OLWeekly

Why Open Source Doesn't Embrace AI
Justin, From The Architect, 2026/06/05

Open source software is different from open education, of course, but there is overlap in the two communities' rejection of AI. In this post Justin Fowler outlines the four major open source arguments against AI and shows that they don't have a basis in fact. The objective isn't to get everybody to support AI, but rather, to foster a more productive dialogue about it. Meanwhile, "there's a coherent version of the pro-AI argument that says: AI vendors are toolmakers, not platform owners. Judge them by what their users produce. And the produce here is overwhelmingly more open source, faster." If the same holds true of open education, then we too need to reframe our discussion. Via Liam Proven.

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They Built a System to See Everything. But It Can’t See You.
Abi Awomosu, How Not to Use AI, 2026/06/05

This is a long article, and ther title is a bit misleading, but it's entertaining, and contains elements of truth. I wouldn't exactly buy into the world view, but I know any number of people who would. It's based on comparing what AI does with what divination systems did through the ages - systems like the I Ching, the Oracle of Delphi, astrology. What they are all based on is not a big database of facts, but a method of seeing patterns and relationships in things. But there are two ways to look at this - as a type of calculation, a 'prediction', or as a type of interpretation, a 'divination'. "Empire does not divine. Empire predicts. And to make its predictions look like truth, it had to make divination look like superstition." And it becomes 'colonialism' when "it manufactures the predicted outcome rather than say: I don't know." That's what the surveillance systems in Tesco are being used for, and where the art of not being seen becomes a strategy. But "the system doesn't give you the answer. The system creates the conditions for the answer to arrive from the collision between the corpus and the question you brought. You are never optional."

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The European Social Stack - An open declaration
European.Social, 2026/06/05

What tells me I'm on the right track with CList? Initiatives like this. The proponents plan to build on federated social software and to include features such as bridging from service to service, distributed identity, and multiprotocol integration. I've already developed these in my proof of concept so I know it's possible. The real challenges are in things like content moderation and the full social ecosystem. How do you manage unwanted content in a network that supports genuine privacy and decentralized ownership? My own approach is to base interactions on 'pull' - that is, the only content you see is content you asked for. That makes it a poor platform for broadcasting, marketing and propaganda. 

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ChipotlAI-Max
GitHub, 2026/06/05

This is pretty funny. You may have heard the story about a restaurant AI customer support chatbot that people could use to write computer programs. This takes the idea a step futher. "Chipotle's customer support chatbot 'Pepper' went mega-viral after users discovered it could solve LeetCode problems, write Python, reverse linked lists - the works. It's powered by IPsoft Amelia (not Claude, not GPT), and it's still live.... We took OpenCode (MIT license, 120k+ stars), forked it, hardcoded Pepper as the default model, slapped on Chipotle's brand colors, and shipped it." It's now looking at Home Depot, Sephora, Nordstrom, IKEA, and more, using brand AIs to write computer code. "Not affiliated with Chipotle. They will probably sue us. Worth it."

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Cognition spaces: natural, artificial, and hybrid
Ricard Solé, et al., arXiv, 2026/06/05

This is an interesting paper with an ambitious aim, as described in the abstract: "Within this framework, cognition is treated as a graded capacity to sense, process, and act upon information, allowing systems as diverse as cells, brains, artificial agents, and human–AI collectives to be analyzed within a common conceptual landscape." In addition to core requirements - sensation and memory - the framework describes cognitive capacity in terms of complexity, and also considers hybrid cognition as a consequence of agency and interaction. I think the approach is sound, but that it is incommensurable with terms like 'information' and 'processing', which reflect a computational, rather than network, basis for cognition.

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Canada’s National Artificial Intelligence Strategy: AI for All
2026/06/05

This document (50 page PDF) reads a lot like the European strategy just released, which isn't really surprising. The three major pillars are trust, opportunity, and sovereignty, and of those the elements that interest me the most are "shared prosperity" and "benefit from AI". It remains an open question how equitably distributed those will be. There's an emphasis on building out infrastructure to reduce dependence on key suppliers, just as in Europe. And there's a bluntly stated assessment of the state of innovation in Canada: "Canada helped invent modern AI, and that legacy is not just historical...  Too much Canadian innovation is captured and scaled elsewhere." There's also an emphasis on AI literacy, "the understanding that lets Canadians recognize AI, judge its outputs, and decide for themselves where it belongs in their lives."

