Stephen Downes

The headline, in a paywalled article in Fortune (though you can read it here), is "The U.S. spent $30 billion to ditch textbooks for laptops and tablets: The result is the first generation less cognitively capable than their parents." No surprise, the tech sceptics love it, and it has been heavily promoted in social media. But even the article admits, "This is not a debate about rejecting technology. It is a question of aligning educational tools with how human learning actually works." Anyhow, I had ChatGPT write an article refuting the inference stated in the headline. Specifically, "Laptops do not inherently degrade cognition or learning. Poorly designed instructional systems using laptops do." The same, by the way, will be true of AI. (That image in Fortune, by the way, is a masterpiece of propaganda.)