Comments for Dave's Educational Blog

Comment on The CCK08 MOOC – Connectivism course, 1/4 way by What is a MOOC? Massive Open Online Courses Explained

What is a MOOC? Massive Open Online Courses Explained — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 14:38:18 +0000

[…] the term MOOC first popped up back in 2008. The intention was to take advantage of online learning’s ability to connect people worldwide. […]

Comment on In search of quality points of contact with students by I’m alive! (And to prove it I’m here) | Abject

I’m alive! (And to prove it I’m here) | Abject — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 01:43:50 +0000

[…] in the already-accursed year 2026, posts by Dave and Anne-Marie had me wondering if I had gone a full calendar year without posting to the home […]

Comment on Rhizomatic Education : Community as Curriculum by Les formations sont-elles obsolètes ?

Les formations sont-elles obsolètes ? — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 18:15:03 +0000

[…] Rhizomatic Education: Community as Curriculum (2008), il a soutenu que quand le savoir est une cible mouvante, le curriculum ne peut pas être un […]

Comment on Rhizomatic Education : Community as Curriculum by Are courses obsolete?

Are courses obsolete? — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 18:04:02 +0000

[…] Rhizomatic Education: Community as Curriculum (2008), he argued that when knowledge is a moving target, curriculum cannot be an input at all: […]

Comment on In search of quality points of contact with students by Return to Me: Teaching, AI, and the Longing to Connect – Teaching in Higher Ed

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 17:25:40 +0000

[…] much more visible through the rapid expansion of chat-based large language models in his post In Search of Quality Points of Contact with Students. He […]

Comment on AI text is just writing, but worse. by Joe Murphy

Joe Murphy — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 16:22:10 +0000

I really like what you said about AI and intolerance of uncertainty. In a time of information glut and distrust of expertise, I can see the appeal of a nice, synthesized, author-less average for many questions. Seems like an interesting potential area of research to see if AI answers are viewed as less uncertain than one’s own review of multiple sources.

The 2 papers I’ve found so far are coming from another angle – intolerance of uncertainty is correlated with AI anxiety. Though I suppose one could be anxious and still use the tool…

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12937827/
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10447318.2025.2558043

Comment on A human centered model for discussing AI in assessment by dave

dave — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 20:51:50 +0000

In reply to Graham Blair. I appreciate your close reading. This is exactly the point.

Comment on A human centered model for discussing AI in assessment by Graham Blair

Graham Blair — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 16:41:54 +0000

The Illich quote does a lot of quiet work here. If desirable knowledge is no longer scarce, the thing that turns scarce is the third circle — the human attention behind “are we helping?” Two of the circles are backward-looking: did they do it, have they learned, both judgments about a finished artifact, and those are exactly the ones AI corrodes, because the artifact stopped being reliable evidence of anything. “Are we helping?” is the only one pointed forward, at the student’s becoming — and the only one AI can’t hollow out. The irony is that it’s also the one institutions invest in least, because it’s the one that doesn’t scale: it needs time, small groups, real faculty attention. So the disruption ends up weakening the two circles schools lean on hardest and leaving the underfunded one as the only durable thing they’ve got.

Comment on A human centered model for discussing AI in assessment by Geoffrey

Geoffrey — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 15:36:18 +0000

I found this article really thought-provoking because it shifts the conversation about AI in assessment away from policing technology and back toward human learning. It reminded me that the most important questions are not whether students used AI, but whether they genuinely learned, engaged with the process, and received the support they needed to grow.

Comment on A human centered model for discussing AI in assessment by Stephen Downes

Stephen Downes — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 14:52:00 +0000

I’m more-or-less in agreement with Jon Dron’s critique of Dave Cormier’s post from a couple of weeks ago, especially this: “The core problem is that…