OLWeekly

25 Years of OLDaily
Stephen Downes, 2026/05/15

I was introduced to a thing called the 'internet' in a pub in Edmonton after a softball game in 1988 or so. We philosophy students had gathered there after losing another game and some of the others (Ishy and Jeff, to be specific) to me about a 'MUD' they had been playing on. 

I took to it like a duck to water. I had already been messing around with online services, having set up a Maximus bulletin board service (BBS) on my own, and the MUD was just like the game 'Adventure', which I had played while working on a mainframe while on training in Austin, Texas, in 1980.

I have no natural programming skills. It has always been a struggle for me; I blame my phonics-oriented education, which somehow managed to bypass the concepts of abstraction and formalization almost entirely. My inability to complete integral calculus doomed my plan to become a physicist, and it wasn't until I took an advanced philosophy of mathematics class with Verena Huber-Dyson that I comprehended entirely how you could replace anything - anything - with a single variable, and then perform functions with it.

I passed my PhD logic requirement, and concurrently, I succeeded in learning how to install and program my own MUD server, an unholy combination of C and something called LPC, object oriented (anything!) and beautiful. And Jeff McLaughlin and Istvan Berkeley and I concocted the notion of the Multiple Academic User Domain (MAUD), which we called The Painted Porch, and my career in educational technology began. 

It was Jeff who sent me the advertisement from Assiniboine Community College looking for a 'distance education and new instructional media design specialist'. It was 1994 and I was living in a cabin in northern Alberta, having given up on my PhD and opting for a simpler life. I had been working as a distance education tutor for Athabasca University for seven years, and had continued experimenting with the MAUD, and also with an 'audio-graphics' distance education mode.

There was no way to make living a simpler life work with student load payments, so I applied for the job, and to my surprise, got it, moving to Manitoba and a new life. By 1995 the world wide web had become a thing, and it became my job to move the college from course packages and telephones to web-based delivery. I served my first website off my desktop using a Glaci-HTTPD server that ran on Windows, build the Assiniboine website, and put a proof-of-concept Guide to the Logical Fallacies on it.

I was also active on the internet. I never had any use for UseNet, though I understand it was popular, but I really liked mailing lists, and was active on DEOS and WWWDEV, both of which blended distance education and online learning. As I built a learning management system called OLe for Assiniboine, I described my practice in various posts and websites. This brought me opportunities; Rik Hall in particular drew me out and got me involved in the wider community.

At home during those days, I took OLe and converted it into a website management tool I called gRSShopper. I decided I wanted to keep and post the articles I wrote and especially the comments I added to various discussion boards. A content syndication format called 'RSS' came out in 1998 or so, authored by Dave Winer and Netscape, and I syndicated my personal articles as Netscape Netcenter feed number 31. 

This community included Terry Anderson, who was working at the University of Alberta, who invited me there for a short consulting gig and ended up hiring me in 1999 as an information architect to create something called MuniMall, an online learning and resources hub for municipal sector staff and elected officials in Alberta. I adapted gRSShopper to this task, with one important addition: I added a mailing list so people could keep up with the courses and offerings.

As my two year contract with the University of Alberta was ending, an offer came out of the blue from Tim van Gelder, a philosophy professor at the University of Melbourne, to come work for him for three months putting some philosophy applications online. He had seen my Guide to the Logical Fallacies and had somehow decided I was the ideal candidate for this. To Australia I went, not only to work with Tim, but also to meet up again with a bunch of people I had met at Rik Hall's NAWeb conferences. 

It was at this office in early of 2001 I came up with the plan to add a newsletter to my website so people could subscribe to my RSS feeds by email as well as by RSS (which, to be honest, almost nobody was using). So I added a 'subscribe' link to my website and set up my email code to send a specific page. I set up my RSS writer to also write in HTML to put content on that page. Before I could even send the first issue, 25 people had subscribed. On May 15, 2001, I sent it.

My approach to RSS was, by then, different from other people's. Instead of linking to my own articles, my focus was on linking to other people's articles. By the time blogs became popular a few years later, I was almost the only one doing this (the other exception was Scott Leslie). The 'title' and 'link' field pointed to the other article, and I wrote a commentary about it in the description. I praised, I criticized, I went off-topic, I philosophized, I went wherever the mood struck me.

