Welcome to my first blog post on this blog and my first blog post in over a decade. Blogs were one of my early experiences with real engagement on the web and I am excited to return to this medium. This blog — nomadiclearning.dev — will primarily be about my experiences, thoughts, ideas, brainstorming sessions, and prototypes of what learning may look like in the current future. I say “current future” because many of these changes are happening now and many may become fundamental concepts in the emerging philosophies around “learning in the Age of AI”. I genuinely believe we are at an inflection point. How things change, I really have no idea, but I sure do love thinking about it!
A paper I read recently is called “Agentivism: a learning theory for the age of artificial intelligence”. The basic idea is that as AI agents are able to learn faster and more efficiently than humans, we may be able to offload these tasks from our mental load, and we as humans can focus more on the relationship between this “learned” knowledge. We then can focus on how to instruct these AI agents to help us synthesize information, categorize knowledge, and facilitate learning transfer. The authors propose a new theory of learning (“Agentivism”) that encompasses these new modalities of learning. They also state that traditional theories of learning will still persist — it is just that they will be “less” important as humans can offload much of the initial work of learning. It really blew my mind as I read it. One of the biggest criticisms of generative AI use in education today is that the AI is doing exactly this — offloading mental cognition. What if this was a net positive and not a net negative like many are arguing? I’m not ready to take a stand either way, but it is a wild idea to think about because it goes against almost all of our ideas of learning going back to the Enlightenment period.
More next week (including my LLM Wiki Knowledge project)!
Mike