OLWeekly

The Collapse of Self-Worth in the Digital Age
Thea Lim, The Walrus, 2024/12/06

This article laments the 'ludic loops' that define us in the algorithmic age, that is, the design of the internet stops us from ever switching it off, "It moves at the speed of light, with constantly changing metrics, fuelled by ... repeated cycles of uncertainty, anticipation and feedback" - in other words, it works exactly like a Jackpot 6000 slot machine." But instead of tokens or dollars, what we're playing for is "your sense of self". But external validation is as old as the concept of 'self-worth' itself. Michelangelo didn't paint for free. Da Vinci had to earn a living. Any time we depend on such externalized criteria, whether an author waiting for the reviews or the big price shortlist, or the Reddit reply guy playing for 'likes', we run this risk. The cure, though, is to get over ourselves. Am I another Descartes? As popular as Wittgenstein? Why would it matter? If we want, we can play the game, but the only way to win is to stop playing.

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A New Infrastructure for Learning Credentials
Mike Flanagan, Getting Smart, 2024/12/06

This item is the latest in a series of posts that didn't really catch my attention until now. It's based on the idea of "Horizon Three" or "H3", which is the name for the "future-ready" educational system that follows in sort of a third wave that follows after 'traditional' (H1) and 'efficiency' (H2) learning. The concept is described more fully in this Google Drive PDF document (24 pages). What is it, exactly? It's a lot of stuff we've seen elsewhere, a mix of good and bad, including learner-driven school models, business and community partnerships, national competition for models, publicly funded supplemental and enrichment programs, mastery-based and embedded assessments, student ownership of credentials data, and more (see specifically pages 18 and 19 of the document). This approach is framed in terms of defining philanthropic support for education initiatives (which is why it flew beneath my radar; I usually just think of these as policy advocacy initiatives to find ways to support privatized education systems). Anyhow, worth knowing about.

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PD12M
Source.Plus, 2024/12/06

From Alan Levine comes this link: "At 12.4 million image-caption pairs, PD12M is the largest public domain image-text dataset to date, with sufficient size to train foundation models while minimizing copyright concerns. Through the Source.Plus platform, we also introduce novel, community-driven dataset governance mechanisms that reduce harm and support reproducibility over time." Search could be better, but the images are great.

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The Biggest Week In AI Ever (Again!)
Conor Grennan, AI Mindset, 2024/12/06

In case you thought Amazon was being left out of the AI boom, this article offers an antidote. Here's Amazon's plan: "They're offering their own models (Nova). They're investing in the current leader (Anthropic). They're building the chips (Trainium). They're creating the infrastructure (Project Rainier)." See also: Amazon's easy 17 step process to gain access to its Nova pro model.

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In defense of a minimum referee ratio
Ingrid Robeyns, Crooked Timber, 2024/12/05

The reviewer shortage isn't, as Ingrid Robeyns claims, "a collective action problem." I have stopped refereeing papers entirely (though the requests keep pouring in). It's not just that it's unpaid labour for (often) commercial entities. It's that I think the pre-publication peer review system is broken and needs to be replaced with a system for open and post-publication peer review. No more 'mystery reviewer #2'. No more secret requirements that 'the literature' (ie., other papers in the same journal) be cited. No more inner cicles of people positively reviewing each others' stuff. And also, by making reviewing open and post-publication, we have a strong case for open access publishing, of for no other reason we have eliminated much of the expense of publishing a journal. Image: UAB Libraries.

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Dow Jones negotiates AI usage agreements with nearly 4,000 news publishers
Andrew Deck, Nieman Lab, 2024/12/05

When Dow Jones sued Perplexity for failing to properly license its content, Perplexity replied, "[Dow Jones] prefers to live in a world where publicly reported facts are owned by corporations, and no one can do anything with those publicly reported facts without paying a toll." Now let's suppose that what Perplexity said is true, that is, that the content under question really consists of "publicly reported facts". What does that say now that Dow Jones has its own AI engine, Factiva, and has negotiated licenses with news publishers? To me, it says precisely that Dow Jones thinks that it now owns exclusive rights (or, at least, rights) to publicly reported facts. But that's now how it's supposed to work, right? Nobody owns (say) the fact that there was an earthquake off California today, no matter how someone (or some thing) learned of that fact. Can you imagine a university having to license the facts it teaches in its classes?