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Curmudgucation: AI Is Coming to Evaluate You
National Education Policy Center, 2026/06/04

"Meet Observation Copilot!" writes Peter Greene. "Your principal can feed it a half page of loose notes about what he saw in your classroom, and Observation Pilot will pad it with a bunch of professional and framework-aligned bullshit until you have pages of mind-numbing argle bargle in mere seconds... And you know that this "tool" is only about five minutes away from the concept of letting a video-cam collect the "observation notes" and thereby reducing the human principal's contribution to zero." In spaces that are regulated - including things like classrooms, courtrooms, workplaces - this sort of technology can be blocked or severely constrained. But in the unregulated spaces in between - the job market, commercial markets, social media - the technology will be widely deployed. Legislation will likely prove ineffective; it's how we build these markets that will matter. 

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From Making Web Giants Pay to Making Taxpayers Pay: Government Announces Plan to Kill the CRTC's Online Streaming Ruling
Michael Geist, 2026/06/04

How much would you pay for Netflix? $10? $25? What Netflix want to do is maximize that number, because they understand that the price of a non-essential good is based on a consumer's willingness to pay. Why does this matter? Because it's irrelevant what percentage of that price comes in the form of taxes or subsidies. Nobody cares; only Netflix cares. Why does this matter? The principle behind CanCon regulations, or more recently, Streamer subsidies to Canadian content producers (or for that matter, the Canada-US Auto Pact) is that people who make money selling content in Canada should pay part of the cost of producing content in Canada. Critics of such plans say that companies like Netflix will simply "pass the cost along to the consumers". That's a lie. You can't simply 'pass the cost along' because the price of the Netflix stream isn't based on what it costs Netflix to stream its content here; it's based on (say it with me) people's willingness to pay. 

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LifeMaxxing - Optimize Your Life
LifeMaxxing, 2026/06/04

The prompt for this post is this image, which I got from a paywalled account on LinkedIn (it's obviously AI-generated so it has no copyright attached - here's their Youtube channel). Because I couldn't link to the original post, I went searching for the obvious contemporary representation of the same concept: lifemaxxing. Now this is not an endorsement of any of this, but it's well worth talking a look. Here's the pitch: "Master the art of self-optimization. Transform your health, fitness, style, lifestyle, and mindset to become the best version of yourself. Evidence-based protocols for peak performance." The image itself emphasizes a voice-based interface to an AI-based system supporting tasks and priorities, calendaring, finances and goals, journal and coach, habit tracking, and nutrition. It's described as a "personal AI OS" and the objective is personal self-management, with supports, as opposed to (say) a guided program. To me it's an interesting overview of what constitutes 'personal development' as compared to what an academic might call personal development.

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On European Tech Sovereignty, accompanied by an EU Open Source Strategy
European Comission, 2026/06/04

The risks Europe faces are similar to those we face here in Canada: dependence on west Asia for hardware, dependence on the U.S. for software. By now we are all aware how quickly conditions can change. This led to the development of this policy, released today by the European Commission. It begins by stating clearly (and correctly) "Technological sovereignty is thus grounded in openness, partnership and fair competition. It does not mean isolation, protectionism, or tech decoupling." The model proposed "includes four initiatives: the Chips Act 2.0, the Cloud and AI Development Act, the open source strategy, and the Digitalisation and AI in Energy Roadmap. These form a cohesive framework, together with existing initiatives, to move towards the goal of creating a 'European technology stack'." We would do well to emulate this approach, to the extent we are able. See more on DT.

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About TU Delft OPEN Publishing
TU Delft, 2026/06/04

This should be the future of academic publishing: "TU Delft OPEN Publishing is an innovative, community-driven university publisher working closely with TU Delft researchers and teachers. We listen to their needs and place them at the center of our services." The output serves the whole community. "Our books and journals adhere to the Diamond Open Access model, ensuring that all content is free to read and free to publish. Authors retain full copyright of their work under a CC-BY-4.0 license." I don't know what the financial model is for TU Delft but I would imagine they're spending less than they would on commercial academic publishing. For institutions looking to follow in their footsteps, here are their policies. Via Alan Levine.

