I was, not secretly, hoping for another book from Martin Weller, but it looks like his latest series might have concluded. I for sure shared being wrong about Things I was wrong about pt2: The Death of the VLE, while the others I either didn’t have expertise in or was in a different phase of my…
Author: JR
Just because you’re on their side, it doesn’t mean they’re on your side
Sometimes you have a thought of feeling you can’t quite articulate and then you run into a piece that really nails it. That’s the case this time, from Cory Doctorow’s pluralistic. Over the past couple of months in particular I have heard more and more critiques of GenAI, across the board from the tools, to…
Wow Us with your Simulacrum
Similar to Alan, as recently noted over on the cogdogblog, I’ve seen an uptick in people trying out a new tool, NotebookLLM to generate podcasts from other documents (docs, books, lists, etc.). I’d never heard of NotebookLLM before this, but am a daily podcast listener and even support a few. I listen to audiobooks regularly,…
Unpopular Position post no 179
Rick Jabos writes on LinkedIn, Here here. I’ve written about this story before, but it’s been one I can reliably reach back to about the work we do as IDs. Many years ago a friend of a friend of mine worked at an education company and one evening we were at the same event. We…
Against Hope: OpenEd24
It has been a long time since I’ve heard Robin speak, or seen action over on the actualham blog, but we have the privilege of getting a sneak peak at her OpenEd24 talk Against Hope. This is not your usual Open Education talk, but it is a leitmotif of many conversations I’ve been in and around…
Your AI Summary is (probably) Not What You Think
A few posts coming through my feeds recent circled this idea of using AI for summaries. In the L&D space I’ve seen this put forth as a potential/recommended use case for GenAI. First up was an article shared by Stephen Downes about someone who used a bunch of Adobe products to convert speech in a…
Revisiting Open Education
It’s been a long time since I’ve sat down to really think or write about Open Education. I’m not even sure if I’ll post this, but perhaps writing will help. There was a time when I might have been characterized as an active advocate for Open Education, particularly in higher education. I sat on committees,…
My Top 10 Learning Tools for 2024
Jane Hart has surveyed and published the Top 100 Tools for Learning list for the last decade. Here are my current top tools, in no particular order. Feedly—RSS lives! This app has been a lifeline for following blogs and other publications since I abandoned that social media site whose name shall not be mentioned. I…
The thorny problem of authorship in a world of AI
I ran into this from a couple of different places over the past few days. First, over at Though Shrapnel. Doug introduces the quoted piece with a pretty provocative statement, The OLDaily newsletter included a couple of follow-up points, It’s an interesting and challenging thing to articulate. At what point should one attribute or cite…
Things I was wrong about pt2: The Death of the VLE
I smell another book from Martin Weller (this would actually be a great one to follow up 25 Years of Ed Tech). His latest blog series looks at What I Was Wrong About and the second post is all about the death of the VLE (or LMS on this side of the Atlantic). I sympathize with…
How much to educational developers actually teach?
Sarah Silverman is an educational developer from the USA that I have kept more of an eye on in recent years since some of her original critiques of CTLs came across my feed. This post explores the role and challenges faced by educational developers in the context of their teaching responsibilities. Sarah reflects on an…
Three Things Your Ed Degree (possibly) Got Wrong
The Effortful Educator normally publishes content around retrieval practice, memory processing, spaced practice, etc. But recently, they published an intentionally provocative talk they gave at their school, Three Things Your Ed Degree (possibly) Got Wrong. I couldn’t resist reading or thinking about my own experience during my undergraduate program. Let’s see how the program I completed…