Stephen Downes

Alex Usher tends to write from the government and university administration's point of view, and it makes sense, because that's where the money is. So it's not surprising to see this week's column devolve into "academic unions in Canada have a veto over real program change (and) dig in against not just job losses but any hint of changes in working practices." And honestly, it's pretty easy to criticize people with "average professorial salaries of over $200K such as at UBC". It's just enough money that most people think it's a lot (and it is a lot - I wish I made that). But it's not so much that losing their support will ever cost the consulting business any income. It also doesn't help that most faculty never really wanted to be in the education business - they wanted to be historians or geographers or physicists or some such - but unless they're in an actual profession like doctor or lawyer the best employment opportunities will be in colleges or universities. But having said all that - blaming "resistence to change" is a gross mischaracterization of opposition to a lot of what's happening in academia. I mean - you're talking about really smart people, for the most part, and their only objection is "I don't like change"? There's a lot that can't be said in this short space, but I think any discussion has to begin with a recognition that academics resisting the conversion of their workplace into free training camps for corporations might have some basis for their objections. Image: AAUP.

I've lost count of how many educators have asked about how to build community over the years. My advice has always been the same: instead of building a community, find the community that already exists and join that. This post contains information about how to do just that. But a word of caution: doing it this way means changing the focus from yourself and your causes to other people and what they need. And (as the article suggests) it's probably best to look away from charities and look toward networks of mutual support. All this is why I haven't tried to build community around this site (and look suspiciously at pundits who are developing community around theirs).

I have to say, I love this format, though it seems like a lot of work. David Hopkins introduces it as follows: "Inspired by Tom Whitwell's annual collection of things learned, here are my '52 things I learned in 2025'. The list is usually presented under the comment that 'no explanation or context of what it is about the article I learned, just a title and link of something important to me personally or professionally in [year]'."

OK, this would sound dangerous, right? "I asked Cursor: 'Take this React component, make the rows draggable, persist the order, and generate tests.' It did. I ran the tests, and everything passed; I then shipped the feature without ever opening the code. Not because I couldn't but because I didn't have to." Shipping without even looking at the code? I would say this is a lot less concern for developers than it might seem. After all, for most, the code - the actual code - has always been hidden. Developers who write in Javascript or C or PHP know that these are high-level languages, and that they are automatically compiled into low level code which actually does the work. Testing - not code inspection - catches any problems. AI-generated code is the same thing, just at one level of abstraction higher. 

This is a long discussion of something I don't think was an issue to begin with, but I could be wrong about that, so I'm passing it along. It stems from the argument from Robert Dare that states "Complexity, the theory goes, manifests itself in 'complex adaptive systems', which are made up of many independent agents [my emphasis] who interact and adapt to each other." But if you read 'independent' as (say) 'completely immune from any external influence', then entities in a complex system are not 'independent'. I have used the word 'autonomous' to express the idea that they are the locus of decisions about how they react to all this input. Keith Hamon describes them as "partly competing, partly co-operating, or simply mutually ignoring."

In 1998 or so my website was RSS feed number 31. That's the number it was assigned on the Netscape Netcenter, at the time the only platform for reading RSS feeds, where it sat alongside feeds for things like Wired and Dave Winer. RSS - also known as 'Rich Site Summary' or 'Really Simple Syndication' has been my go-to ever since. I use it every day, it's the source of a lot of what you see in this newsletter, and of course I use it to distribute these posts, my articles, and even my talks as a podcast. So I'm pretty supportive of what Ben Werdmuller is saying here as he makes the pitch for continued community support for what is essentially a core piece of internet infrastructure.