That first issue, it turns out, was so typical. None of the links work any more but three of them can be recovered through the Wayback machine (the last, from the National Post, is blocked by Wayback, because you know). One was about tech sceptic David Noble, another was about universities and corporate learning, another was an anti-tech screed from the Chronicle (some things never change), and the last was about Universitas 21.

Most of the rest you know about. My newsletter was an instant success, some of my publications became popular, Rory McGreal - another person I met through NAWeb - pointed me in the direction of a job with the NRC in Moncton (he, meanwhile, would join Terry Anderson at Athabasca University - it's such a small world. I retired from that job on April 8. 

And here we are, 25 years after that first issue. As of today, I have 40,876 posts in my database, comprising 6,584 issues of OLDaily, most of them links and commentary about things other people have written, and 1,467 of them my own articles (which reminds me, I have a bunch more articles I have posted elsewhere I need to add to that list). There are also 591 presentations and 186 publications in the archives.

I never stopped building gRSShopper. I've made it do any number of things over the years, most notably functioning as the engine for the world's first Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) in 2008 which I ran with George Siemens. Over the years other MOOCs were added to the list, each supported by gRSShopper, each with their own library of pages, links, posts, presentations and articles.

Though retired, I'm still writing and I'm still building - why would that ever stop? My current project is something I took up in the mid-2010s, a personal learning environment (the badly named CList). I said in my Retirement FAQ that I was looking for 100 paying subscribers to keep OLDaily afloat, and as I write I have only a quarter of that - and zero corporate or institutional support. It's disappointing. But how could I stop, really? 

Though nothing I have ever written has been as popular as that first Guide to the Logical Fallacies (I could probably have built a career off it), I think that OLDaily has been my most substantial contribution, not the least because it wasn't about me and my accomplishments, but about the wider community that made everything possible. My story really is our story, my history really is our history.

When I was a kid, I'd camp out in the back yard. My father would come out, and we'd have a fire, and listen to the ball game. He was a telephone pioneer, one of the people who wired up the homes and businesses of eastern Ontario and western Quebec. He gave me my first modem, which I used for my BBS, he told me to study computing, because it was the future. He died in 1998, and never saw any this, but he could see where it was going. He'd go inside after a while, and I'd lie in my tent, head poked out the flap, looking up at the stars.

I still like to get out camping. I have a trip planned for tomorrow. I like to say it's for the adventure, the fresh air, the exercise, but really, it's still about looking up at the stars.

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From Signals to Infrastructure: Strengthening the Commons for the AI Era
Anna Tumadóttir, Sarah Hinchliff Pearson, Creative Commons, 2026/05/14

This is another update from Creative Commons signaling their shift from helping people access open content to helping copyright holders put conditions on access to their formerly open content. Specifically, they are "are advocating for the development and usage of carefully scoped AI opt-outs" and "doing research and development for a new tool designed to enable conditional access." If they're going to do this, I don't see why they don't just join ODRL or some other digital rights management (DRM) consortium. What they're doing has nothing to do with open access any more, and everything to do with locking down content. If Creative Commons were really interested in open access, they'd be thinking about how to enable free and open access language models everyone can use, so we don't have to pay multinationals to apply mathematics to content repositories.

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Announcing a New Guide to Strengthening Coordination and Connections in Out-of-School Time
Maggie Dahn, Mizuko Ito, Kylie Peppler, Connected Learning Alliance, 2026/05/14

Throughout my time as a student, from an early age to graduate school, my most powerful learning experiences occurred in what we call here "out-of-school time (OST) programs." I did a lot, some on my own, others based in the community: sports programs, Boy Scouts (and camp), Army Cadets, debating and public speaking, student newspaper. And so much more. For me, these programs were just 'there'. But they take time and a community to get right, and that's where this guide comes in. It describes four major principles: youth as network builders, interest-driven learning engagement, responsiveness to family contexts (addressing barriers like transportation, scheduling, and cost broadens), and grounding in long-term relationships. These are principles that I think should guide actual school-time programs as well. They create the real value that elite institutions provide students (as compared to training factories that emphasize job-ready skills). And long-term, I can envision the time we allocate to OST increasing and our emphasis on formal learning decreasing. 

