Stephen Downes

I think there's a common trope in the education community: take one outrageous example of technology, use it to criticize the entire field, then propose a non-technological alternative focused around in-person classes and flipcharts. Oh, where would we be without flipcharts? Anyhow, you can read the latest instalment here.

This article reports on a survey questioning the need for an open educational XR (OEXR) resource library. The results were favourable. Respondents said "free access to the OEXR Library for all users is crucial, underscoring the diverse range of institutions participating in our survey." Focus group participants underlined "ensuring equitable access to XR tools and resources such that institutions with limited financial resources can still benefit from XR technologies." Full responses are available on the OEXR Survey Data Dashboard.

According to the website, "The OER Research Database provides a free and easily accessible venue for instructors, administrators, students, policy-makers, and other stakeholders to locate research and formal literature on the use of open educational resources and practices." I haven't looked at it to any depth. I did notice that the authors "excluded publications we consider to be informal (e.g., blog posts, conference presentations)" whih makes it less interesting and relevant to me. Via Alan Levine.

I would be remiss if I did not mention the University of Toronto's Geoffrey Hinton today, co-winnder of the Nobel Prize along with John Hopfield, for work in the development of neural networks. "Hinton was selected for the high-profile award for his use of the Hopfield network – invented by his co-laureate – as the foundation for a new network called the Boltzmann machine that can learn to recognize elements within a given type of data." Long-time readers will know of my own enthusiasm for the approach, despite the scepticism of cognitive theorists. See also this press release from the Swedish Academy.

Mark Corbett Wilson takes the time to look at the auto-podcast generator in Google's NotebookLM with a number of examples, examination into how it works, and discussion about its use. The most useful bit (to my mind): "There is even an "open" NotebookLM available on Hugging Face. It was made in an afternoon (by a computer scientist) and you can download it from GitHub and install it on your own machine, or, click the link below to try an online version."

Here's the gist: "ActivityPods allows users to create a single account for multiple decentralised social apps. With an account, users get a Personal Online Datastore (Pod) to store all their data, as well as an ActivityPub inbox and outbox for communicating across the 'Fediverse'. ActivityPods implements part of the Solid protocol (full compliance is planned in the long term), which separates user identities, data storage, and applications. This allows multiple applications to use the same data, ensuring that your social network is available across any app that uses ActivityPods." I haven't tested this, but it's noteworthy that it exists.