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"Not employee surveillance," Microsoft defends Teams' new location tracking feature, now rolling out
Mayank Parmar, Windows Latest, 2026/07/20

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I'm so glad I'm not working in an office environment any more, what with Return-To-Office and MS teams features that enforce that. "If the organization chooses Inform mode, Teams workplace check-in will be enabled for everyone without their permission." 'Inform mode'. Lovely. Like a parody. But it's not. People should own their own software; software should not own people.

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Zero Books Read
Steven D. Krause, 2026/07/17

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CBC Radio ran a bit yesterday or the day before lamenting the fact that people no longer go to movies, and it reminds me of this item lamenting the lack of people reading books. Why would we support these bad old commercial models? My reaction is similar to Steven Krause's: who cares? "In my view," he writes "the best movies and streaming media today are every bit as 'literary' as texts that happen to be printed on paper. And our postliterate world (which I think we entered long ago) has not resulted in the 'end of reading' at all." I read tons, most of it for fun. But books on paper? No.

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Is our intelligence rooted in how living organisms are organized?
Paul Middlebrooks, The Transmitter, 2026/07/17

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This is an excellent video (though tbh I read the transcript) suggesting "that the free energy principle falls short as a unifying framework for living systems and cognition, and instead finds promise in recent concepts in philosophy and theoretical biology—how living systems must be organized in order to survive." It's not clear what question this even answers ( i's something like, what's the difference between living and non-living things?) and they don't get to it until about half way through but it's worth the journey.

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A History of Large Language Models
Gregory Gunderson, 2026/07/17

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Take your time and give this paper a nice slow read. As the author says, "No single idea is beyond the abilities of a smart teenager to understand. But what is beautiful and surprising and remarkable is that the phenomena we observe in LLMs is not magic but simply the emergence of a complex system from simple rules." Yes, it seems hard to imagine that these language models can really work. But clearly they do, and this paper describes the step-by-step process over the years as researchers discovered how the could. Via Data Science Weekly 660.

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Going Beyond Access to Democratizing Knowledge
Kisha G. Tracy, OEGlobal, 2026/07/17

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The argument here is that "There is more to democratizing knowledge, however, than just access. OER is an opportunity to redress marginalization and erasure, and open pedagogy has a responsibility to confront social justice issues." I don't agree. The form is basically, "you've done a good thing but you haven't done enough." The problem is, it's never enough, and it means that no good deed ever goes uncriticized. I'll take the open access, thank you; you can keep on with your math or physics or whatever. Sharing your biochemical research does not create an obligation to address social justice issues.

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Evidence from Formal Logical Reasoning Reveals that the Language of Thought is not Natural Language
Hope Kean, et al., 2026/07/16

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I don't trust fMRI analyses of human cognitive functions at all, so I'm not citing this paper as evidence of anything. But the question it asks is worth asking: do we need language in order to reason logically? On the surface it would seem we do: logic just is a symbol manipulation system (with semantics doing the work of connecting it to trust and meaning). But as Hume more, babies and animals can think logically. This paper concludes that language is not necessary, but again, I'd want better evidence.

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Introducing Claude for Teachers
Anthropic, 2026/07/15

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Not being a verified K-12 educator in the U.S., I can't test Anthropic's brand new Claude for Teachers myself, but it looks clever. "Claude for Teachers connects to Learning Commons, giving Claude access to academic standards across all 50 states—and beneath each standard, the smaller learning competencies... Claude for Teachers also brings in trusted curricular resources like OpenSciEd and IM v.360 from Illustrative Mathematics." Via Marcus Green. See also Chalkbeat.

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Strada announced as new host for Digital Credentials Consortium
Strada, 2026/07/15

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The Digital Credential Consortium is moving from MIT to Strada, an education foundation, where it will be refocused and renamed the Digital Credential Commons (DCC). It "will build upon the infrastructure incubated at MIT Open Learning to scale an open-source and open standards-based ecosystem in which learners fully own, control, and can use verifiable digital records of their skills and achievements." Obviously this is something I want to support in my CList personal learning environment. via Doug Belshaw.

