OLWeekly

Ai is Everything That is Not Needed in Education
Matt Crosslin, EduGeek Journal, 2025/12/19

Remember Matter & Space? I wrote about it in April, quoting from George Siemens and Paul LeBlanc. As Matt Crosslin reports here, the website has disappeared (the URL now redirects to Southern New Hampshire University). Croisslin reports on "a LinkedIn post by Paul Leblanc, who says that Southern New Hampshire University has decided to bring the platform in-house," and a What I Learned post from George Siemens from September (covered here). Instead of finding out what's going on, Crosslin takes the opportunity to dump on AI in genmeral and Siemens in particular and to say "we know what works in education: time, funding, nutrition, safety for all, etc." which is about as empty as a comment can get. Me, I hope George is OK, I hope Paul finds himself at Harvard, and I hope Matt revels in the educational renaissance obviously happening in Texas.

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The Report of the LMS's Death is an Exaggeration
Glenda Morgan, Phil Hill, On EdTech Newsletter, 2025/12/19

Glenda Morgan and Phil Hill respond to Alfred Essa's claim from yesterday that the LMS is dead. "Every dollar committed to LMS extensions," writes Essa, "is a dollar not spent on what actually advances learning: faculty innovation, curriculum design, program-level experimentation, and institutional capacity to shape its own tools." Morgan and Hill respond that the LMS was never intended to produce learning, but to handle important administrative functions. "Like Essa, we agree that higher education is facing structural change, not a temporary downturn. Institutions are under real pressure and will need to make difficult strategic choices and significant shifts. But abandoning the LMS is not one of the productive ones in our opinion."

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Reflections on the closure of the OER Foundation and the implications for OER policies
Paul Bacsich, 2025/12/19

People aren't going to like the fact that this report (31 page PDF, LinkedIn summary) is mostly authored by ChatGPT, but I urge readers to set aside this and to engage with the content, which makes some compelling points. The point of departure is, of course, the shutdown of the OER Foundation, which resulted from the centralization and commercial focus of New Zealand's polytechnic sector. But it also raises broader issues for OER, specifically: "OER fails when it is treated as an educational movement; it survives when treated as public infrastructure." Worse, the community failed to act on the warning signs because "OER advocates overestimated their proximity to power. They were influential in discourse, visible in policy documents, and respected internationally - but rarely decisive in budgetary or structural terms." Against all this, readers my want to contrast my own views dating from 2018, which ChatGPT did not consult.

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Why Authoritarian Innovation Has Limits: A Recursive Emergence Perspective | Isaac+Mao
Isaac Mao, Recursive Emergence, 2025/12/18

While Isaac Mao is talking about innovation at the national level, and specifically China, I think the same logic applies at corporate and institutional levels. Innovation, says Mao, is a process where "collective memory (Ψ) generating new coherent patterns (Φ), which reshape the institutional lattice (Ω), which then feeds back into memory with less entropy than before," and this requires "high Ψ diversity... high Ω permeability (and) fast Φ→Ψ integration" (or, in my own terms: diversity and autonomy, openness, and interaction, respectively). In other words, 'recursive emergence'. A discussion based on this follows, but I think it should be more nuanced. No government (or corporation or institution) is completely authoritarian or non-authoritarian, and they can be more or less authoritarian in different areas. And we are not (yet, at least) globally authoritarian. But the main point here is the definition of innovation, and I think this is not wrong, and I think a lot about how we should structure business, research and society follows from this.

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Can neuroscientists decode memories solely from a map of synaptic connections?
The Transmitter, 2025/12/18

My inclination is to answer this question with a "no" while I think the panel's collective response is to say "do what now?" Because, after all, what exactly is is to decode a memory?"I think," says Michał Januszewski, "that you want to do, if you want to read out a memory, is to have a learned function which maps some inputs to some outputs." So anything that is a 'memory' will be relative to a specific input? Or do we just generalize, and say any future (brain) state that depends on a past state is a memory. But then, is a behaviour (like a bird singing its song) a memory? There's a lot more along these lines; if you're in education, you should at least consider some of these questions. You can read the transcript (16 page PDF) or listen to the panel discussion as a video. 

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Facebook tests £9.99 monthly subscription for sharing more than two links
Liv McMahon, BBC, 2025/12/18

As this article reports, "Facebook is testing placing a limit on how many links some users can share when they post on the social media platform." I'm sure I don't need to emphasize how anti-Web this is. "Tests like this underline why building a business that's overly dependent on any one platform's goodwill is incredibly risky." Even more to the point, it underlines why we shouldn't depend on centralzied servcies at all.  See also: the Guardian.

