Learning centricity vs Learner centricity: some thoughts on Dave Cormier’s human-centred model for discussing AI in assessment #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/79413

The Emerging AI Divide in Higher Education #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/79412 This article uses a lot of words to make what is at heart a simple point: "Drawing on experience across higher education in the UK and Malaysia, two academics argue that the real AI divide in universities is not about access to tools but about institutional readiness - and why it is an urgent equity issue policymakers can no longer afford to ignore.".

Forgejo – Beyond coding. We forge. #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/79411 Haven't tried it, but I definitely want to take note of a federated version of GitHub. "Forgejo can be trusted to be exclusively Free Software. You can create an account on Codeberg and other instances or download it to self-host your own. It focuses on security, scaling, federation and privacy." Via Paul Walk..

Rebuilding Shared Meaning in a Fragmented World #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/79410 To put it simply, in 'modernism' there was one point of view (one type of truth, one view of the world, one way of describing it), which had its good and bad points. Then came 'post-modernism', which allowed for many points of view.

The uncontroversial 'thingness' of AI #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/79409 Lucy Suchman writes (5 page PDF), "The term ‘AI’ can be read as a label for currently dominant computational techniques and technologies that extract statistical correlations (designated as patterns) from large datasets, based on the adjustment of relevant parameters according to either internally or externally generated feedback." Great definition.

Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/79408 My own take is that Anthropic's competitors have been given a gift by the U.S. government (there are a million other points of view being expressed out there that I won't attempt to review). "The US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national...

What Does It Feel Like to Live Under the Threat of Redundancy? #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/79407 As a long-time government employee I learned early that there's no such thing as job security, and when I retired in April the entire Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) team was cut, which took the bloom off the rose.

If everything is a neighbourhood, is anything a neighbourhood? #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/79406 We see the word 'community' a lot in these pages, but how big is a community? We can use Tom Watson's discussion of the term 'neighbourhood' as a proxy for this question. The answer depends on who you ask (though a very informal poll makes it less than 1,000 rather than some larger number).

Learning through community service #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/79403 This is a light article, but it speaks to an interest of mine, community service learning (CSL), which "allows students to get involved with community organizations, often on a volunteer basis, and to collaborate with them on projects that meet community needs." As usual, I have critiques around the edges.

Four Arguments Ontologists Never Finished (And Why AI Teams Will Have Them Again) #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/79405 I've kept this item in a browser tab for a couple of weeks waiting to give it the proper attention it deserves, and while I never did, I still want to pass it along. There's a whole debate under the surface of the AI revolution on the relevance of knowledge structures from good old fashioned AI (GOFAI) such as ontologies, graphs and namespaces.