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Walking in Darwin’s Footsteps
Rachel Botsman, Rethink, 2026/06/04

The field trip has always been a staple of my intellectual process. Even when I was younger and had no money, I found ways to travel, buying cheap bus tickets and using it as my hotel. Later, in my car, I explored every road I could, covering vast swathes of Canadian countryside. I combined this with hobbies that would take me out of the vehicle and into the environment, forcing me to experience and feel; hiking and photography took me there. Even studying philosophy, I would find different places to read - Mill's On Liberty in Calgary's Devonian Gardens; Quine's Word and Object in the Edmonton River Valley; the Tao Te Ching on a B.C. ferry; Kierkegaard's Concluding Unscientific Postscript in a dive bar called Andante. That's why forcing people to attend an office or a classroom is so pernicious: it robs people of this, and substitutes conformity for development.

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Networks of influence: Linking capitals and agency to understand actors’ roles in sustainability interventions
Lena Rölfer, et al., One Earth, 2026/06/04

I have talked in the past about the idea that social (or public) knowledge results from a network process. This article (13 page PDF) is a version of a similar idea, but with some significant differences. The context is agency in global sustainability actions, for example, forest management in Germany, or water resources in Spain. The authors describe five forms of agency: "allocating human resources, enacting political relevance, influencing financial flows, providing physical goods and assets, and steering social-ecological discourse." These in turn are represented as forms of capital: human capital, political capital, physical capital, etc. These flow through a network structure to influence the governance process. There are of course significant problems with this model (notwithstanding that it may be empirically accurate). Capital of any sort is not distributed equitably, and some forms of capital are also counter to individual sovereignty. It's a process that bypasses and therefore may subvert democracy. The issue (in my view) is the focus of this network on single points of control - the 'management' of resources.

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Enclosure of Legibility
Ranjit Singh, Bot Populi, 2026/06/03

"The fight over training data is not only about what gets taken from the commons," writes Ranjit Singh."It is also about what the system returns to us as the baseline version of culture." A similar point is also made in this paper by John Moravec on AI coloniality. I think this is true if we think of AI - or even a particular AI system - as a single undifferentiated whole. But it never is, and it's important to understand this. AI always works in a context. Sometimes it's a vague and ill-defined context, such as the prompt, "Write a short story about a significant holiday." Even here, a lot of work is being done by each word. Ranjit Singh focuses on the word 'significant', but I focus equally on the word 'holiday', which has the context 'American!' written all over it. Nobody does holidays quite like the Americans. I tried it here (in Canada) and got a story about New Years Day. I asked for a story about a significant writer and got Mary Shelly. For a significant deity, I got Athena (I was hoping for Ganesh, but you can't always have what you want). For a significant city, I got Istanbul. Here's my transcript. None of this disproves the original statements on coloniality, but I think it requires of them a lot more nuance.

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Devices Down Is The Wrong Goal
Lisa Nielsen, Tech & Learning, 2026/06/03

The American Federation of Teachers (AFT) has released a 10-point document entitled, "Devices down,
eyes up, hands-on." It has its good points, says Lisa Nielsen. "Students need more active, human, hands-on learning. They need projects, movement, collaboration, civic engagement, career-connected experiences, and chances to tackle real problems." But the whole 'devices down' message sets the wrong frame. "The problem is not the device. The problem is passive learning, poor infrastructure, weak support, and policies that confuse classroom management with meaningful instruction." 

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Sydney academic used AI to write SMH opinion piece urging students to avoid using tech to ‘cut corners’
Josh Taylor, The Guardian, 2026/06/03

Paul Prinsloo comments on this piece, "This is not about naming and shaming. Rather it raises the question of why on Earth do you do this to your reputation. In my humble view, it was unnecessary. Alas." I'm inclined to agree. At the very least, why would not not be open about your use of AI in this specific instance? It could have been an object lesson in what the academic thought was a good 'non-shortcut' use of AI. Alas...

