Stephen Downes

Why don't more conferences do this? "Browse speakers from past FFConf who still publish on their own blog. Filter by year or topic, search by name or session keyword, then download an OPML file of the feeds you picked and drop it into your feed reader." Sure, we often get lists of X/Twitter accounts or Facebook identities, so often by people who complain about corporate takeover of the learning space. We are the ones who make our choices; we should stop making the wrong ones.

This is from Emma Irwin's digital sovereignty presentation and overviews a mechanism for evaluating software based on the four freedoms that define open source software: to use, to inspect, to share, and to modify. A fifth layer is added: to govern. She suggests "turning this table into an RFP questionnaire with written response fields for vendors" or "developing a numerical scoring system to weight the operational impact versus technical compliance."

The main lesson here is that web domains are temporary. I mean, we've always known this (after all, we have to keep paying year after year or the domains will expire). Institutions have never shown any sort of domain loyalty - Otago Polytech allowing Open Education Global's Mastodon domain to expire is just the latest example of this. And as Alan Levine comments, " digital durability rides more on the individual than the institution." But maybe this is more about dukkha than domains, "the anxiety or stress of trying to hold onto things that are constantly changing." Anyhow, Levine seems ready now to let time pass. "I love keeping my old sites up and going or at least archived, but who am I kidding? It's all just sand piled up and the big waves will come one day."

There are some interesting ideas here: "Thomas Metzinger's work on minimal phenomenal experience: the simplest possible conscious experience a human, animal, or biological creature could have. Some suggest pure awareness, free of content. (Anil) Seth points to another possibility: 'foba' — the feeling of being alive." The search here is to find the difference between the machine and the embodied - but I really think we'll find the difference between the abstract and the individual. 

Tim Bray linked to this so I guess it's an OK link for a Bloomberg post even though it's in newsletterhunt. Matt Levine here writes, "I feel like a lot of stories in financial markets these days are about essentially this tension, 'everyone must prepare for apocalypse by owning AI stocks' vs. 'you are trying to trick us into owning AI stocks.'" And yet, the Standard and Poor (S&P) 500 index won't include SpaceX (which - just to be clear - is essentially an AI stock that also loses money launching space ships). Levine concludes, "It could be years before the big AI companies are profitable enough to get into the S&P. And then a few years after that, maybe they'll take over the world. In a sense, S&P is betting they won't." I don't really care one way or another which way the stocks go. But I do agree that betting on any of these companies at this point is a long shot, mostly because AI is math, and you can't own math.

David Hopkins links to Stuart Allen's webinar, Micro-credential Design Trends in Higher Education, which he describes as "one, structured and well-presented body of work that encapsulates the current state of microcredentials, how you get started on them, and all things a typical university needs to consider before being able to deliver it's first (or tenth) one."