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Protecting online safe spaces
Alana Cattapan, University Affairs, 2025/12/18

I'm a bit surprised to read that Zoom-bombing is still a thing. "'Zoom-bombing' refers to any time uninvited guests join a virtual meeting to disrupt it, typically by sharing loud audio or offensive imagery, or both." That said, I have worked with professors who even as late as this year have preferred to keep their Zoom chat open to whomever wants to drop in. It's definitely not what I recommend, no more than I would recommend allowing just anyone to join the stage at a conference panel discussion. At the same time, I've seen the logic work in reverse, which professors arguing that the discussion shouldn't be advertised so they can keep it 'open' without fear of it being Zoom-bombed. Me, I don't really see a contradiction of values here - 'open' does not entail a responsibility to provide an 'open mic'.

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Teaching Quality
Hollis Robbins, Anecdotal Value, 2025/12/18

This is quite a long post and it wanders into irrelevant territory quite a bit (for example, a debate on whether liberal or conservative instructors are better teachers) but the message, ultimately, is quite clear: "If universities continue to charge premium tuition for sub-par human instruction that is inferior to a $20/month AI subscription, the market will collapse." So what to do? "The only survival strategy is to offer what AI cannot: the 25% of 'heroic' teachers who provide mentorship, complex critique, and the human accountability that drives actual learning." This, however, requires definition and measurement of teaching quality, and the data for this just isn't there. Hollis Robbins isn't the first to stress teaching quality in higher education, but I still think the concept is more elusive than critics think. Because if it weren't, we'd have some was of measuring it, and if we could, then we'd just have AI optimize for that. As Justin Weinberg says, "calling for a metric that will reduce all the various things a university can do for students to a few numbers does not seem like a promising strategy."

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Coursera and Udemy enter a merger agreement valued at around $2.5B
Lauren Forristal, TechCrunch, 2025/12/18

My interest in the world of mergers and acquisitions is virtually zero, but I'll pass along this notice because I imagine some people interested in MOOCs and edtech will want to take note. The announcement states, "they have entered into a definitive merger agreement under which Coursera will combine with Udemy in an all-stock transaction." If you're wondering about the layoffs that inevitably follow such an announcement, they anticipate "annual run-rate cost synergies of $115 million within 24 months of closing", so what's that, a thousand jobs, maybe a quarter of their combined workforce? The announcement also suggests "sustained investment in AI-driven platform innovation, rapid product development, and durable growth initiatives." 

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Visiting OpenAI: Reflections from a Philosopher’s Desk
Daniel Story, Daniel's Substack, 2025/12/17

Definitely the AI-sceptics will enjoy this takedown of an OpenAI-inspired conferences that seems to be all talk and no intelligence. Those sceptical of academia in all its forms and pretenses will also find reasons to enjoy the article. I don't know whether any of what was described really took place, but that seems to be irrelevant. And I can't help but feel how familiar all this feels to me. We are playing a superficial game in which we criticize our own superficiality, yearning for depth, but not aware that we have been misled about what depth really is for all these years (p.s. I read this while listening to Jean-Michel Jarre, which probably didn't help with my objectivity at all).

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If You've Never Broken It, You Don't Really Know It
Tim O'Brien, O'Reilly, 2025/12/17

I literally made this comment in a prompt in a recent ChatGPT interaction: "You have got to be kidding me, I have a rule that stated that I never wanted you to do that, and you just ignored it?" And I think the core point of this article - that vibe-coding using an AI isn't the cure-all it's made out to be - is a good one. Part of this is because AI can be stubbornly mule-headed. But just as often, it's because the problem or project isn't as clearly formulated in your mind as you thought it was. The unexpected use case, the one-in-a-million exception, the forgotten data type: humans often forget them, and AI will definitely forget them. We need to keep this in mind because a lot of these errors are the sort of thing that will impact only one in a hundred or one in a thousand people - and in institutions, we're not really good at listening to so small a demographic. 

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You should never build a CMS
Knut Melvær, Sanity.io, 2025/12/17

This is a fascinating discussion for anyone who creates or uses content management systems. Here's the setup: Lee Robinson migrated cursor.com (a website supporting the Cursor AI engine) from Sanity (a content management system) to an AI-authored melange of cloud services including GitHub, documenting the whole process. "What I previously thought would take weeks and maybe an agency to help with the slog work was done in $260 of tokens (or one $200/mo Cursor plan)," wrote Robinson. This article was written by Knut Melvær, an executive at Sanity, who observes, "when a high-profile customer moves off your product and the story resonates with builders you respect, you pay attention." And while he agrees with a lot of what Robinson, the gist of this response is that while a non-CMS solution might work in the short term, you will eventually run into the sort of problem a CMS was intended to solve. "Markdown files are the content equivalent of denormalized strings everywhere. It works for small datasets. It becomes a maintenance nightmare at scale."