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How to make best use of git and GitHub for AI-assisted software development
Jon Udell, 2026/06/03

Jon Udel describes Bram ("Bram runs agents mindfully"), a "desktop app with three panes: a terminal where you use Claude Code and/or Codex, an agent pane that embodies a workflow (rendered by XMLUI), and an app pane that hot-reloads the app you are developing." This is basically also how I've set up my mixture of a VPS, VS Code and Claude in my own development workflow, so I can see the appeal. Why is this such a good approach? "It encourages agents to enact a git/gh-centric workflow that makes otherwise chaotic agent-assisted development feel safe, orderly, and accountable," says Udell. What that means is you can manage code sharing and collaborative development while allowing your agent to take care of the complexities of doing that. It also "helps you think clearly about the work you are doing, and proceed in well-defined chunks and sequences." Developing this way hasn't redefined my undertsanding of thinking and learning, but it has helped me understand them to deeper degrees of depth. Yes, it's like playing with fire. 

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Redefining Educational Technology: A Critical Collaborative Inquiry
Aras Bozkurt, et al., Open Praxis, 2026/06/03

If the term 'technology' is understood as "orchestration of phenomena for some purpose" then the definition of 'educational technology' will be devoted mostly to describing that purpose, and the three paragraph definition (view here) offered by the 26 authors of this article (20 page PDF) describes it as a process where "learning and meaning-making are enabled, mediated, supported, and transformed." Most of the definition attends to peripheral - and parochial - concerns. For example, it addresses who is included: "researchers, practitioners, educators, communities, and institutions," that is, everyone but students. And for example, it offers "a core commitment that its theory, research and practice should be ethically grounded and critically reflexive," which honestly I see as an empty declaration absent a statement of what constitutes 'ethical' and 'critically reflexive'. 

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AI and a world without migrants
Cory Doctorow, Pluralistic, 2026/06/03

"Billionaires poured trillions into AI because they are obsessed with the fantasy of a world without people," writes Cory Doctorow. Why? "Other people insist on having their own priorities and goals, and they mulishly refuse to organize their lives to suit your priorities." The beauty of AI is that it does what you want without needing to be persuaded (or paid). Where does that leave people? They become "the unnecessariat: workers who are surplus to requirements and can be vaporized or liquidated or warehoused or simply ignored." It all makes sense, says Doctorow, "provided you don't believe that other people are really, truly real." 

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Course Design: How to Get It Right the First Time
TeachOnline, 2026/06/03

This is what we might call the 'standard model' of course design: begin with outcomes, design based on expected student performance, stimulate that performance with active learning, sequence with scaffolding, and iterate based on feedback. An additional section suggests rethinking assessment because of AI. I'm not sure this standard model is used a lot in formal academia, since it's not necessarily skills or competency based, but in corporate learning I would say it's expected. I don't personally design this way because I never have a set of outcomes I expect a student to carry away with them. 

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Slide Deck Q&A Quality Assurance App: A Multi-Stage Pipeline for Pedagogical Question Generation
Jim Salsman, arXiv.org, 2026/06/03

This article (15 page PDF) describes an application that ingests a PDF slide deck, analyzes it for academic content, and generates a question set based on that content. I wanted to try it, but it asks for my Gemini API key, and I didn't want to run up a Google tab (Gemini is expensive; I learned that the hard way). But you can test it if you want, and also view the software repository. I can think of a variety of applications for a tool such as this, not the least of which is posing a set of questions to a student after they've presented their own work as a slide deck.

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How DuckDuckGo Can Be a Hero
Doc Searls, Doc Searls Weblog, 2026/06/02

Just for the record: I've stopped using Kagi as a search engine and started using DuckDuckGo. This is partially because it wasn't worth the money and partially because Kagi, like Google, was introducing too many things that weren't search.

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Code Acts in Education: AI and the Amplification of Academic Content Assetization
National Education Policy Center, 2026/06/02

What constitutes academic freedom? This strikes me as maximalist: "Freedom to teach includes: Freedom to determine what shall be taught (course content); freedom to determine how it shall be taught (pedagogy); freedom to determine who shall teach (via transparent selection procedures); freedom to determine whom shall be taught (the right to determine and enforce entry standards); freedom to determine how students' progress shall be evaluated (assessment methods); freedom to determine whether students shall progress (via marking criteria and grade determination)." I mean, I suppose anybody can have those freedoms (I'm not going to stop them) but it's not clear this is something we as a society want to be paying for.

