Stephen Downes

This post introduces Wednesday's #LTHEchat on Bluesky (which I assume is a series of posts using the hashtag, like the old Twitter Chats). But it's also a good discussion of inclusive communities of practice (ICoP) or Inclusive Collaborative Practice (ICP). "We define ICP as the intentional process of working with others in ways that value diverse perspectives, distribute opportunities fairly, and create environments where everyone can contribute, belong, and thrive." Obviously (to me, at least) this matters any time you're working in an international or multicultural context, which is most of the time, and also takes into account differences and preferences in communication and other elements of interaction.

According to this short item, "Students can now access hundreds of textbooks from providers in the U.S. and India including OpenStax, Open Textbook Library, and S Chand Publishing, right in Gemini Notebook at no charge." I tested it (illustrated) and it does indeed work (you can also import commercial books into your Notebook at a charge). There are more providers than just those listed; I saw eCampus Ontario in the results, for example. What I wonder is whether any money is passing from Google to the providers of these open textbooks. Via Mark Oehlert.

I like this, and would add that it applies to more than just the architectural profession. As in so many others, this field has created a 'hero' mythology that defines our creations as 'statements' with our name on them, according to this article. But this mythology is now dead, and maybe we should think of the architect (or any professional) as someone who 'reads the room', identifies what's of value and what's important, and sets the stage for the emergence of creative ideas and practical solutions, no matter where they come from. Via Mark Oehlert, who comments, "we need to be focused on recapturing the time and cycles that AI will inevitably free up and figuring out how move up the value chain."

This is why a lot of people are resorting to AI to manage their knowledge and learning workflow. "Since the last issue (a week ago), 121 new studies, four new resources, five new FAQs and two new concept pages, on open education and statistics and data science education, have joined the knowledge base." For the record, I don't use AI to select, filter or summarize resources (and of course I write all these posts by hand). There's a tradeoff there that readers should be aware of: it means I may miss important articles and publications when they come out, and might miss emerging trends. At the same time, the benefit is that instead of using AI-based pattern recognition, I'm using my own in-brain pattern recognition to spot useful articles, comprehend what they say, and extract relevant ideas or trends (and that is what you are paying for when you support OLDaily financially, keeping it free and open for all to read). 

This is a good comprehensive article reviewing the security breaches there have been recently (and there have been a lot) and discussing what we should expect, and do, in the light of AI-assisted service compromises. If you're wondering why everyone was making '4' jokes recently, it's this: "eMudhra broke this trust in the most blatant way: its private keys turned out to be single-digit numbers. A private key is a 384-bit key, which means that it would be a number between 0 and 2^384, (a number with 116 digits!) Except, the key turned out to be the number '4.'" Author Gergely Orosz expects the security problems to get worse before they get better, not the least because of security handled the eMudhra way. But here's my own take: for the most part, what we're seeing are not new compromises (the PHP issue, for example, was known for quite a while beforehand), but rather, compromises by new players. Before now, you had to be a government or large company to breach security like this; now many more people can do it. As we repair these breaches (and they are being repaired, because they have to be) we reduce the ability of everyone to breach our systems, including especially the governments and companies that have been doing it all along.

It's like the internet publishing world took a deep breath and then said, "let's get on with this then." Human-authored content, it turns out, is still valuable. Geoff Graham announces via this post that he has acquired CSS-Tricks back from Digital Ocean, so it's now an independent site again. Jeffrey Zeldman of A List Apart reflects on this and mentions Smashing as a great place to get similar content as well. Piccalilli adds, "Let's buck up our ideas and get cracking, everyone. There's lots to teach and I know we've got plenty of fight left in us." All of these are among my regular reads and I like this new energy.