Should I be racked with guilt for not buying books?
Doug Johnson,
Blue Skunk Blog,
2026/06/16
The campaign to rein in the rampant freeloading at local libraries continues apace. Ron Charles cites an Authors' Guild report saying "Almost two-thirds of readers obtain books for free — whether from friends, personal collections, libraries, pirate sites, or other free sources" and asks "are affluent library users impoverishing authors?" Well, no. But let's take a step back. I agree with Doug Johnson that authors deserve a decent living. If they don't get one, though, it's not because of scofflaws like me, it's because we've create this scrape-to-get-by economy that turns everything good into a struggle to find a business model and to make ends meet. We're not going to address author poverty by eliminating libraries; at most, we'll do nothing but make a few billionaires richer.
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Not My First EdTech Rodeo
Derek Bruff,
Agile Learning,
2026/06/16
It's basically a trope now to compare the current wave of AI technology to previous ed tech innovations, like MOOCs, say, and to say "they didn't wipe out universities so this won't either". It's lso misleading. With the exception of on very foolish person, nobody said MOOCs (or anything else) would spell the end of education as we know it. They did say it would be transformative, and I think that remains true. Sure, you could take MOOCs as implemented by educational institutions and criticize "the video-and-quiz approach to learning that MOOCs popularized." In the same way, you can criticize AI tutors that emulate lectures and even coaching. But none of this addresses the real impact the technology has had. It has changed what we need to learn, where we learn it, and how we learn it. Ultimately, the MOOC was about people learning to teach themselves, rather than to consume education as though it were some consumer good. You have to look outside institutional learning to see it, though,
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The Emerging AI Divide in Higher Education
Ria Sidhu, Omkar Dastane,
Society & AI | Society-Centered Artificial Intelligence Research & Practice,
2026/06/16
This article uses a lot of words to make what is at heart a simple point: "Drawing on experience across higher education in the UK and Malaysia, two academics argue that the real AI divide in universities is not about access to tools but about institutional readiness - and why it is an urgent equity issue policymakers can no longer afford to ignore." Via Sai Gattupalli.
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Forgejo – Beyond coding. We forge.
Forgejo,
2026/06/16
Haven't tried it, but I definitely want to take note of a federated version of GitHub. "Forgejo can be trusted to be exclusively Free Software. You can create an account on Codeberg and other instances or download it to self-host your own. It focuses on security, scaling, federation and privacy." Via Paul Walk.
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