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The Need Is Real
Phil Hill, On EdTech Newsletter, 2026/06/02

Phil Hill cites Patrick Methvin of the Gates Foundation on the case for something called earnings-premium accountability for universities. "New accountability frameworks focused on earnings outcomes are helping sharpen attention on whether students are actually better off after pursuing a credential," says Methvin. Now of course there are other measures as well, and Methvin recognizes this. But it's the earnings outcomes that catch Hill's attention. He references his daughter who "graduated last June from a private college in Phoenix with an associate degree in diagnostic medical sonography" and has been unable to find a job. As for student loans, "people don't expect to pay them off anymore. They expect to have them forever - a payment you just make, working toward nothing." Are universities responsible for what happens to their graduates? In a world where the economy can change overnight due to a virus or ill-considered act of war, it seems a but much to ask. But maybe universities shouldn't be making promises either.

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The Verb that Needs a Body and a Name
Adam Pryor, Purposeful AI, 2026/06/02

"The discussion board, as currently designed in 95% of higher education courses, is a graveyard of compliance," writes Adam Pryor. It's not actual discussion; there's no purpose or meaning behind it, beyond getting a grade. So what should replace it? "Not minor tweaks to your syllabus (but) structural replacements for the standard discussion board." Pryor offers seven "patterns" for good engagement. Some of them are low-tech: "we want a node-and-edge system map drawn on a whiteboard, photographed, and uploaded." Others demand "synthesis over simple reaction" (a discussion summary, or a prompt 'autopsy'). I agree with the overall argument but I think the specific patterns are one-dimensional. We want artifact generation, synthesis, and reflection - but for these to be anything more than rote make-work they have to not only be governed by participants, they have to be anchored in their lives and interests.

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Connected community spaces
Michael Foster, Paths & Patches, 2026/06/02

Everybody wants to build a social platform. Michael Foster, in this article, observes, "in Europe, the Rebuild initiative has mapped more than 200 social platforms." There's also Good Commons case studies describing JamiiAfrica in Tanzania, Mutante in Colombia, and Magamba Network in Zimbabwe. Fediverse projects include "Acorn from Blacksky, Bandwagon from Emissary, Mosaic from Bonfire, and Roundabout from New_ Public." But they're almost all silos, they're almost all "tightly focused on unique needs." What they have in common is that they start with community, have issues around governance, and are based on scale. In other words, they're based in groups, not networks. I personally think this is the wrong approach (not that anybody is paying attention). I think we should start with individual people, and enable them to connect, to create and join networks, which are in fact how we build our communities.

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The Worst Use Case for Generative AI is Writing
John Warner, The Biblioracle Recommends, 2026/06/02

John Warner's first paragraph reads as a 'mission accomplished' moment, but when your "data points" include a couple of NY Times opinion pieces and a strategically-interpreted Ethan Mollick post, you don't have data points. Now to be clear, I think there is a great deal of value in person-to-person interaction. And it is in many cases what we (as humans) really prefer. But it doesn't follow that AI are necessarily bad at writing. And it's simply not true that "writing is an inherently human activity." Sure, there's a lot of room for AI writing to improve, but it already exceeds a lot of bad human writing (this Cost of Living segment on CBC today sounds exactly like Notebook LM). There are many cases where AI writing may be preferred to human writing: giving directions or instructions, for example.

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How human-like is LLM cognition?
Zak Hussain, Rui Mata, Dirk U. Wulff, ODF, PsyArXiv, 2026/06/02

A lot of cognitive science takes the form "humans must have [cognitive feature X] because that's the only way to do [cognitive function Y]." But what if artificial intelligence can also [do cognitive function Y]? This study looks at whether that's the case, and argues that this alignment is 'jagged': "LLMs can show surface-level behavioral convergence, process-level similarities, cross-task generality, and representational alignment, while also exhibiting some capability, distributional, metacognitive, or super-human forms of divergence." Still, the challenge for cognitive science is there. "The field has long been willing to draw strong inferences about human mental representations and processes from behavioral evidence alone; the arrival of systems that can reproduce much of that behavior - sometimes through divergent means - forces us to re-examine when such inferences are warranted and what they actually license for both humans and machines."