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A Blueprint for the Brain's Circadian Clock
Meet Zandawala, IDW, 2024/12/05

This article summarizes a much longer paper in Nature (20 page PDF) on the circadian clock of the fruit fly. It comprises a connectome of some 240 neurons in the fruit fly brain (compared to some 20,000 neurons in vertebrates), accepting input from photoreceptors and sending output signals from a variety of locations to other fruit fly systems. The authors draw an explicit parallel between the fruit fly system and that found in vertebrates, though they note there are some significant differences as well. The connectome isn't located in one particular place in the brain, but is distributed across a wide range of regions. Utterly fascinating.

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Threads takes an important baby step toward true fediverse integration
Wes Davis, The Verge, 2024/12/05

"You can now follow fediverse accounts on Threads, but the accounts aren't searchable and their posts won't show in feeds." This might not have happened at all were it not for the recent Bluesky surge. 

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Generative Agent Simulations of 1,000 People
Joon Sung Park, et al, arXiv, 2024/12/04

What will become of the social sciences after this? The authors describe a system that generates simulations of survey responses by a group of about 1,000 people. It can "replicate participants' responses on the General Social Survey 85% as accurately as participants replicate their own answers two weeks later" and also, "reduces accuracy biases across racial and ideological groups compared to agents given demographic descriptions" (which, presumably, the humans don't do). The paper is a 65 page PDF, though only the first ten pages are actual paper. The key lies in emulating specific individuals in order to "evaluate our architecture by comparing how accurately each agent replicates the attitudes and behaviors of its source individual." Via Mark Oehlert.

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Overview and key findings of the 2024 Digital News Report
Nic Newman, Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, 2024/12/04

This is a report (168 pages) from mid-June, prior to the recent Bluesky surge. News media was facing "layoffs, closures, and other cuts due to a combination of rising costs, falling advertising revenues, and sharp declines in traffic from social media." But in the last few months, as Ed Zitron reports, "Bluesky sends real traffic. Will update this tomorrow with firm numbers but journalism is going to move here for sure. Twitter is a drop in the bucket. It's over, but we are so back, and so on and so forth." There's no guarantee that Bluesky will continue to connect people to people, but it's a far sight better than the current social media ecosystem that connects people to propaganda. Via Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò.

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University lecturers' lived experiences of teaching critical thinking in Australian university: a hermeneutic phenomenological research
Musa Nicholas John Manning, Higher Education, 2024/12/04

I don't think you can use "Heidegger's hermeneutic phenomenology and Gadamer's hermeneutic circle" as critical thinking, which may be why "the first problem to consider is what about critical thinking makes it an unsolved mystery in Australian higher education." Though Musa Nicholas John Manning writes (17 page PDF), "there are no unified approaches or models of teaching critical thinking," there is a consensus, as Manning notes, that critical thinking is "self-regulatory judgment that gives reasoned consideration of evidence, contexts, conceptualizations, methods, and criteria, resulting in interpretation, analysis, evaluation, and inference." But in this article Manning uses "the hermeneutic approach to infer... from what the lecturers did not say, by searching for hidden clues (e.g. nonverbal cues and behaviours including gestures and tone of voice)."  I would respond that these are so culturally bound as to be useless as the basis for inference. But you can see how we drift, for example, by "specifically targeting the student's interests rather 'than solely being about Argumentation'." You can't just treat critical thinking as though it were some branch of the social sciences or psychology. Anyhow, I've written on this several times, including here and here.

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Analyzing the Impact of AI Tools on Student Study Habits and Academic Performance
Ben Ward, Deepshikha Bhati, Fnu Neha, Angela Guercio, arXiv, 2024/12/06

David Wiley in LinkedIn summarizes this paper (7 page PDF) as follows: "According to a new study, using generative AI reduces the amount of time students spends studying and improves their GPAs, but may be habit forming." He follows it with a winky face, probably because the key word here is the word 'but'. I mean, if it reduces study time and increases GPA, who cares if it's habit forming. But the hesitation is there, even in the original paper, as the authors conclude, "challenges like over-reliance and curriculum integration persist." If you don't like a thing even when it's successful, what do you like?