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Open Science 2.0: Building Understanding in an AI-Mediated World
Ashutosh Ghildiyal, Maria Machado, Gareth Dyke, The Scholarly Kitchen, 2026/07/16

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The authors advance a new version of open science (aka 2.0) based on a transition from 'access' to 'understanding'. But what do we mean by understanding? We might answer in traditional cognitivist terms - ontologies, explanations, predictions, principles. This article references verifiability, expertise and impact. I'm not really sure these count as 'understanding' either, at least in the normal sense we understand me them.

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The Gyms on the Corners
Neeraj Mehta, SSIR, 2026/07/16

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This article uses the example of resistance in the Minneapolis–Saint Paul metropolitan area to make its point, but the message is relevant even without the political overtime. It describes the way large centralized organizations get all the press, money and credit for organizing in contrast with the important roles played by networks of small decentralized community groups that operate without funding and in relative obscurity. "Centralized organizations are easier to identify, easier to contact, and easier to evaluate using conventional metrics." We see the same dynamic play out in education where the large organizations take the credit and get the funding but where the real work is being done in quiet local communities without fanfare, often by people with the most precarious employment.

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How Taylor Swift Fans on Reddit Source Their Information
Samantha Vilkins, Sebastian Svegaard, Axel Bruns, Katherine M. FitzGerald, Snurblog, 2026/07/15

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This is a set of slides from a conference presentation that treats a set of Reddit subreddits as epistemic communities, in this case, a set of them specific to Taylor Swift. To a large degree, sourcing matters to people who post (less so for people who comment) and while the usual media of record is relied upon, there are some surprises (such as one sub classifying the NY Times as no more credible than a gossip column). I wouldn't exactly consider Reddit a reliable source (though that varies widely by sub) but I do think studying the communities' epistemic practices is important and informative.

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Becoming an Audiobook Reader
Sarah Clinton-McCausland, ACRLog, 2026/07/15

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The suggestion here is that "The more audiobooks I’ve read, the more I’ve finally embraced the reality that listening to audiobooks is reading." Sarah Clinton-McCausland adds, "Recent research has started confirming what audiobookworms have known all along: a 2019 study, for instance, found that 'the semantic representations evoked by listening versus reading are almost identical.'" That's my experience as well; I see myself as having 'read' Moby Dick even though I actually listened to it.

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Q&A: Chris Agnew on AI and the Future of Schooling
Tara Moon, FutureEd, 2026/07/15

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This article unintentionally points to the danger of 'evidence-based' strategies. Different evidence points different ways. So, near the start we read, "immersive, experiential, relevant learning was impactful for kids, but it’s way too expensive to be accessible to all." Ok. But the actually proposals are based on "10 skills that research links to long-term success... if these are learning experiences we know matter, what’s preventing schools from providing them today?" These are two very different things. The research on what skills were needed in the past may be totally irrelevant to future needs, and anyhow doesn't speak to immersive and experiental learning at all. The evidence underdetermines the need.

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2026 Q2 Review: Online learning developments in UK higher education
Neil Mosley, Neil Mosley Consulting, 2026/07/15

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The bulk of this article is a 'greatest hits' of UK Ed Tech news from the last quarter, but the interesting bit is the intro discussing the University of Manchester's announcement it will offer work placement to all students, contrasted with previous announcements about online learning. The two actually go together, but it's not clear this is understood. Neil Mosley writes, "if universities really want to signal that they are supporting people with career-focused study motivations, they could do a lot worse than seek to develop more flexible and accessible forms of study, such as online learning…and maybe talk about it once in a while."

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Editorial
Santosh Panda, Journal of Learning for Development, 2026/07/14

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I don't usually link to a journal editorial as it's usually a summary of the issue's contents, and this one is no different. But there's a tension here I want to address. No doubt context is important in any design, development, and evaluation of open and distance learning (ODL). But analyses of "x perceptions of y" is a poor substitute for context. Personal perceptions are often misreported, are usually uninformed, should not be aggregated, cannot be shown to have casual impact, and essentially amount to opinion disguised as research. If it were up to me this staple of academic writing in education would be disallowed.