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What’s a Package Manager?
Will Raphaelson, Technically, 2026/05/14

If you develop software, you know what package managers are. They are services you can run in your development environment to find and install pre-packaged bundles of software designed for a specific purpose. For example, if I'm creating a web application, I might want to use React, which is a collection of web interface functions. Package developers load their software into the manager, and application develoipers use the managers to find and install that software. As this article notes, package managers "are now critical infrastructure for AI products. They're in the 'hot path', as we say in the biz." That's why AI labs like Anthropic + OpenAI buying them up? I can see the logic. But it's a fragile ecosystem, and I've run into issues many times, as one package is updated and creates a version conflict with the application or with other packages. Or one package develops a security issue that impacts a whole project. Or a package just doesn't do what you want it to do. I prefer to work without packages, if I can manage it.

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Floci
GitHub, 2026/05/14

If you always wanted to use Amazon Web Services (AWS) but didn't want to pay Amazon money, this is the tool for you: Floci, "A free, open-source local AWS emulator. No account. No feature gates." Now to be clear, I haven't tried to set this up, much less try to make it work in any serious way (and tbh I use Amazon pretty minimally as well - just S3 to store files and SES to send this newsletter by email). "Floci runs real Docker containers for services where in-process emulation would compromise fidelity - stateful databases, connection-heavy protocols, and runtimes that require native execution. The result is wire-compatible behavior against the actual engine, not a simplified approximation."

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The Castlereagh Statement
The Castlereagh Statement, 2026/05/14

Though it recognizes that "our education and training systems were not designed for an AI-driven society," I regard the Castlereagh Statement - a declaration signed by an Australian 'Coalition of the willing' - to be at its heart a very conservative document (36 page PDF). It asserts three goals for Australian education and training: "a shared definition of what we value in human learners and educators, with aligned measurement systems; coherent learning pathways from early childhood to lifelong learning, aligned with societal needs; and every Australian being capable of confidently, critically, and creatively engaging with AI." It's always dangerous to begin a process of redefining what is value as a society, and always difficult to agree on a shared vision and collaboration, especially when it means that for most people the focus remains on jobs and skills, but the statement appears confident it has articulated that foundation, though Australians might not want their values to be redefined by some committee. Via Carlo Iacono. See also Learning Elearning with notes on the webinar to soft-launch the statement, and EdResearch Matters on how to implement the ideas it contains.

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Adding DID to RSS and Atom Feeds
2026/05/14

In my work developing CList I want to enable content and messaging federation - so that people can follow and talk to each other - without being dependent on a specific platform. So I want people to be able to create and use DIDs to help them find and follow each other. But how?

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The Conditions of Understanding
Jonathan Boymal, The Last Analogue, 2026/05/13

This is what I would call a 'folk theory of understanding': "To understand something well enough to act on it requires three things to converge: reliable observations about what is happening, theory that can organise those observations into coherent patterns, and mechanisms that explain how and why." In other words: observations, ontologies, and causal principles. We spend a lot of time on this, and Jonathan Boymal takes time to describe "sense-making as a system of (six) interlocking components": "the information ecosystem, our natural and built surroundings, the institutions that produce and distribute knowledge, the cultures we grow up inside, the sensing and feeling bodies through which all experience is filtered, and the mental models we carry as frameworks." But (in my view) all of this is an artifice, constructed rather than discovered, and in a complex world no longer sufficient.

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How to make Semantic Layer work for Analytics Agents
Claire Gouze, New AI Order, 2026/05/13

As Claire Grouze wrotes, "The semantic layer is presented as the holy grail to make your analytics agent reliable." This is the 'knowledge base' we suppose that intelligence and reasoning works from, filled with ontologies, causal principles, and the like. The stuff we think it takes to 'understand' a domain. But the semantic layer is brittle and context-dependent. When used on its own in this test, it refused to respond to most questions. Even optimized - at the cost of much more work and slower processing speed - it still answered few queries. And, as Grouze writes, it doesn't eliminate hallucinations - it just moves them. This sort of finding is why I think teaching recognition skills is more important that teaching facts and principles. Via Isin Pesch.

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Infrastructure as Curriculum: What Students Learn When AI Works Offline
Sai Gattupalli, Society and AI, 2026/05/13

This short paper makes the point (and creates a framework of sorts) that offline AI can serve pedagogical purposes. "Offline systems make tradeoffs legible - coverage may be narrower and responses slower, but the system's boundedness encourages learners to treat AI output as a proposal to be tested rather than a conclusion to be accepted."

