You can hear the squeak of sphincters closing
2026/08/19
I don't use AI to write any of my text mostly because (a) I think I'm a better writer, and (b) the AI can't draw on my experience the way I can. The first may be hubris and is entirely subject to change, but I can't imagine the second ever changing. I don't have any opposition to AI, and I use it to generate code and to remove noise from my photos. And it's OK with me if other people use AI to write (though I really wish they would optimize for brevity). But key in all this is that AI is a tool that should be subject to the wishes of the person using the tool, and that's where Anthropic's watermark fails. "Watermarking is misdirection: a way for goods to appear to do one kind of thing while secretly doing another. Real writers (e.g. Gruber, Teare, and Jarvis) are calling bullshit on it." This is really important, because if it can secretly do one thing, then it can secretly do any number of things. I can protect my code with tests and my images with my eye, but there's no way to protect my writing.
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The College Success Rulebook: Practical Advice for College and Beyond
2026/08/19
I'm not sure what advice I would give to students any more. It wouldn't be this (24 page PDF) - it would never have been this, which mostly amounts to "do what you're told" with a little bit of "show some initiative" added. That would never have worked for me, and would leave students falling far short of getting the best out of university. I think there are three keys to success (or, at least, there were, before AI): writing well, which also supports reading well, and is the key that unlocks the content; connecting with other students to share the workload; and extracurricular activities to develop skills in what's valuable to you. The usual "habits of excellence" help if the details become overwhelming, but for the most part success is created when you define what counts as success and then work the system to attain that.
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This report (52 page PDF) is styled as a 'rapid literature review', and while I'm not exactly sure what that means (I've asked) the result is still worth a look. The authors studied 271 of 975 papers considered to compile research which is admittedly still in its early stages. "Affective gains are common. GenAI use is often associated with increased interest, engagement, motivation, and reduced anxiety," however, "evidence of impact on higher-order reasoning, transfer, self-regulated learning, and durable learning is more uneven." A lot depends on external factors (this should surprise no one). "This includes the characteristics and developmental needs of learners, how the GenAI tool is designed, what the task asks students to do, who participates in the activity, and the wider cultural and institutional context."
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The Three Screens That Made Us Still
2026/08/19
I am of the belief that television caused far more harm to society than social media ever did, or even could. As LarsGoran Bostrom writes, "Television did not assault its viewers. It invited them to surrender. The screen demanded attention but offered no resistance, no requirement for response beyond the passive receipt of images flowing at thirty frames per second." Into the passive and receptive receiver it poured propaganda and advertising, building a comfortable mythology alongside a consumer society. I've always felt that digital technology offered a possible way out. Bostrom writes, "Will we remain the watched, the fed, the guided? Or will we reclaim the role of the watcher, the thinker, the one who chooses? The answer depends on whether we remember how to turn off the screen..." No. Not exactly that. The answer depends on whether we use the screen, or whether we merely let it use us.
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Open edX & n8n: Build Powerful Dynamic Workflows
2026/08/19
The details of this are useful mostly to OpenEdX users, but the concept generalizes and is worth noting. In a learning management system (LMS) things happen - a person registers, a grade changes, etc. - and this has an impact on external systems or should trigger actions. Most every LMS has a set of notifications - in OpenEdX they're Django signals - that are created when these events happen. Usually the provider writes code to 'wire' them to other systems. This article describes how an automation platform called N8N is used instead to perform the same function. You can try this for yourself, but I would reserve more than a weekend for it.
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Engaging Digital Learners Through Affective Objectives
2026/08/19
The 'affective domain' describes how we feel about things. "We know that interest, confidence, motivation, and commitment impact learner engagement and performance, but how do we design for these feelings in an intentional way?" That's the question posed in this article, and it draws on Krathwohl's Taxonomy to offer a response: receiving, responding, valuing, organization, and characterization. Unfortunately the meaning of these terms appears to have drifted through time: for example, we read here that 'receiving' is "being aware of or sensitive to the existence of certain ideas, material, or phenomena and being willing to tolerate them", which in this paper it is characterized as "learner pays attention". Similarly, valuing is originally described as "willing to be perceived by others as valuing certain ideas, materials, or phenomena," while here it is "learner believes that what s/he is learning is worthy."
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This is a video recording of a Senate Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism hearing titled "Your Data, Their Profit: The Consumer Cost of AI Surveillance Pricing." If you don't have the 90 minutes to watch the video, Liz Brandt has written a summary on LinkedIn. The idea here is that companies use surveillance technology to learn about you and then adjust their prices accordingly. Practices include, for example, charging more for a Lyft ride if your phone battery is low, being charged $150 more if you're in the Target store, selling personal data, and changing electronic price labels minute by minute. I think that if education has a role in all this (and it should, right?) it should be in helping people respond: building connections, sharing information, forming cooperatives, organizing, the like. We don't see that so much in education. Usually students learn how to work for companies rather than to push back against them.
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Copyright 2026 Stephen Downes Contact: stephen@downes.ca
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