Building Europe’s Public AI Stack #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/78779 There's a lot of discussion happening in the European Union about how to respond to what is emerging as a dependency on foreign infrastructure (most notably from the U.S.) in AI.

Higher education and AI in late 2025/early 2026 #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/78778 This is an interesting scan of what's happening in U.S. higher education with respect to artificial intelligence.

Dr. Lahana’s Multimodal Makerspace: A Reality Check for the “Laptops Broke Kids” Narrative #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/78777 Lisa Nielsen is on point with this argument, I think. "We need to be honest," she writes. "students do not need less technology.

Teaching Learners for the Long Tail of Time #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/78775 In these days of artificial intelligence, writes Ted Curran, "it's even more important to have a private repository of knowledge you trust under your own personal control." Unsurprisingly, I agree.

Unreasonable Effectiveness #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/78774

Unexpected Link Back Trail to David Warlick #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/78773 Alan Levine follows a trail of memories through the web and finds himself at David Warlick.

LLM Cultural Censorship Is Corporate Risk Management #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/78772 In seventeen well-crafted (and likely 'output shaped') paragraphs Steve Hargadon argues that "the cultural censorship embedded in LLMs is not a failed attempt at universal ethics.

Vimeo Lays Off 'Most' of Its Staff, Allegedly Includes 'the Entire Video Team' #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/78771 If you have videos on Vimeo, get them off now. "Employees reported major job cuts this week, just months after the video hosting site was bought by Bending Spoons...

Fighting AI Hallucinations One Citation at a Time: Introducing the LLM Citation Verifier #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/78770 This is a good idea addressing a pressing problem though there is one important caveat.

Triangulating the lifelong learner: neuroliberalism and the OECD’s focus on meta-cognition, affect, and wellbeing #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/78769 This article will require a lot of patience to read; though it is no doubt well-intentioned, it often appears to be deliberately obscure.

Public NotebookLM with AI Policies, Guidelines and Frameworks #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/78768

Qwen3-TTS Family is Now Open Sourced: Voice Design, Clone, and Generation #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/78767 "It's important," writes Simon Willison, "that everyone understands that voice cloning is now something that's available to anyone with a GPU and a few GBs of VRAM...

Language models resemble more than just language cortex, show neuroscientists #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/78766

I use the 'unicorn prompt' with every chatbot - it instantly fixes the worst AI problem #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/78765 If you follow my videos where I'm working with ChatGPT you'll notice I use the same sort of "unicorn prompt".

Digital tools are not the problem; it’s their governance #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/78763 There's some really interesting thinking in this article that belies its simplistic 'platformization of the university' framing.

Social Network Analysis of AI Agent Organizations #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/78762

Claude's new constitution #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/78761

How I use Generative AI with my students #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/78760 I like this post because while it's very focused and descriptive of one person using AI in one classroom, it doesn't try to generalize and say that everybody should be doing the same thing.

Introduction to Open Educational Practices #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/78759 Fresh off the press.

Collaborating with Khan Academy to build the best AI tools for learners #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/78758 This article (advertorial) announces Google's partnership with Khan Academy to integrate its AI, Gemini, with Khan's reading and writing coach.

It’s Already Here! #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/78757

Leveraging media for impact: A Guide for Early Career Researchers #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/78756 I have mixed feelings about this article.

Using video: from passive viewing to purposeful engagement #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/78755 The core tenets of using video in learning haven't changed since 2013, says David Hopkins.

CommonsDB Feasibility Study part 2: from Design to Deployment #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/78754

What I Learned After Trying Out Every Exoskeleton at CES #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/78753

No - Duh: Countless Teachers Like Me Have Long Known the AI Risks Brookings Just "Discovered" #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/78752 David Cutler responds to the recently published AI’s future for students is in our hands and companion Prosper, prepare, protect report published by Brookings.

Generative AI: product safety standards #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/78751 The Department for Education has released new 'safety standards' for AI for students in England.

GenAI in Higher Education #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/78750 I had a general feeling of unease reading this open access book (153 page PDF) partially because of the content and partially because of the presentation.

Constructing AI in education #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/78749

Scapegoating and Careerism in Universities: Signals of System Failure? #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/78748 The focus is on Australian public universities but I think this discussion could be generalized.

What we miss about teaching critical and creative thinking #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/78747 Do we really present creative thinking and critical thinking as distinct capabilities? I'm not sure, but this post makes a good argument for integrating them.

View of A Framework for Ethical Online Course Development with Universal Design for Learning #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/78746

Don't fall into the anti-AI hype #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/78745 The simple argument here is that "you can't control (AI) by refusing what is happening right now.

Judge orders Anna’s Archive to delete scraped data; no one thinks it will comply #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/78744 The story here is that a judge has ordered Anna’s Archive to delete the OCLC’s WorldCat data it scraped from the website in 2023.

Spot the Difference #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/78743 I mostly like this post because of the beautiful photo of a loon at the top, which I would show here, but it's owned by (and presumably licensed from) Getty Images, so nobody's really pure, I guess.

Curatorial Silence and Its Impact on Pedagogy #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/78742 This blog post makes the important point that we should keep speaking even when things get difficult.

Digest #183: The Importance of Belonging for Student Success #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/78741 I have mixed feelings about the whole concept of belonging. I speak here from the perspective of always feeling like the outsider (probably not actually an outsider, but I digress...).

Anthropic Economic Index: new building blocks for understanding AI use #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/78740

The Refraction Principle: How AI Bends (But Doesn't Break) Human Purpose #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/78739

The AI Ad Gap Widens #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/78738 The use of AI in advertisements doesn't concern me, but only because my own opinion of advertising in general couldn't be lower than it is now.

Guardex.ai #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/78737 With the arrival of multi-modal AI our lives will get more complicated, not simpler. Multi-model AI uses more than just text, and uses what are called 'world models' to interpret data from cameras and sensors.

A new direction for students in an AI world: Prosper, prepare, protect #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/78736 This is a lengthy new report from Brookings on the use of AI in learning. "We find that at this point in its trajectory, the risks of utilizing AI in education overshadow its benefits.

Royal Roads University: A Canadian University Without Tenure or Senate | HESA #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/78735

Debunking the AI food delivery hoax that fooled Reddit #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/78734

The Mythology Of Conscious AI #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/78733 This is quite a good article and more than does the job of setting the tone for today's OLDaily.

The Problem with AI "Artists" #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/78732

Algorithms and authors: How generative AI is transforming news production #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/78731 There are some interesting bits in this article even if, in my view, the research basis doesn't allow us to generalize meaningfully.

HoP 484 You Bet Your Life: Pascal’s Wager #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/78730 Peter Adamson's monumental 'History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps' podcast series has made it to the mid-1600s and Pascal's Wager. Here it is: "Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is.

The Human Advantage: Nine Skills We Can’t Afford to Lose in an AI-Powered World #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/78729 This seems to be a day for focusing on human skills in an AI world, and yet I find the descriptions of them to be so lacking. This article is a case in point.

Be Redemptive #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/78728 I think there are some good points to be made in this longish post ruminating on how to decide what needs to be made and what needs to be done in the world.