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What will be left for us to work on?
Arvind Narayanan, AI As Normal Technology, 2026/07/14

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This is an excellent transcript (or you can listen to the keynote audio) on the impact of AI on human work and capability. In short, the argument is that super-intelligence isn't sufficient to achieve significant impacts on its own. In short, the bottlenecks aren't in cognition, but in decision, testing, evaluation, process and other things that have to be conpleted outside the AI lab. Take the time to give this one the close attention it deserves.

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Local journalism’s AI problem is that we never solved its consumer problem
Eric Ulken, Medium, 2026/07/14

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The surprising bit in this analysis of local news media and AI disruption is the reason people give for paying for it: "74% cite consumer-good attributes such as access to 'the facts I need,' while only 44% mention public-good qualities like 'the public’s right to know' as reasons for giving." I would imagine the role of self-interest various a lot across cultures. I think also the analysis overlooks the role of personal experience on the part of the reporter, even as it underlines its own credibility by pointing to 25 years of experience in local news. This item and the previous via News Alchemists.

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2026 European Enterprise Publisher Newsletter Report
Center for Sustainable Media, 2026/07/14

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What interested me about this item wasn't the stats on European newsletters, but rather what the author considered 'underuse', keeping in mind the target is news media. Naturally I was compelled to compare with my own practice, developed over 25 years. The focus wasn't content - it was about being more upfront, more open with 'samples', and developing habits and relationships over time. The major gap, in my view, was the lack of any mention of RSS.

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End Over End
Audrey Watters, Second Breakfast, 2026/07/13

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This is an honest post from Audrey Watters exploring the following question: "It sure seems that as long as we’ve believed everyone should read, we’ve fretted that everyone doesn’t (or at least The Atlantic sure has worried) -- they don’t read enough, and even if they do, they don’t read the right kinds of material." I say 'honest' because she says this: "It's not that I don't worry about reading... I do. I worry because I love reading... And I love reading because without it, I could not write and I could not think. Not well. Not clearly. Not intelligently."

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Maximizing Enterprise Learning Effectiveness
Craig Weiss, 2026/07/13

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Craig Weiss knows his stuff, even if the quality of his writing isn't the greatest. In this overview post he captures the current state of enterprise training in a few cogent - and perhaps controversial - points. First: minimal staffing. Three admins for maybe 50K learners. Second: buy content directly from a source that will stand by the quality. Third: do more than just assigning learning - foster and ongoing relationship, and offer training that speakers e not only to current needs but also employees' potential future plans.

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Three unconventional responses to the AI assessment challenge in higher education
Neil Mosley, Neil Mosley Consulting, 2026/07/13

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I'm not sure I would endorse any of the three solutions to assessment in the AI age proposed here by Neil Mosley, but I appreciate the creative thinking involved. The three: first, twi-tier degrees, one with unlimited AI use, one without; experience-only assessment, showing you had the experience but not making claims about competence; and finally, collective visibility in assessment.

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Moving Beyond the Hero Leader: A Strategic Blueprint for Sustainable Leadership
Eric Sheninger, A Principal's Reflections, 2026/07/13

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This article isn't exactly on Ed Tech, but it follows a theme from a few recent posts. Eric Sheninger writes, "For decades, the dominant narrative in education has romanticized the myth of the "'hero leader.'... While it makes for a compelling story, this model of leadership is not only an illusion, it is a dangerous recipe for institutional instability and catastrophic educator burnout." Now Sheninger still depicts the leader as someone who is in charge, so he isn't completely committed to decentralization. But he's on the right track.

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Why I Stopped Arguing With People
Cong Wang, A Geek's Page, 2026/07/13

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Some time in the 1990s I stopped arguing and started explaining. It was no longer about convincing other people, it was about explaining why I was doing what I was doing (now to be clear, I am not perfect, and often relapsed, but that was the intention). My reasoning was essentially exactly what is stated in this article. We are mostly led by sentiment, not reason (as Hume would say), and arguments rarely sway someone's point of view.

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