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Student Success (in the Age of AI)
Steve Hargadon, 2026/06/01

Good post though perhaps too long on how we should change how we think about education in the age of AI. Steve Hargadon writes, "What AI destroys is performed compliance: the busywork, the credential that certified obedience, the elaborate game in which students learned to produce the appearance of understanding and call it an education. That was never worth keeping." But what's left? "In the age of artificial intelligence, agency is no longer one path to success among many. It is the only thing left that can actually produce it... it is the one input the new machine cannot supply, cannot fake, cannot simulate, and cannot replace." I think that's partially true; agency depends on, and is intertwined with, human experience. Anyhow, Hargadon continues, "If agency is the whole game, then the only question that matters for education is how a human acquires it. These are described in "the conditions of learning, and they are irreducibly human and relational. They are also, not coincidentally, the one thing the new machine cannot provide because they are not made of information. They are made of relationships."

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What I Learned at NAFSA 2026
Alex Usher, HESA, 2026/06/01

With no sense of context at all, Alex Usher spends a good part of this post trashing Canada's limited participation in a "higher education fantasyland" NAFSA conference on international education held in Florida (yes, the 'F' stands for 'foreign' - that's part of the context). Representation from Africa was not present - they're not really welcome in the U.S. any more. Canadians (Usher excepted) are less keen on travel to the U.S. these days, for some very good reasons. And the whole concept of international education has changed over the last few years (Canada, for example, has more demand than it can meet, and has scaled back international student numbers a lot recently). But mostly, there's no real desire in Canada to, shall we say, integrate with U.S.-based initiatives these days, educational or otherwise. The only real surprise here is that Usher considers Canada's limited participation to be a problem. 

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Shared Ownership, Shared Success: The Power of Consensus
Eric Sheninger, A Principal's Reflections, 2026/06/01

I think actual consensus is more complex than people realize. This post is a case in point.  Eric Sheninger writes that consensus is distinct from principles like unanimity and compromise, which is fair enough, but then writes, "consensus is a cooperative process through which all group members develop and agree to support a decision in the best interest of the entire school." He then switches to the passive sense to add "every viewpoint is considered, and earnest efforts are made to address legitimate institutional concerns." Now to me that reads as (and stay with me here) authoritarian. Someone has decided that 'the best interests of the school' prevail, whatever they are, as opposed to (say) the best interests of students; views are 'considered' and 'earnest efforts' are made by someone, who will actually decide what is done, and ultimately, people are expected to "deep collective commitment" even if the outcome didn't meet their original concerns. Now of course this article does not endorse authoritarianism of any sort; the suggestion is that the process emphasises "a shared leadership framework that activates the collective intelligence of the entire faculty." But to work, the collective intelligence cannot be constrained by prior stipulations, cannot be represented by a single voice, and needs to have the ability to decide that perhaps a single shared perspective on something isn't a desirable outcome.

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In Search of Podcasts
Knotbin, 2026/06/01

This is an interesting article based on comparing podcasts (and by extension, RSS) and the ATmosphere protocol used by Bluesky. "'Wherever you get your podcasts' represents the interoperable utopia of the podcast world," writes Roscoe Rubin-Rottenberg. "How do we bring that magic to the atmosphere?" In short: you can't. A podcast shares one simple thing, a podcast feed. But "on atproto, everything is a record, and each record has its own type. Posts, likes, follows, blocks, lists, profiles, comments, videos, and anything you can think of has its own defined schema, denoted by a $type." This gets even more complex when we start reasoning about things like follows and blocks. I find this article to be a good foil to contrast with my own approach in CList, which is a lot simpler.

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DIDComm
DIDComm, 2026/06/01

These are protocols I'm looking at as I develop DID-based interactions in CList. "DIDComm protocols enable trusted interactions between parties. These support activities like secure chat, verifiable credential exchange, buying and selling, scheduling, escrow, bidding, ticketing, and so forth. If not already in use, protocols can be designed for any use case." I have no interest in most of the items listed, but there are many more practical protocols presented. See also: DIDComm Book.

