One reason I haven’t commented on the Canvas hack yet is that I swore off writing about LMS news years ago. But this story isn’t really about Canvas or LMSs. It’s about the fact that education, through educational technology, is under attack by sophisticated cybercriminals. They started with hospitals some time ago. Now they’re coming […]

I wrote “Dammit, the LMS” in 2014. The diagnosis still holds. What’s changed is that I now work at the place that’s structurally positioned to do something about it — and AI is forcing the conversation EdTech has been postponing for two decades. Some thoughts ahead of 1EdTech’s Learning Impact conference.

An economy is based on how we decide to value something. “Skills” as items of value in an economy do not have stable value or even a stable definition. We can have a skills economy. We just need to accept that the definition and value of a skill in an economy comes from agreement among market participants, not from an ontology.

I haven’t been writing much in the past two years because I’ve been going back to school, after a fashion. I’ve been trying to apply everything I’ve learned in the cognitive sciences to what I’m learning about AI. This post finally shares my passion project.

AIs have weird failure modes that we don’t understand yet. That’s likely because the industry has not been rigorously studying them yet. We need to recognize the reality of where we are so we can minimize risk of disasters.

I’m delighted to announce that I’ll be running an interactive webinar on the nature of learning context and AI on Thursday, February 26th at 11:30 AM ET. “Learning context” is not just a play on words here. 1EdTech takes the position that context is fundamentally different from data and needs to be treated as such, both in how we think about it in our application design and in how we handle it technically.