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If You Want People in the Office, Build One Worth Coming To
Phil Gilbert, SSIR, 2025/12/18

I don't know whether the offices at IBM are as employee-friendly as they seem to be based on this article, but I definitely endorse the argument that 'return to office' requires much more intentional design of how we work in offices at all. "Today's leaders mandating return-to-office (RTO) policies are solving the wrong problem. They're focusing on attendance rather than engagement. If your people don't want to be in your space, that's not their failure - it's yours. The spaces you've created aren't compelling enough. Full stop."

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An Opportunity to Build the Ownership Economy
Marjorie Kelly, SSIR, 2025/12/17

"It's clear a new cultural moment is opening," writes Marjorie Kelly, "a moment when worker ownership might take on a new sheen of possibility and promise." Might that work to reorganize learning? The article suggests, "nonprofits, churches, and universities can incorporate employee ownership programming and advocacy into their work on issues like community stability, wealth inequality, and the racial wealth gap." It's hard to say, though - the logistics are so different for young children as compared to professional certification. And education isn't just a workplace - it's also a place where a society or organization invests in its future goals and objectives (which may range from developing a workforce to developing a social conscience) by hiring people to put these into practice. I'm not ruling it out - and in general, I'm a great proponent of worker ownership - but it's complex.

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CrowdBucks is a new payment system for the Fediverse
Sean Tilley, We Distribute, 2025/12/16

I'm not a fan of this at all, but it doesn't surprise me at all that someone created it. The idea is that you sign up for an account using your Mastodon ID (other services to be supported later) and then ask people for money, which they pay you through CrowdBucks. 

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Women and Leadership in Distance Education in Canada
Cindy Ives, Pamela Walsh, Rebecca E. Heiser, Athabasca University Press, 2025/12/16

Many of the authors contributing to this book (299 page PDF) are familiar to me, and the story they tell from their perspective is one I know well from mine, the story of the rise to prominence of distance education in Canada especially over the last decade and a half. Their perspective, as the title suggests, is that of women in leadership positions in this field from across the country and from various backgrounds. It reads as a series of personal histories, detailing the issues, challenges, and principles that guided them through that time. It's a good read, and I appreciate that this sort of valuable contribution is openly published so everybody can read it.

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AI-assisted coding: 10 simple rules to maintain scientific rigor
Russell Poldrack, The Transmitter, 2025/12/16

This article doesn't actually offer 10 simple rules - that's a different document - but it does lay out four themes based on the ten rules (and some personal experience). The themes are reasonable - you still need to know what you are doing, you need to know how to work with coding assistants for things like context management, you need to work within a testing framework, and you need to ensure the code is valid - that it actually does what the AI says it does. The article made me wonder: how would the same rules apply for using AI to write articles (assuming we need more articles in the world, a proposition I am beginning to doubt)? 

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I ported JustHTML from Python to JavaScript with Codex CLI and GPT-5.2 in 4.5 hours
Simon Willison, 2025/12/16

A couple of weeks ago Emil Stenström wrote How I wrote JustHTML using coding agents. I read it at the time - I thought maybe I had posted it here, but I guess I hadn't (it's one of those niche posts that really interesting to me but maybe less interesting to the broader e-learning readership). It describes using AI to write a fully compliant HTML5 parser in Python (not trivial, because there are so many ways to write HTML incorrectly, and a parser can't choke on them). It was significant to me because it suggests that testing, rather than reading lines of code, will be how we validate software in the future. Anyhow, in this article Simon Willison describes porting the software from Python to Javascript - "It took two initial prompts and a few tiny follow-ups... Time elapsed from project idea to finished library: about 4 hours, during which I also bought and decorated a Christmas tree with family and watched the latest Knives Out movie." So is that what software development is now? "Is it responsible and appropriate to churn out a direct port of a library like this in a few hours while watching a movie? What would it take for code built like this to be trusted in production?" Here's the playground for the new software. Works perfectly.