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From Jazz to Symphony
Alex Usher, HESA, 2024/12/03

Another discussion of the changing role of universities. Here, Alex User describes the changing role of universities from focusing on pure research to work that diretcly benefits the community. Things like 'promoting local economic growth, or providing solutions to "grand challenges" or sustainable development goals.' Now the precise way you describe 'benefit the community' matters here, because the way Usher describes it, "the lessons institutions learned with respect to growing research outputs do not translate well into these new missions. Research is something that can be done within academia; these new tasks require partnerships and relationships." It needs orchestration, some sort of central coordination, which means an end to the idea of self-governance for university research. I'm not honestly sure that central coordination makes sense, but mechanisms for cooperation surely are.

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Philosophy of Mind is Very Different Now
Joshua Knobe, Daily Nous, 2024/12/03

Joshua Knobe sets up the distinction by contrasting what "the norms and institutions" perceive as 'core' with what jobseekers are apparently doing, that is, "purely a priori work in the metaphysics of mind" addressing questions like "the mind-body problem, consciousness, the nature of intentionality, etc." versus "some kind of empirical approach" looking at "how some specific aspect of the mind actually works". I see his point, but constructed as it is, it's a straw man. Almost nobody does "purely a priori work" any more, and the major questions are (to my mind at least) mostly solved: there is no mind-body distinction, consciousness is experience, and intentionality is representation. Meanwhile, though, the idea of "how some specific aspect of the mind actually works" is rife with conceptual confusion. The people who do understand the latest empirical work are asking questions that will not (necessarily) be resolved experimentally, questions like "how do we measure 'intelligence'?", "do 'beliefs' really exist?" and "what does it mean to be an 'agent'?"

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David Stein: Playful Teaching with Generative Artificial Intelligence - Duke Learning Innovation & Lifetime Education
Elise Mueller, Ph.D., Duke Learning Innovation & Lifetime Education, 2024/12/03

All of this sounds good. Elise Mueller chats with Duke's David Stein about the way he has integrated AI into his work: "Stein uses AI in platforms like Canva... to design compelling visuals for presentations... Tools like Descript enable him to produce engaging videos... Stein can quickly summarize survey results and analyze data." Great, right? But I have the feeling that the fun in AI comes from using it yourself, not watching others use it. I think people are pretty unimpressed with the AI visuals. I feel like I would be far less likely to linker through a gallery of AI-produced photos than photos taken by people on their most recent trip. It's not that I'm anti-AI, it's just that I don't get excited by it. Not in that way, at least.

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How GenAI is reshaping tech hiring
Gergely Orosz, The Pragmatic Engineer, 2024/12/03

I have long predicted that AI would be used to support the recruitment and hiring process, but there's an unwanted side effect: applicants can also use AI to enhance their chances to get through screening and pass the interview. This article focuses more on the latter problem. "Large language models are forcing tech hiring managers to adapt software engineering interview processes, fast." But it's hard not to believe that, in the long run, AI will give employers the edge over individual job seekers. That's actually good news, I think, for the genuinely qualified people out there.

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Generative AI at the end of 2024
Bryan Alexander, AI, academia, and the Future, 2024/12/03

Bryanm Alexander offers a comprehensive scan of recent developments in AI. The list isn't explicitly pointed at EdTech, though I know he always has that in the back of his mind. He comments, "there are signs of AI serving as an intermediary between people, often several AIs... I think of this as an automation layer in human activities, an intermediary which increasingly fits into our lives." Alan Levine, meanwhile, takes one to the tools listed here out for a spin: Mistral AI's image description tool. It's enough to make tired metadata authors rejoice. "Mistral is doing a good job of describing and then ending in a bit of context or suggestion of meaning."

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Reimagining the role of higher education in a world of intersecting revolutions
Rahim Somani, 2024/12/03

Rahim Somani argues for a changing role for universities in the community. "Rather than relying solely on traditional instruction and theoretical discussions, universities should invest in immersive experiences like workshops, real-world projects and reflective practices. These experiences cultivate resilience, self-awareness and an understanding of failure – qualities essential for thriving in uncertain futures." The idea - which I advocate - is to become an essential part of the community, too valuable to stop funding.

