Stephen Downes

Knowledge, Learning, Community

This article might have a good story to report - an Oklahoma school that is completely automated that costs more than any other school in the state. But it's mostly an exercise in weak AI writing - see the process here. On the surface it seems to be well written, but oh! it goes on and on and on, doesn't have any real sense of a narrative arc (much less of the inverted pyramid), and is filled with filler. I read every one of the 5104 words in what should have been, at most, a 1000 word article. So much agony! Like this: "W. Ian O'Byrne, an associate professor of literacy education at the College of Charleston who has studied digital literacy for two decades, put the pedagogical objection cleanly in The Conversation on 15 June 2026: effective learning is not always efficient." Or, "The legal position is worse than most parents will assume." Or "The second half of the question is what this does to teaching as an occupation, and here the answer has less to do with any individual school than with the signal a price sends." 

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Stephen Downes Stephen Downes, Casselman, Canada
stephen@downes.ca

Copyright 2026
Last Updated: Aug 21, 2026 12:55 p.m.

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