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ParadAIse L0st?
Peter Bannister, Higher Education Research & Development, 2025/12/15

I was reviewing something I had written the other day when I realized I had used the word 'delve'. What did this mean? Had I succumbed to parroting the AI style? Wasn't I afraid of being labeled an AI user? Neither: it was just the word that seemed to fit. I left it in. So anyhow, this article wrestles with a similar dilemma for academic writers. What happens to creative thought when AI is everywhere? "Users become both architects and artefacts." I had a few responses to the paper: one, a visceral dislike for the writing style; another, wherein I commented on LinkedIn, "Makes you pine for the days when only the rich could afford intellectual dishonesty and unearned advantage." Another, where I considered the possibility that there was a genuine issue being raised that addressed both human and AI content equally. In the end, all I was left with was 'meh'.

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OpenAI are quietly adopting skills, now available in ChatGPT and Codex CLI
Simon Willison, Simon Willison's Weblog, 2025/12/15

The most recent bit of AI jargon is something that might take you back to the days of the Amazon Echo and Alexa: skills. Today's version, however, comes from Anthropic and is being (quietly) adopted by OpenAI. "A skill is just a folder with a Markdown file and some optional extra resources and scripts, so any LLM tool with the ability to navigate and read from a filesystem should be capable of using them." Here's where they show up in OpenAI. "Skills are a keeper," says Simon Willison.  

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Last Call for Mass Market Paperbacks
Jim Milliot, Sophia Stewart, PublishersWeekly.com, 2025/12/15

I didn't have much money when I was young so for me reading meant buying used mass market paperbacks. These were at best temporary books, and would often fall apart. But I wasn't building a library to decorate a house! Anyhow, with the arrival of the internet I was able to read as much as I wanted essentially for free, and I stopped buying them (I remember the point in time exactly - I had read the first two Game of Thrones books and was waiting for the third to come out in paperback... and it never did (maybe it did eventually, but I waited years). No way I was going to pay for a hardcover, so that was the end for me.) Anyhow, Ben Werdmuller writes, "ReaderLink, the largest book distributor in America, is going to stop carrying them - and we'll notice the effect immediately."

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Share some Gratitude for the OER Foundation, For it is No More
Alan Levine, OE Global Connect, 2025/12/15

Alan Levine makes a point of offering a Hat Tip for the OER Foundation. He writes, "The courses shared through OERu are built on the web first approaches of collaborative authoring via a wiki and a dynamic distribution system based on open protocols. This is a credit to the vision and commitment of Wayne Mackintosh over 16 years. And so much was built and share in not only the tools, but the methods, but technologist Dave Lane, who always shared his expertise with me for years and years." I do hope someone in the world can step forward to host the content and services.

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Terminating OER Foundation Services
2025/12/15

It is truly a disappointment to read that Open Education Resource Foundation (OERF) and its services are being terminated. Reading the note, it really feels like it was killed rather than starved - funding was withdrawn, but in such a way that there was no way for the organization to try to find alternative funding (now I could be wildly misreading this; that's just how it comes across to me). "The OER Foundation maintains an extensive Free and Open Source Software technology infrastructure, specifically 48 instances of 32 different web application services in support of its charitable mission, operating across eleven servers (one physical and 10 virtual) located in Germany and the United States. Web traffic data shows that this infrastructure supports in excess of 140 million unique visitors from over 120 different countries a year." Staff have a week to find new jobs. Image: Alan Levine.

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How Google Maps quietly allocates survival across London's restaurants - and how I built a dashboard to see through it
Lauren Leek, Lauren's data Substack, 2025/12/15

The purpose of a ranking system is often to create a market rather than to merely describe it (fans of university rankings take note). This is brilliantly demonstrated in this report showing how a Google Maps depiction of restaurant popularity quietly tips the scales in the direction of "relevance, distance, and prominence." It's this third that is more interesting here (since, again, it features so heavily in university rankings). "In the language of digital economics, ranking algorithms act as attention allocators, steering demand toward some firms and away from others." 

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Can We Introspectively Test the Global Workspace Theory of Consciousness?
2025/12/12

If you think there's something to cognitive load theory then you're probably implictly endorsing what Eric Schwitzgebel references here, the Global Workspace Theory. "Its central claim: You consciously experience something if and only if it's being broadly broadcast in a 'global workspace' so that many parts of your mind can access it at once -- speech, deliberate action, explicit reasoning, memory formation, and so on. Because the workspace has very limited capacity, only a few things can occupy it at any one moment." The question he asks is, can we test it by contemplating our own perceptual experiences at any given moment? When we ask people, he says, we get a completely mixed bag of responses (in my case I add a lot of extra stimulation, like the music I'm listening to and the scene out the window, in order to fill the vast gaping void that is my attention span).

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