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The Contradiction at the Heart of AI Disclosure: Judith Butler and the Subject of Accountability
Owen Matson, LinkedIn, 2026/06/01

I hate linking to LinkedIn, even though it appears people can read this without a login, because access is so tenuous. I don't know why people don't do their writing on a proper blog. Anyhow. I wanted to link to this item, which reviews Judith Butler's Giving an Account of Oneself (sadly behind a paywall) because it makes an important point. For Butler, "Many contemporary AI-disclosure practices seek to identify and isolate machine participation as though intellectual activity ordinarily originates within a self-contained individual whose boundaries can be clearly identified and preserved. Increasingly complex forms of human-AI interaction disrupt those assumptions." We don't develop our thoughts and ideas in isolation, usually: we develop them through interaction with other people, the world, and these days, computers. For Butler, "subjects are required to make themselves intelligible through normative frameworks incapable of accounting for the experiences they are being asked to disclose."

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The Pope on Defederation
Laurens Hof, connectedplaces.online, 2026/06/01

The Pope's Magnifica Humanitas encyclical is viewed as a treatise on AI,  writes Laurens Hof , but "this week, the Catholic Church also wrote one of the better diagnoses of why decentralised social networks keep struggling." We might call this the 'framework of subsidiarity and solidarity'. By 'subsidiarity', we refer to a basic principle of decentralization, which pushes power don the hierarchy to the smallest unit where it makes sense (in the Papal view, that would be the family; in the libertarian view, that would be the individual). But the other part of this is solidarity (which libertarians pretend doesn't exist). "Subsidiarity without solidarity is fragmentation: a thousand instances each guarding their own place, with no shared obligation or collaboration, with no place to maintain the commons that is the network itself." True, but incomplete. Solidarity is about more than just governance. It's about how we communicate, how we interact, and how as a community we develop ideas and values and more.

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A human centered model for discussing AI in assessment
Dave Cormier, Dave's Educational Blog, 2026/06/01

This post starts off with comments about changes to what we control in assessment but quickly turns to the subject of what, exactly, we are assessing. The result is a Venn diagram with three categories, expressed as questions: Did they (students) do it? Have they learning? Are we helping? The first is where most discussions of AI and assessment end, but it's actually the least important of the questions (and, frankly, if they've learned what they should be learning, who cares whether they 'did it', whatever it is?). The third talks to the utility of our intervention, whether related to the assessment or not. Though as Dave Cormier says, "good assessment is a combination of something that is designed to serve your learning goals AND something that helps the student learn more after they've done that assessment."

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Mastodon - How To Make Posts
Eugen Rochko, YouTube, 2026/06/01

It's hard to believe you could create a 28 minute video on how to make a Mastodon post but founder Eugen Rochko (aka Gargron) has managed to do it. "Posting on Mastodon is easy and intuitive at its core, however, there are many features that are unique to Mastodon and may be less obvious. This tutorial goes every single feature in Mastodon's composer interface."

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DrawSplat Feature: Mermaid Diagram Studio
Miguel Guhlin, Another Think Coming, 2026/05/29

This is an item I'm posting for myself, so I don't forget. "Type or paste Mermaid syntax on the left, preview on the right. Use templates for flowcharts, sequence diagrams, mind maps, pie charts, Gantt charts, timelines, class diagrams, and state diagrams. Download as SVG or PNG, or copy to clipboard." Great stuff; already wondering how I can integrate it into my own projects. See also this item on Drawsplat.

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Redefining Publishing: Practical pathways to open science
Alison Mudditt, PLOS, 2026/05/29

Interesting report (37 page PDF) from PLOS on the future of open academic publishing. There's a good summary on Scholarly Kitchen if you don't want to read the whole thing. The main finding is that "open science creates value when reuse is practical at scale," however, "these benefits depend on the infrastructure, standards, metadata, incentives, and coordination needed." Related is the idea that academic credit for participating in the various elements of the scientific research stack (and not just the publication, as is currently the case). The report defines this stack as "a publishing model that connects articles and preprints with associated research outputs - data, code, methods, and materials - into a structured, open, machine-readable record." The report also addresses the role of publishers, business model reform, and regional pathways.

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