university system was developed to promote and preserve. Image: CBC.

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Universities can help forge a new Common Life
Jon Yates, WonkHe, 2021/06/14

This is mostly from a British context and is mostly an advertorial for the author's book, but I include it here because it illustrates a glaring blind sport in academia. The proposition - and it's a good one - suggests that, historically, "humans have overcome divisions by bringing people together" and that "universities should be central to bridging our divide" as one of these 'common life' institutions. They should put us "in a house with strangers and gives us a series of challenges to complete." Sounds great... expect that most people never attend university, and those that do are mostly from a privileged socio-economic class. So does Jon Yates say universities should open their doors to everyone? Of course not. He suggests "add a requirement to every course that students have to spend at least a weekend with people whose values are totally different from their own." It's hard to believe such a myopic one-sided solution would ever be seriously proposed... but, there it is.

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