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AI may be the new gatekeepers, but human connection is more needed than ever
Ben Werdmuller, 2026/05/13

"I'm biased towards New_ Public's point of view: pro-social spaces, pro-democracy technology, and community as an ingredient for trust are all my jam," writes Ben Werdmuller, "But everything laid out in this presentation is already happening." Even more, a new pro-social technology that doesn't even have RSS is something I'm already questioning. If your collaboration is limited to email, LinkedIn and Bluesky, you haven't thought the subject through.

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On monocultures, institutional agency, and resilience
D'Arcy Norman, 2026/05/12

As Scott Leslie says, this is a thoughtful post on the Instructure hack. Like Phil Hill, D'Arcy Norman leads with Instructure's public communication regarding the incident, which was (and continues to be) not good, with most people interpreting their claim to have "reached an agreement with the unauthorized actor (ie, ShinyHunters) involved in this incident" to mean "they paid the ransom." Though, what else were they going to do? Along with many others, Norman points to the technology monoculture as a point of failure. "It looks like Instructure manages 3 different Canvas environments: 'production', 'beta', and 'test'. And all 8,800+ institutions appear to share those three environments." But the major lesson to be drawn, he writes, comes from UBC. "The UBC response is truly remarkable... (they) quickly put together a cohesive set of resources to support instructors in rapidly adopting different online platforms to meet the pedagogical needs in their courses." This is a lesson in maintaining expertise and developing resilience, even while working with external partners.

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The Ozempic Problem: The Generative AI Norms Forming in Silence, and How Youth and Adults Can Shape Them
Wyatt Pashia, Getting Smart, 2026/05/12

I thought this was a decent article though the examples are contrived (as so often happens in articles about education). There isn't (and never was) a Ms. Chen or a Priya or a Fitz or a magical sense that detects when feedback is created by AI. Sure, some things are 'cringe', but that can happen when a human writes (it would be like me trying to use the word 'rizz' meaningfully) and it reflects less than careful proofreading more than the sure and only sign of AI. The 'Ozempic' example here is to convey some sort of social disapproval of the use of drugs for weight loss, as though willful exercise and diet is somehow more socially acceptable. The argument here is that "admitting AI use carries the social risk of being seen as less capable, less creative, or less genuine. But we can move the needle by engaging young people directly. A well-designed nudge reframes disclosure from a moment of 'getting caught' into an act of ownership." Maybe. Maybe new norms will emerge - but note, they will emerge, not be 'constructed' through some process of collective meaning-making and choice.

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We May Be Entering A Second Axial Age
Otto Scharmer, NOEMA, 2026/05/13

Writers are always hopeful that their age represents fundamental change that that their work has identified the nexus of that change. I am not immune to it, I confess. Neither is this paper, which argues that just as "the transition from small hunter-gatherer societies into complex civilizations gave rise to the first Axial Age," which "opened the depths of individual interiority," today's "planetary polycrisis of climate chaos, mass migration, increasing warfare and transformative AI represents a rupture of comparable magnitude," through "the systematic cultivation of ordinary people's inner development, moral imagination and civic agency." Again, though, this is an argument that sees the future as a return to the past, a subsumption of the individual to the collective. "We now must reimagine our existing institutions and create new collaborative structures that our sectorized setup mostly lacks." 

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Recognized Entities v1.0
W3C, 2026/05/12

Dropped today, "This specification describes a data model with which one or more recognized entities, such as one or more persons and/or organizations, can be described as known to perform specific actions, such as issuing or verifying a verifiable credential." The idea is to provide "a cryptographically-verifiable and privacy-preserving mechanism" allowing credential-holders to prove their credentials are recognized. "The specification is designed to interoperate with existing 'trust infrastructures'... while enabling new decentralized ecosystems to be built using verifiable credentials." 

