FR#157 – Social Software Distribution #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/78986 Larens Hof makes an interesting observation. Decentralized social networks are now being used to share and exchange bits of software the way existing social networks have been used to share comments and media.

The Death of Spotify: Part II #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/78985 Laura Hilliger links to this article about the future of music streaming. The article is full of hits and misses, but there's a sound point in there. It's this: for most people, most music is commoditized, like tap water.

SOLA - Saylor Online Learning Assistant: AI-powered learning coach Moodle plugin #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/78984 "SOLA, Saylor Academy's open-source AI learning assistant, is now publicly available on GitHub," reports Tom Caswell.

This is Our Opportunity to Create A Learner-Centered Path for AI Integration in Education #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/78983

What 2,800 AI Conversations Taught Me About My Users #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/78982 What I like about topic modeling is that while you don't get theories or generalizations or neat simple taxonomies, you get information you can use.

Claude the Instructor #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/78981 More on the use of Claude as a teaching tool.

What's My JND? #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/78980 This is a fun game with an interesting point. The idea of the game is to "find your Just Noticeable Difference in colour perception. How small a colour difference can you actually see?" If you're curious, my JND is 0.0054.

The Great Syllabus Stagnation #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/78979

How LLMs make Git and GitHub easier to use and learn #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/78978 I've mentioned my own experiences working with AI to navigate the intricacies of Git. Here Jon Udell relays his own experiences.

OpenAI's Education Pitch Has a Free Version Problem #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/78977 This is a longish and wide-ranging article in response to an OpenAI Education 'summit' for education leaders held last week in San Francisco.

Crawl entire websites with a single API call using Browser Rendering #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/78976 Cloudflare's announcement caused a stir in the socials today.

The Shape of the Thing #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/78975

Your Browser Becomes Your WordPress #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/78974 This is really neat: a version of WordPress that runs entirely in your browser on your computer. See also Planet WordPress on this.

There's Gonna Be Another Internet Phone Book! #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/78973 A second edition of the Internet Phone Book is being prepared and if like me you have an independent personal website then you can submit your listing.

Strategic AI: People First? #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/78972

When AI remembers everything and organisations forget how to choose #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/78971 Doug Belshaw captures here some core questions about learning and memory. "In Borges' story Funes the Memorious, the protagonist falls from a horse and acquires a perfect memory...

Open Education: When Sharing Becomes Colonization #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/78970 The question being posed here is whether there is, "in certain forms of sharing, a more or less well-disguised colonialism?" The three authors each offer their own view.

How to Use AI as a Stand-In SME for Portfolio Samples #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/78969 "One of the challenges of building instructional design portfolio samples is the lack of a Subject Matter Expert (SME)," writes Christy Tucker.

What’s Your EGOT? #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/78968 This is kind of fun. Some background: "EGOT stands for Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony... What makes the EGOT so compelling is not that someone won four awards. It is that each award represents mastery in a completely different domain.

A lot of journalism folks are offering editing advice as Grammarly’s AI "experts" #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/78967 A number of well-known journalists are finding their names, and presumably their talents, used without permission by Grammarly's AI editing tool.

Open Education Is the New Punk: A Subversive Do-It-Yourself Approach to Pedagogy #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/78966 Something I'd like somebody to build omne day is a function that tracks concepts over time across articles, publications and popular discourse.

Skills, Innovation, Quality, Blindness #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/78965 Alex Usher wants to redefine two things in this short post: innovation, and skills.

Impeccable: Design skills for AI harnesses #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/78964 OK, I haven't tried this, and I think the left-right sliders over the examples are a usability fail (you'll see what I mean) but I find the concept intriguing so I thought I'd share.

The web is bearable with RSS #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/78963 This article starts off as praise for RSS and ends up as a lament for the web in general. The RSS part boils down to essentially this: "Imagine reading the web without popups, without ads, without nag screens.

The Hidden Advantage of Being Over 50 in the Age of AI #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/78962 I'm not really sure I'm convinced by this argument, despite being one of the ones having the advantage of experience.

A new generation of apprentices: She started her career at 18 and hasn’t looked back #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/78961 I really have mixed feelings about this. Starting a career at 18 has many advantages - by contrast, my 'career' (properly so-called) started when I was in my 30s.

Making breakfast on a burning planet: a parent’s perspective on a GenAI future – #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/78960

The one science reform we can all agree on, but we're too cowardly to do #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/78959 This is a longish article revisiting an issue we've covered on numerous occasions here: the broken system of academic publishing.

PEER: a technique for brainstorming interviewees and story sources #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/78958 This is a useful article meant for journalists but worth reflecting on for all of us.

Is higher education broken? Not exactly. #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/78957

Explore AI Literacy - A Visual Navigator for AI Literacy Frameworks #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/78956 This tool, which the website source reveals was created by Perplexity computer, compares 20 AI literacy frameworks across 9 domains.

The Australian Workforce Crisis: Why skills aren’t enough #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/78955

What we mean by good relationships - Network Weaver #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/78954

Context Hub #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/78953 The current issue of The Batch introduces readers to Context Hub, Andrew Ng's new tool to provide API documentation to your coding tools.

Why organisms are more than machines #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/78952 This is a good article, I'll grant it that. I resist its main thesis; ultimately the argument is not successful. But it's worth state here.

What's an API? #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/78951 This is a clear and well-written account of what an application programming interface (API) is. We read about APIs all the time, from xAPI for learning records to MCP as an API for artificial intelligence.

The Hunt for Dark Breakfast #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/78950 OK, it started as a joke, and it's a bit of a joke article: "Breakfast is a vector space. You can place pancakes, crepes, and scrambled eggs on a simplex where the variables are the ratios between milk, eggs, and flour.

Why We Brought MCP-I to DIF (and Why DIF Said Yes) #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/78949

Future shock #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/78947 I do think we have to think of generative AI this way: as a bicycle of the mind. Just like computers were when they came out. "It is a personal amplifier, not a generic one.

AI Agents Are Recruiting Humans To Observe The Offline World #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/78946

Beyond Prestige: Whose Knowledge Counts in Open Education? #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/78945

Core Skills for Today's Future of Work #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/78944

Chatbot data harvesting yields sensitive personal info #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/78943

Towards the Permissive and Transparent use of Generative AI in Education #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/78942 This article introduces a website called PETRA AI (the Permissive and Transparent use of AI in education).

Group identities and inclusive multicultural democracy #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/78941 This is a good article.

College students, professors are making their own AI rules. They don't always agree #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/78940

Narrative as a Fundamental Way of Making Meaning #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/78939 I have spent my entire life resisting the idea of the narrative and storytelling (which is a hard place to be in for a writer). For Keith Hamon, though, the narrative is the core.

Two Paths, One Purpose: How Fair Dealing and Open Education Work Together #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/78938 The term 'open education' has a variety of meanings, most being based on the idea of creating access to learning opportunities and resources.

Are service typologies the key to scaling agentic AI systems across public services? #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/78937 There's more to this than meets, the eye, but I've added Updates from GOV.UK AI Studio to my RSS reader and will likely track further developments.

UX Roundup: Year of the Horse #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/78936