This episode of “Talking with machines” featured a conversation with Stephen Downes. I was joined by Tom Haymes and Bryan Alexander as we discussed “Augmented Info, Ethics, and the Duty of Care.” Stephen touches on his contributions to the origins of Massive Open Online Courses and Connectivism Theory (MOOCs and cMOOCs) before sharing his ideas on completely open courses like his “Ethics, analytics, and the duty of care” in 2021. He starts with the origins of higher education before discussing some possibilities for using the affordances of digital technologies to offer new ways of thinking about learning and teaching. We share the ways we are all using digital tools and then Stephen discusses his research on ethics and leads the conversation on ethics in educational institutions and the duty of care implied in our learning and teaching relationships.

Resources from Stephen Downes CList: Personal learning and communications application Online: https://www.downes.ca/CList/ Source code: https://github.com/Downes/CList Ethics, analytics, and the duty of care report by Stephen Downes 2023 https://www.downes.ca/files/docs/2023_10_23_-_Ethics_Analytics_and_the_Duty_of_Care_-_Published_English.pdf Ethics, analytics, and the duty of care cMOOC: https://ethics.mooc.ca/course_outline.htm

Talking with machines by Mark Corbett Wilson @mcorbettwilson on social media

In today’s conversation Ruben Puentedura acknowledges the limitations of “AI”, shares his research and experience with Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) technologies, and talks about the affordances of home grown LLMs (Large Language Models) combined with external resources. We are joined by Bryan Alexander and Tom Haymes.

Dr. Puentedura is the Founder and President of Hippasus, a consulting practice focusing on transformative applications of information technologies to education.

From Local to Global: A Graph RAG Approach to Query-Focused Summarization https://arxiv.org/pdf/2404.16130

Code a simple RAG from scratch https://huggingface.co/blog/ngxson/make-your-own-rag

More from Ruben Puentedura https://www.linkedin.com/in/rubenpuentedura/ Tom Haymes: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomhaymes/ Bryan Alexander: https://bryanalexander.org/ Mark Corbett Wilson: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markcorbettwilson/

Talking with machines by Mark Corbett Wilson @mcorbettwilson on social media

In today’s conversation, I’m again joined by Bryan Alexander and Tom Haymes. We started our discussion around Tom’s recent post “The AI Revolution Will Be Small.” Tom wrote “Bigger is not better in computing technology. Small tech is where the actual power has been over the last 50 years. When we democratize computing power (or power in general), we create the seeds for actual change. In doing so, we have harnessed the power of millions of imaginations. That is where the actual power lies. Every technology goes through a phase where people can’t wrap their heads around what the new technology is for, how it works, or how it changes our social and economic paradigms. This is where we are now with Generative AI.” https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/ai-revolution-small-tom-haymes-paqac/

More from Tom Haymes: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomhaymes/ Bryan Alexander: https://bryanalexander.org/ Mark Corbett Wilson: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markcorbettwilson/

Talking with machines by Mark Corbett Wilson @mcorbettwilson on social media