A Social Filesystem — overreacted #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/79461 This is a very good description of how the ATmosphere protocol actually works, with the bulk of the focus on the personal data store (PDS) and how records are actually stored and named.

Hyperblam Docs Home #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/79460 This is another one of those items I've saving for myself for a time when I can settle in and enjoy it a bit.

The problem with evidence production on AI in education #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/79459 I'm not going to dispute Ben Williamson's argument here. It is entirely plausible that much of the 'AI in Education' (AIED) research is, as he says, "junk science".

Satya Nadella’s Insights on the Future of Organic Intelligence (OI) #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/79458 Reading Michael Feldstein's post I would have thought Satya Nadella's post was a tome, but in fact it's only a few well-chosen paragraphs long.

Escape the Moon #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/79457 Saving this one for later when I have a better room and a (much) larger screen. I do like the novel presentation. "Crash-land, gather, refine and fabricate your way off a dead moon.

Edtech examined #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/79456 This report from the U.K.'s Information Commissioner’s Office on their audit of EdTech companies operating in schools shows that they leave a lot to be desired.

W Social: a Broken Ghost Town? #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/79455 W Social is a new Europe-based social network service build on the Bluesky network.

Enabling Collaborative Initiatives #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/79454

PACT: Anonymous Credentials for the Web #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/79453 Websites have good reasons to block bots, spam, and the rest, clearly. And so they have been asking readers to prove that they are human using methods that have become more and more intrusive.

Why we’re asking readers to register #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/79452 I was all in ten years ago when Rest of World came out. It would finally be an authentic source of international voices. And that's how it presented itself.

Critique of Agent Model #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/79451

Open Weights + Open Content = Free, Private, AI-Powered Learning #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/79450 David Wiley introduces a new prototype.

How we’ll fight the platform war against Big AI - Anil Dash #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/79449 The only reason why there's even such a thing as a 'platform war' against AI is that the companies pushing AI are already, for the most part, platforms. Microsoft. Google. X/Twitter.

Does this help someone learn? #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/79448

What Edtech Got Right, What It Missed, and What AI Changes Now (Jennifer Carolan, Reach Capital) #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/79447

Paradoxes of Openness: Power, Reciprocity, and the Governance of Scholarly Infrastructures #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/79446 This is a chapter from a larger book, the whole of which is worth looking at. This summary doesn't do this complex chapter justice.

LLMs and performative productivity #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/79445 It's as though people believe there's a learning 'off switch' (though it only exists in other people).

Sublimation #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/79444 The first think I thought of when I read this post from Julian Stodd was simulated annealing and Boltzmann machines.

There Are No Instances in atproto #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/79443

Down the Web Rabbit Hole With a Hammerhand #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/79442 This is a longish discussion of McLuhan's idea of a tool as an extension of the self, which then of course can be applied to media. Today, it can be applied to AI.

Industry to Educators: Teach Human Skills, Not Just AI #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/79441

This Week in Student Success #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/79440 I'm not sure 'disjuncture' is the best word for the contradictions being described by Glenda Morgan in this article on the differences between what teachers think they are delivering and what students think they are receiving.

3 Fresh Ideas for Structuring Professional Development #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/79439 If you wanted to make a keynote feel more like indoctrination than an opportunity to stretch the mind, I can't thing of a better method.

Multi-Agentic EdTech: The Promise and the Costs #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/79438

There are too many JavaScript schema libraries, so support only one #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/79437 This is rather technical, but is an example of building compatibility in the 'interfaces' between different application domains.

Transforming AI models into useful model organisms #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/79436

How the Open Knowledge Format can improve data sharing #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/79435 The Open Knowledge Format (OKF) is "an open specification that formalizes the LLM-wiki pattern into a portable, interoperable format.

Take a Stand and Understand the Standard #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/605 Discussion of web standards..

Visualization experiments #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/79434 Interesting extension of Matthias Melcher's diagramming tool. I too use WinDirStat (I recommend it if your hard drive is too full). At some point I need to write an article about the two-pane layout..

Towards a Regenerative Anthropology #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/79428 This manifesto describes a 'regenerative anthropology' and captures many of the trends we have seen in open online learning.

Cloud-based vs self-hosted messaging: Which do you prefer? #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/79426

Writing Was Never a Test of Who Could Think. #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/79425 There are some nuggets of goodness in this article that is far longer than it needs to be. The first is right near the beginning: "AI is not a tool.

The Fable of AI in Education #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/79424 The term 'tokenomics' has already been defined to apply to blockchain, but I'm going to apply it in a new context, to describe the new and emerging science of minimizing the use of tokens while maximizing AI utility.

The Easier Technology Gets, the More Challenge Matters - George Couros #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/79423

The Current State of Play: AI in Higher Education and the Road Ahead #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/79422 I mostly agree with what's expressed in this article but I disagree with the tenor, which has the university still providing and the student still consuming.

News Harvester #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/604 Upgrade to the latest version of News Harvester to display free Net headlines on your site. The newest version of the Perl/Perl-DHTML installer now works with the latest LWP Perl module..

Why is Meta destroying its engineering organization? #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/79421 Obviously I don't feel any sympathy for Meta as a company, and while I do feel for its employees, I consider this to be a bit of a case of "you reap what you sow".

Toward a sociology of education and artificial intelligence #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/79420 This is an editorial (12 page PDF) introducing an upcoming special issue of the British Journal of Sociology of Education on the sociology of education and AI.

Coauthorship integrity: Reconceptualising assessment validity for the age of generative artificial intelligence #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/79419

Beyond the sandbox: A playbook for scaling L&D innovation enterprisewide #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/79418 It's the same sort of lesson being learned again in the corporate learning environment. "We expected high engagement. We anticipated deep learning. The result? A ghost town.

Online Conferences Should be Better than In-Person Conferences, Not Worse #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/79417

Some Student Data Should Never Become Digital #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/79416 "Modern learning systems can observe response times, hesitation patterns, engagement signals, repeated errors, abandoned tasks, and changes in behavior over time," writes Charles Fadel.

Should I be racked with guilt for not buying books? #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/79415 The campaign to rein in the rampant freeloading at local libraries continues apace.

Not My First EdTech Rodeo #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/79414 It's basically a trope now to compare the current wave of AI technology to previous ed tech innovations, like MOOCs, say, and to say "they didn't wipe out universities so this won't either". It's lso misleading.

Learning centricity vs Learner centricity: some thoughts on Dave Cormier’s human-centred model for discussing AI in assessment #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/79413

The Emerging AI Divide in Higher Education #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/79412

Forgejo – Beyond coding. We forge. #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/79411 Haven't tried it, but I definitely want to take note of a federated version of GitHub. "Forgejo can be trusted to be exclusively Free Software.

Rebuilding Shared Meaning in a Fragmented World #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/79410 To put it simply, in 'modernism' there was one point of view (one type of truth, one view of the world, one way of describing it), which had its good and bad points.

The uncontroversial 'thingness' of AI #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/79409

Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/79408 My own take is that Anthropic's competitors have been given a gift by the U.S.