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Day 1: Exploring Generative AI - #UofGSoTL
Dustin Hosseini, Nayiri Keshishi, #UofGSoTL - University of Glasgow SoTL Pages, 2024/12/02

This post reflects on the development of a teaching resource on the topic of generative AI, gender, race and ethnicity. It consists of a Powerpoint presentation and two critical reflection worksheets; access it here or here. The want learners "to reflect on how gen AI can reinforce or create new inequalities," though I would say that it's equally important to understand that these perceptions and divisions already exist in society - our literature, our teaching and our culture. 

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Contradictions between Classroom and School Cultures: (Part 1)
Larry Cuban, Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice, 2024/12/02

The way we are taught infoms our sense of identity and culture more than the content of what is taught. I don't suppose that's controversial, though in some circles it might be. But as we see in this post from Larry Cuban, the content is barely registering, even if it's what's needed to pass standardized exams. "Nothing much was expected of the students beyond textbook and worksheet answers... the values, rituals, and habits favored the least amount of academic work possible." Except for football. Image: Bradley Lands.

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Building a Graph RAG System: A Step-by-Step Approach
Kanwal Mehreen, Machine Learning Mastery, 2024/12/02

Retrieval Augmented Generatrion (RAG) is the method of providing generative AI with text it can use as a knowledge base against which to form responses. Graph RAQ is the process of using a graph - which clearly connexts concepts together - rather than simple stand-alone text. This article gets pretty technical in a hurry, but the idea is clear, I think. Understanding requires connection and not just definition. Our concepts aren't stand-alone and universal; they form a mesh of context-sensitive meanings that depend as much on how they are used as on how they are formed.

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Revisiting Edward Said’s contributions toward decolonising higher education
Fadhil Ismail, Jürgen Rudolph, Shannon Tan, Journal of Applied Learning and Teaching, 2024/12/02

The first part of this editorial (15 page PDF) offers an overview of the life and thought of Edward Said, best known for the book Orientalism, as he lives and studies the creation of the stereotypes and approaches to the Middle East that have been renewed and reiterated over the past two centuries. It's not hard to see this caricature in the literature of, say, the 1940s and 50s. It's more subtle today. But it is still possible to see the lines drawn in text, as arbitrary as the borders on the map, that erase indigenous identities and meanings. Erasing this sort of colonialism isn't simply a matter of drawing new lines: "true  resistance,  Said contends, requires moving beyond essentialised identities  like  'Islam'  or  'the  West'.  Instead,  Said  advocates  a cosmopolitan vision, where one's local identity is just one layer in a broader, open engagement with the world.  He  argues that in today's interconnected world, no one is solely defined by a single label – 'Indian', 'Muslim', or 'American'. These categories are starting points, not endpoints, as imperialism has left a legacy of blended identities that challenge pure, exclusive labels."

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Making Philosophy Cool Again, Part 1: Euthyphro, The Spirit of Liberty, TV Lawyers (and more)
Teri Kanefield, Teri Kanefield, 2024/12/02

One this about philosophy is that what an article seems to be about is often not what it is about. Here we have a straightforward account of Plato's Euthyphro, which seems to be a discussion of piety and justice. In this dialogue, Socrates undermines Euthyphro's efforts to define the two terms. But poor Euthyphro never does detect the sleight of hand: Socrates is assuming that concepts such as piety and justice exist independently of instances of them, and independently of the people who instantiate them. If you accept this, there is no way out of the trap. Once we define these concepts, they become unchanging, and we lose control over them, though we - like Frankenstein - created them.

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Where to draw the line?
Gordon Brander, Squishy, 2024/12/02

This is, as Gordon Brander demonstrates, ancient wisdom, but it is immediately practical in today's world: "Compositionality is the principle that a system should be designed by composing together smaller subsystems, and reasoning about the system should be done recursively on its structure." It's the principle that underlies the Cartesian method; it's the idea that informs the development of learning objects and open educational resources. It's how software is developed. But, as Brander notes, where you draw the lines matters. Once drawn, they are almost never redrawn. We need, as much as possible, to follow the natural divisions in the space where we're working. 

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