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Brain Rot, AI Slop and the Work of Thinking
David Webster, 2026/05/13

This is a transcript where David Webster talks about "how to make our bit of the world (be that classroom, VLE site, or tutorial meeting) one that promotes and rewards actual thinking and nurtures concentration and an actual appetite for disciplinary engagement." It's a good article and worth reading in full, but I want to focus on one bit near the end. Webster says, "If we want students to care about understanding or thinking, they need to encounter people who visibly care about understanding - who are rapaciously curious. If we want them to tolerate uncertainty, they need to see uncertainty handled without panic. If we want them to revise their thinking, they need to see revision as a sign of seriousness rather than weakness." I've long talked about the role of the educator being 'to model and demonstrate'. That's what this is. That's where our focus should be. That (I hope) is what I've always tried to do in this newsletter.

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There Are a Million Fediverses. Some of Them Are Louder than Others.
jaz-michael king, jaz-michael king's blog, 2026/05/12

This post begins as a criticism of the idea that "the fediverse holds this very specific opinion" and evolves into a discussion about chronological feeds where "you replace algorithmic amplification with sheer volume. If those same 3% of vocal, toxic, aggrieved accounts are posting twenty times a day while the 97% of us post once or twice, who dominates your timeline?" It's a fair criticism - I've found the same effect in my RSS feeds, which is why when I built my own, I privileged accounts that post infrequently. In this post jaz-michael king makes a case for curation, but what's missing though is a consideration of how we should be able to shape our own algorithms (which is essentially what I did) rather than rely on the platform or the machine.

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Squashing Gemini Nano
Mark Corbett Wilson, Talking with machines, 2026/05/12

This is an update on the revelation that "Google Chrome is silently downloading Gemini Nano onto our computers without a clear opt-in or notification." As Mark Corbett Wilson describes it, it's not simply that people are finding an unexpected AI model on their hard drive.  "Beyond the AI model, the 'ghost' data in Chrome often extends to the GPUCache. Chrome builds a massive cache of 'shaders' to speed up graphics rendering on your GPU. Over time, these can balloon into several gigabytes and they rarely clean themselves up." Cleaning it up is not a simple task, as described here.

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One Step Forward, One Step Back
Phil Hill, On EdTech Newsletter, 2026/05/12

This is an update on the Instructure hack with a focus on media questions and the company's response. Overall it's... not good. Instructure obviously wants to limit the bad publicity, but are doing so in a way that keeps the people impacted less informed. This, at least, according to Phil Hill. "The scale of the breach has not been publicly acknowledged. The academic continuity framing is being articulated by everyone except the company at the center of it. Higher ed's trade press is being deflected to a static page. Direct questions about the most material aspect of the resolution are going unanswered."

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"My theory of change is to be"
Tim Hollo, In Between Days, 2026/05/13

I want to leave a promissory note here to finish some thoughts, knowing I might not ever get to fulfill it, but at least to flag the intention as something important. Let's start here (and yes, we've visited this place a lot): "When we peel back the modernism, let go of the separation, the interdependence is everywhere, and the pathways to rediscovering it are many and varied - and surely that's the point." That should sound so familiar. A lot of people today see the path forward as a path backward - letting go of modernism, as though it has all been a big mistake. I too, think abstraction as an ideal was a mistake, but I see the path forward as reaching into a future, one where we don't lose who we are even while understanding our interconnection with everything else. Indeed, the whole concept of interconnection makes no sense if it is not connection between individuals - distinct, autonomous, and indispensable. And the promissory note is that I want to say this without appeal to mythology, whether to the idea of the will or to mysterium, tremendum et fascinans. Via Kate Bowles.

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RDF 1.2 Primer
W3C, 2026/05/11

This document "introduces the basic concepts of RDF and shows concrete examples of the use of RDF." It's background for the introduction of RDF 1.2 (also known as 'RDF Star'), an important update to the W3C specification. This summary on LinkedIn (sorry) describes the key changes well. "The headline feature is 'triple terms': the culmination of the long-running RDF-star effort. In plain terms: you can now use an RDF triple itself as the object of another triple. Statements about statements, without the old reification gymnastics that everyone quietly hated. Hypergraphs in disguise." In simple terms: if 'P' is the statement that 'Cats like catnip', then now it's much easier to say 'Mary believes P'. This enables a much deeper and expressive semantics. More detail in this presentation.

