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Digital tools are not the problem; it’s their governance
Kende Kefale, University World News, 2026/01/22

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There's some really interesting thinking in this article that belies its simplistic 'platformization of the university' framing. I would indeed skip the unconvincing opening sections and go straight to the 'making good design choices' section. Here we are presented with what amounts to two sets of competing metrics, the 'fast' algorithmic metrics and the slow 'university' metrics. What makes them different? "Platforms promise to replace trust with telemetry. But telemetry cannot tell you whether silence in a seminar is laziness, confusion or careful thinking; it can only tell you it happened. To interpret silence, someone must risk an intervention... risk is what makes a teacher different from an algorithm. Risk is the price of meaning." We've seen this argument before, where the assertion that computers, unlike people, have nothing at stake in the interaction. But here, what's at stake is trust - does a computer care whether you trust it? And that's the thing... it might, if it was instructed carefully enough, and in which trust acquires a moral or ethical flavour.

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Social Network Analysis of AI Agent Organizations
Hasan Gokberk Bayhan, SSRN, 2026/01/22

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This paper (13 page PDF) "discusses standard social network analysis (SNA) measures to enterprise agent settings to identify coordination hubs, bottlenecks, shadow dependencies, and fragile single points of failure... contrasting Model Context Protocol (MCP) mediated connectivity with human communication networks." It's a good idea and the paper serves as a starting point, though the author introduces unneeded complexity, for example, defining abbreviations 

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Claude's new constitution
Anthropic, 2026/01/22

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When I read Anthopic's new 'soul document' (84 page PDF), more properly called its 'constitution', I reflected on how this would compare to an account of ethics intended for a human.I wonder how many people, for example, subscribe to this: "We don't want to assume any particular account of ethics, but rather to treat ethics as an open intellectual domain that we are mutually discovering...  Our intention is for Claude to approach ethics nondogmatically, treating moral questions with the same interest, rigor, and humility that we would want to apply to empirical claims about the world." In his discussion Simon Willison comments, in the "list of external contributors who helped review the document... I was intrigued to note that two of the fifteen listed names are Catholic members of the clergy." I also notice that 'janus' contributed, which is a bit of a puzzle to me. IYKYK I guess, and IDK. Carlo Iacono compares the teaching of Claude to the teaching of children and opines, "If Claude should maintain human oversight because it cannot verify its own alignment, what does this imply about human alignment? We also cannot step outside our values to confirm they are good." I think people will be studying this and similar questions for a long time.

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How I use Generative AI with my students
Alice Leung, 2026/01/22

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I like this post because while it's very focused and descriptive of one person using AI in one classroom, it doesn't try to generalize and say that everybody should be doing the same thing. Because they probably shouldn't, and not only because it's specific to New South Wales (NSW) EduChat. "This is very much an evolving space, and I know there are many creative, effective approaches being prototyped in classrooms," writes Alice Leung. "I'd love to learn from others."

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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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