How Flipboard's new Surf app lets you merge social feeds, YouTube, and RSS to escape the algorithm - finally
Steven Vaughan-Nichols,
ZDNet,
2026/04/07
Surf officially launched this week after more than a year in development. I tried Surf and my feeling is that it's a bit meh. It feels like it's focused much more on a reading experience than a creating experience. But your impression may be different. "It combines Bluesky, Mastodon, RSS, and other content into something that feels entirely new," writes David Pierce in the Verge. As Steven Vaughan-Nichols writes, "Surf has been developed over the last two years to unify fractured online conversations and prioritize user-designed experiences over being forced to consume algorithmic content from a firehose of preselected content." Via the Verge.
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AI, SaaS, and EdTech Survival
Phil Hill,
On EdTech Newsletter,
2026/04/07
I think this is a good observation. Phil Hill writes, "Just as Ben Thompson recently argued in Stratechery about Microsoft and broader software survival, AI changes how code gets written, not why institutions pay for ongoing software services. Let's break it down, starting with where the HackerNoon article gets it right." Specifically, "coding is not the same as providing software-as-a-service." Like anything we construct, software requires ongoing maintenance. There's no such thing as 'set it and forget it'. And maintenance (which includes the development of new features) requires an ongoing commitment and expertise. "AI changes the economics of creation. It does not eliminate the economics of operation, support, or trust at institutional scale." And that is what commercial software companies provide. (Now, I would add, that it does not follow that the LMS is not dead; the product category can disappear even if the need for software expertise continues - but that's a different issue).
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Trade-offs and Menus
Alex Usher,
HESA,
2026/04/07
So much of what pretends to be good economics is really just an exercise in framing (or its political equivalent, defining the Overton window). That's what Alex Usher is up to with his articles on trade-offs, both yesterday (in which he asserts the university "exists to provide a space where individual disciplines can do sell their products") and today when he proposes creating "a menu of what everything costs" so we can understand the trade-offs. Now, actual good economics would understand that the university is a complex system, and that the trade-offs aren't really tradeoffs. Any change in one line item has a ripple effect across all the other line items, which create their own ripple effects in turn. Depicting university budgets as trade-offs is a bad strategy. So why do it? Because it allows you to create a list of the sort of changes that will be allowed. Usher's list consists entirely of cuts to staffing and support services, because those are the only places allowed to be considered; a similar list of revenues would include things like tuition and fee hikes, again because nothing else is on the table. The politics here is to get faculty and staff arguing among themselves within the confines of these options, without ever touching on an overall strategy that would make a real difference.
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Digital transformation is a teaching and learning opportunity
D'Arcy Norman,
2026/04/07
D'Arcy Norman offers a useful introduction to Digital Transformation (Dx). Among the examples he cites, Norman references eCampusOntario's micro-credentials in Dx, and BCcampus's 21 digital learning competencies organized into mindsets, skillsets, and toolsets. "The common thread across all of these," he writes, is that "the most successful teaching-and-learning Dx initiatives are not primarily about technology adoption. They involve pedagogical redesign, faculty development, and organizational culture change. Technology is necessary but not sufficient." That's my experience as well, and why I complain when people use the new technology to do the old thing (though I guess SAMR would say this is inevitable).
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Prepping for the endgame of the open web
Jay Hoffmann,
The History of the Web,
2026/04/07
I actually like Alan Levine's comment at the end of this article better than the article itself, but the article is fine. Jay Hoffmann writes, "My point is, each time the open web is attacked, fragments of it survive and persist. Berners-Lee designed the web with a lot of hope and optimism, but he wasn't blind to the cynics." Levine writes, "I'm with ya on the fight and stand for this open web, but hardly think that collectively the 'netizens' are just hapless victims of some warlords. The web slides towards end game when we abandon it in favor of the web megamalls, when we stop making and adding to the web ourselves." That's why I'm still writing my own content on my of software that I wrote myself.
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Readers familiar with Reddit will know it's a discussion website divided into topics (known as subreddits) where each topic consists of an endless series of posts realted (usually) to that topic. What is special about TReddit is that readers can 'upvote' or 'downvote' specific posts or comments. This website is the same as Reddit except it has academic subjects (known as 'communities', such as 'education' and 'anthropology') instead of subreddits, and each new post is an academic article in that field. People can read the article (they're all open access) and comment on them. Presumably the best articles will receive the most upvotes. It's all very new, the 'education' community has 7 followers, and there's no philosophy community yet. This might never be successful, but I like the thinking behind it.
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GC Insights: Designing for inquiry in virtual fieldwork
Rie Hjørnegaard Malm, et al.,
Geoscience Communication,
2026/04/07
This is a short, simple and basic article describing the use of VR to create an immersive activity for physical geography students. "The ambition to build an inquiry lesson with a virtual reality component has challenged the format without making it a 'show and tell'. In this inquiry lesson, the motivation from the rich digital 360 environment and the goal of mapping a genuine geological problem will carry students beyond just wanting a 'correct' answer." The actual lesson is available on Zenodo. I found this item while trying out Peerler (see my other post today).
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