Stephen Downes

The projects recognized by WISE tend to be the sort of things foundations get excited over - you know, where "an innovative non-profit organization" creates a "learning platform designed to improve learning outcomes". That sort of thing. Awards go to things like the Queen Rania Foundation, Remake Learning, High Tech High School, TUMO Center, etc. Not that these are bad things. Not at all. But in the wide world of education, it's a bit of a (well-funded) niche. And it includes things like Edraak, a MOOC platform launched in 2014 that now reaches over 9,000,000 users across the Arab World.

O'Reilly sells technology books and as such is in a good position to see what the future holds buy looking at what people are studying on its learning platform. So what do they see? "The next wave of AI development will be building agents: software that can plan and execute complex actions." Also, there's less interest in learning programming languages and more interest in learning about security. In raw numbers: "From 2023 to 2024, Machine Learning grew 9.2%; Artificial Intelligence grew 190%; Natural Language Processing grew 39%; Generative AI grew 289%; AI Principles grew 386%; and Prompt Engineering grew 456%."

This isn't really a traditional glossary as it only has 16 entries, and each entry isn't a short definition but rather a longish article. It's also - from my perspective - pretty opinionated. That's not a bad thing, especially in this context. And as a whole, the site offers a pretty good background in some of the key philosophical ideas around AI. Contents include articles on consciousness, representation, meaning, agency and more.

This is an update on the story that broke yesterday. Later in the day, Mastodon founder Eugen Rochko posted a multi-part thread explaining his decision. It's admirable. "Our core mission remains the same: to create the tools and digital spaces where people can build authentic, constructive online communities free from ads, data exploitation, manipulative algorithms, or corporate monopolies," Mastodon's blog said.

It's a bit of a blast from the past, but I was in Second Life today. It was still empty. and I still had problems with the controls. What made it different was that I entered from my web browser. As Jokadia says, "Well this is a bit exciting .. only been dreaming about SL in the browser since I created my avatar in *checks notes* .. May 2006!" I had to recover my account name and password - surprisingly, they still exist! The browser-based access was just launched, and it's limited to sessions of one hour each while they get organized.

Internet access is more expensive in poorer countries. So it's not surprising to read that Starlink - which operates on a global, not local, basis - can cost less in high-cost countries, and especially in Africa. That's nothing that can't be 'fixed', though, as Kenya's telecom regulator plan to hike satellite ISP licensing fees by over 800%. This follows lobbying by local providers like Safaricom, which has more than 350,000 fibre subscribers. The licensing fee, rising from $12,302 to $115,331,  won't hurt Stalink, but will be a challenge for smaller providers. Because that's always the way.