Log in to see any non-public content on this page
Athabasca University | AU Student/Staff Login | Invited Guest Login
Athabasca University | AU Student/Staff Login | Invited Guest Login
Jon Dron
Cognitive prostheses and the future of the human race
By Jon Dron August 18, 2023 - 6:47pmI have lived in Canada for over 16 years so I was surprised when, a few months ago, a conference-friend whom I had not seen for many years contacted me to ask whereabouts in Malaysia I lived. I believe that they were misremembering a connection...Look what just arrived on my doorstep! #howeducationworks from @au_press is now available in print...
By Jon Dron June 29, 2023 - 1:49pmHard copies and e-book versions of How Education Works are now available, and they are starting to turn up in bookstores. The recommended retail price is CAD$40 but Amazon is selling the Kindle version for a bit less.Here are a few outlets that...A decade of unwriting: the life history of "How Education Works"
By Jon Dron June 24, 2023 - 2:16pmAbout 10 years ago I submitted the first draft of a book called "How Learning Technologies Work" to AU Press. The title was a nod to David Byrne's book, "How Music Works".Can a technology be true?
By Jon Dron March 16, 2023 - 1:27pmDave Cormier is a wonderfully sideways-thinking writer, such as in this recent discussion of the myth of learning styles. Dave's post is not mainly about learning style theories, as such, but the nature and value of myth. As he puts it, myth is "a...Athabasca University's major unions condemn the sacking of Peter Scott. Meanwhile....
By Jon Dron February 10, 2023 - 3:03pmThe undergraduate students union, Canadian Union of Public Employees, and Athabasca University professional and faculty union have now all come out with strongly worded statements protesting the recent firing of Peter Scott and the process used to...Athabasca University bids a deeply reluctant farewell to Peter Scott in the vilest attack yet by...
By Jon Dron February 2, 2023 - 5:02pmYou may have heard that the president of Athabasca University, Peter Scott, was replaced yesterday with Alex Clark, erstwhile Dean of the Faculty of Health Sciences at AU. This was a complete surprise - no, utter shock - to everyone at AU, from...Two stories about learning to be human from a machine
By Jon Dron January 12, 2023 - 5:22pmI asked ChatGPT to write me a story about a robot teaching children to be human. This is what it came up with...Once upon a time, in a far-off land, there lived a robot named Zephyr. Zephyr was unlike any other robot, as it had been programmed...Some meandering thoughts on 'good' and 'bad' learning
By Jon Dron December 20, 2022 - 7:39pmThere has been an interesting brief discussion on Twitter recently that has hinged around whether and how people are ‘good’ at learning. As Kelly Matthews observes, though, Twitter is not the right place to go into any depth on this, so...Communities we live in and serve: universities and places
By Jon Dron October 6, 2022 - 10:55pmVoluntourism, geoarbitrage, and digital nomadsReasons to be Cheerful is among my first ports of call for news most mornings because I hate to start the day on a negative or banal note. The news is mostly good, but it's never trivial, cute, or...
A beautifully expressed letter about the town of Athabasca, and Athabasca University's place...
By Jon Dron September 1, 2022 - 12:27pmOver the coming days I will be posting some of the comments provided by AU staff in our recent letter to the Albertan minister for advanced education and to our own board of governors. However, I think that this one deserves its own post. It has...
Stories that matter and stories that don't: some thoughts on appropriate teaching roles for...
By Jon Dron 4 January 2024 @ 12:55pmwww.wired.com - Well, this was definitely going to happen. The system discussed in this Wired article is a bot (not available to the general public) that takes characters from the absurdly popular Bluey cartoon series and creates personalized bedtime stories...Published in Digital - The Human Nature of Generative AIs and the Technological Nature of Humanity:...
By Jon Dron 26 November 2023 @ 2:37pmwww.mdpi.com - A month or two ago I shared a "warts-and-all" preprint of this paper on the risks of educational uses of generative AIs. The revised, open-access published version, The Human Nature of Generative AIs and the Technological Nature of Humanity:...▶ How Education Works, the audio book: now with beats
By Jon Dron 8 November 2023 @ 3:46pmwww.spreaker.com - My book has been set to music! Many thanks to Terry Greene for converting How Education Works into the second in his inspired series of podcasts, EZ Learning - Audio Books with Beats. There's a total of 15 episodes that can be listened to online,...Preprint - The human nature of generative AIs and the technological nature of humanity:...
By Jon Dron 9 October 2023 @ 12:09pmwww.preprints.org - Here is a preprint of a paper I just submitted to MDPI's Digital journal that applies the co-participation model that underpins How Education Works (and a number of my papers over the last few years) to generative AIs (GAIs). I don't know whether it...10 minute chats on Generative AI - a great series, now including an interview with me
By Jon Dron 11 September 2023 @ 5:12pmwww.monash.edu - This is a great series of brief interviews between Tim Fawns and an assortment of educators and researchers from across the world on the subject of generative AI and its impact on learning and teaching. The latest (tenth in the series) is with...Research, Writing, and Creative Process in Open and Distance Education: Tales from the Field | Open...
By Jon Dron 20 August 2023 @ 11:16amwww.openbookpublishers.com - Research, Writing, and Creative Process in Open and Distance Education: Tales from the Field is a great new book about how researchers in the field of open, online, and distance education go about writing and/or their advice to newcomers in the...The artificial curriculum
By Jon Dron 15 July 2023 @ 1:23pmwww.researchgate.net - “Shaping the Future of Education: Exploring the Potential and Consequences of AI and ChatGPT in Educational Settings” by Simone Grassini is a well-researched, concise but comprehensive overview of the state of play for generative...View of Speculative Futures on ChatGPT and Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI): A Collective...
By Jon Dron 13 March 2023 @ 12:49pmwww.asianjde.com - This is a remarkable paper, pubished in the Asian Journal of Distance Education, written by 35 remarkable people from all over the world and me. It was led by the remarkable Aras Boskurt, who pulled all 36 of us together and wrote much of it in the...My latest paper: Technology, Teaching, and the Many Distances of Distance Learning | Journal of...
By Jon Dron 16 February 2023 @ 7:18pmwww.jofdl.nz - I am pleased to announce my latest paper, published openly in the Journal of Open, Flexible and Distance Learning, which has long been one of my favourite distance and ed tech journals. The paper starts with an abbreviated argument about the...Petition · Athabasca University - Oppose direct political interference in universities · Change.org
By Jon Dron 6 February 2023 @ 10:26amwww.change.org - I, like many staff and students, have been deeply shaken and outraged by recent events at Athabasca University. This is a petition by me and Simon Buckingham Shum, of the University of Technology Sydney, Australia to protest the blatant interference...
