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Faith No More's "Midlife Crisis" and the Observers Paradox
Noah Kalina, The Noah Kalina Newsletter, 2025/06/26

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I've heard this argument before. Drop the recording device, they say. Don't try to capture the experience, just live in the moment. "This is the photographer's curse: you become so good at seeing life through a lens that you forget how to see it with just your eyes... And the newsletter has made it worse... I'm looking for the story, the angle, the insight that will justify sending another email to thousands of people." My experience is totally different. For me, the camera and the newsletter change what I'm doing from shallow experience, easily lost and forgotten, to deep experience, rich in aspect and potential. You may think of it as just preening on the stage like a Madonna; I view it as a life fully lived and not merely experienced. (p.s. I also prefer to think of my own 66 years of age as 'mid-life' - gotta stay positive, right?). Via D'Arcy Norman.

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Five Ways to Run a Deadly Online Seminar
Alan Levine, CogDogBlog, 2025/06/26

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In a recent project I tried and tried to convince them to not do this, but after more than two dozen episodes their onlione seminars are still academics flipping thoughtheir slide decks, the exact sort of 'deadly online seminar' Alan Levin describes. And attendance is stuck in the single digits. So I totally endirse his advice here, and underline it with the recommendation that organizers heed this advice when it's given to them. Just one quibble: dinner parties. There were no dinner parties in my youth or even my adulthood. They were something some other more well-heeled demograpic did (you know, people with nice houses with dining rooms and all that). So advice like "organize it like a dinner party" is a kind of code where 'that demographic' is speaking to itself.

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The Illusion of Thinking: Understanding the Strengths and Limitations of Reasoning Models via the Lens of Problem Complexity
Parshin Shojaee, et al., Apple Machine Learning Research, 2025/06/26

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I referenced this paper (30 page PDF) from Apple in passing recently, but given how widely it was cited, it deserves its own listing. Recent large reasoning models (LRM), the authors argue, "have limitations in exact computation: they fail to use explicit algorithms and reason inconsistently across puzzles." 

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Immersive Learning Research Network
ILRN, 2025/06/26

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Long before genAI, even before the pandemic, and for a hot moment after the blockchain craze, there was the metaverse. Facebook changed the company name trying to catch the wave. In this moment, the Immersive Learning Network was born, and it has just released the latest set of conference papers. Most of the academic papers are of abstract length; there's more grist in the practitioner papers. In a moment of a moment, catch this paper on XR Literacy by Alin Yalcinkaya, Dan Spencer and Michael Cuales. Probably the most notable feature of the ILRN is the Versatilist podcast with Patrick O'Shea, which just produced its 345th episode. 

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AssessMate: Revolutionizing Assessment Design with AI
Yiliu Pan, Mingmei Zhang, Tzu-Yun Huang, Luojia Chen, Kanghua Qiu, ICICLE 2024, 2025/06/26

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One thing about the publication of conference proceedings as books, such as these proceedings from the 2024 ICICLE conference, is that it gives reviewers like me a chance to look back and see what happened to the projects described. Such is the case for AssessMate, which today appears nowhere to be found online (it would have really helped if the authors had included a project URL or something, but no). Though the paper offers a glowing review of the tool's capabilities, the one paragraph of criticisms may better point to its fate: "critical areas for enhancement, particularly regarding guidance on AI usage, transparency of recommendations, and alignment of assessments with student capabilities." These days we would also expect such a paper to say something about the AI model employed. (My online search revealed an Indian self-assessment service and lms, and an insurance claims application.

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We publish six to eight or so short posts every weekday linking to the best, most interesting and most important pieces of content in the field. Read more about what we cover. We also list papers and articles by Stephen Downes and his presentations from around the world.

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