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Permissioned Data Diary 5: What’s in a Name?
Daniel Holmgren, Daniel's Leaflets, 2026/05/11

One issue (out of many, as I'm discovering) with the ATmosphere protocol, used by Bluesky, is that all data in your personal data store (PDS) is public data. There is no private data in the ATsphere. This article reports on ongoing work to change that, but it's work that has implications. "At the end of the day, specifying a new protocol scheme is basically owning up to the fact that, while we may re-use many primitives and roles from the public data protocol, we are specifying a new data and sync protocol, not just an extension to the existing protocol." Personally, I think what is proposed here is over-engineered. But the thinking is not wrong.

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Is the scientific paper due to be replaced?
Tim Requarth, The Transmitter, 2026/05/11

This article makes the case that "The scientific paper bundles too many functions into a single artifact, and the bundle is starting to come apart." It outlines several proposals that could replace it, for example, "an Adaptive Knowledge Network, in which the basic unit of scientific contribution is a "knowledge object" rather than a paper." But there are risks; the process of writing the paper is part of the scientific thinking that underlies this, and this might be lost. The article doesn't mention Octopus, the UK project that defines "eight publication types that are aligned with the research process," but this would fit squarely into this discussion. The major issue (in my view) with this sort of disaggregation is that every contribution is locked into the same methodology, and nothing breaks out of what might be called 'normal science' for the discipline.

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Transparency and Accountability in AI use in K-12 (Game Created Using AI)
Maha Bali, Reflecting Allowed, 2026/05/11

Maha Bali plans to use this game in an upcoming talk. That's good; something interactive is always fun. My concern here is not that it is AI-generated. The AI did a nice job. My complaint is that it's too easy. It presents each of eight scenarios with three possible answers. It is very easy to pick the 'best' and 'worst' choice, given any degree of background knowledge. And this makes it seem like the actual choices regarding AI are easy. They're not, and the use of this game is a case in point. A critic said it was 'too easy'. Do you go back and ask the AI to make it harder? Do you ask for a justification of the difficulty level? Or do you just go ahead and use it as it?

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Chrome Is Quietly Downloading a 4GB AI Model Without Your Permission
Jibin Joseph, PC Mag, 2026/05/11

I've hesitated to cover this story because I have Chrome on my machine and haven't been able to find the 4 gig file where it's supposed to be (or anywhere else, for that matter). Mind you, I use Chrome only for testing; for day-to-day I use Firefox. But I've seen the story from enough sources now, including some that would actually check the data, that I'm inclined to believe it's true. Having said that - I'm sure that this is only the tip of the iceberg. For example, I use Adobe's noise reduction feature in Lightroom and found the other day my C:\ drive filled by a huge 'cr_sdk' file. There's no documentation of this and no way to manage it. Is it AI? No idea. Could it be? Sure - and I'd never know. Are other services running local AI models? Even if not, they probably will in the future.

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Why the Canvas hack was innevitable
Tim Klapdor, Heart Soul Machine, 2026/05/11

The Canvas hack, writes Tim Klapdor, was inevitable. "When the decree from management increasingly mandates that all core systems must be off-the-shelf products from established vendors (a policy that sounds like sensible risk mitigation) the result is that all your vendors share the same infrastructural single point of failure. When Canvas went down, it took every system routed through it with it." This argument has been made many times in these pages - a distributed and decentralized system is much more resilient. The push toward optimization and efficiency, if taken too far, greatly increases fragility.

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How public scholarship can unintentionally undermine journalism
Michael J. MacKenzie, Policy Options, 2026/05/11

Public scholarship is a good thing, writes Michael J. MacKenzie. But too much of that good thing can undermine and "blur into substituting for paid (and trained) journalistic labour." Nobody would deny that journalism is in a fragile state. But it's not clear whether the best way forward is to continue to pay for it as we always have, just as it's not clear the best way for scholars is to focus their efforts on in-class instruction. The presumption underlying the post - everything is good the way it is - is questionable. I'd rather get scientific and other knowledge straight from the scholars, rather than through the filter of "media, advocacy organizations, policy shops, political actors."

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There Is No 'Hard Problem Of Consciousness'
Carlo Rovelli, NOEMA, 2026/05/08

You can read my essay on consciousness or you can read this article - the point being made is exactly the same (and certainly not unique to either of us). "Experience is not over and above the processes that happen in the brain, as Chalmers assumed upfront. The dualism between a first-person description of experience and a third-person (or scientific) account of the same is a normal perspectival difference: the same brain phenomenon as experienced by that same brain itself, or by another. Experience for both - not evidence of two different kinds of reality."

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