Ads and tracking infiltrated TVs. Now they're coming for monitors.
Scharon Harding,
Ars Technica,
2026/08/25
This is another item with a familiar theme. Smart TVs and now computer monitors have increasingly been surveilling customers and pushing advertisements where they're not expected - or wanted. "LG's and Samsung's smart monitors use the same ad-serving OSes that their respective smart TVs do, meaning they're poised to use automatic content recognition (ACR)." It's easy enough to say that we shouldn't buy them, but if history is any guide, the objective is to ensure there are no other alternatives on the market. "It would be outrageous if dumb monitors were one day as rare as dumb TVs."
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Harvard’s $699 startup bootcamp offers AI avatars of its instructors
Anthony Ha,
TechCrunch,
2026/08/25
The only reason this is in the news is that it's Harvard. The story is that the university is using AI clones of its instructors to offer $600 boot-camp entrepreneur courses in what it calls HBS-Foundry. There's a much longer (and probably paywalled, though I was able to read it) story in the New York Times, but this five paragraph summary will do. Using AI avatars is a trend that has been building for some time now - see here, and here, and here, and here - so it's ridiculous for someone like Bryan Alexander to claim, "Since parts of US higher ed have the chronic condition of Harvard envy, some will try to do this on their own". It's the old story here, where Harvard does something other people have been doing, and is then credited with having invented it.
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How Canada can help Americans and defeat America
Cory Doctorow,
Pluralistic,
2026/08/25
As Cory Doctorow says, "the 'art' of all of Trump's deals can be summed up in a single word: 'renege'." And so the utterly predictable has happened again. So we in Canada find ourselves at odds with a trading partner that, as Doctorow has noted, has always had the advantage. "The systems that Trump has dismantled as unfair to the US were, in fact, sources of tremendous advantage to America." And as he has previously, Doctorow recommends upending that advantage by undoing the agreements and legislation that have enabled that advantage. "Canada made itself easy pickings for America's tech giants, who wiped out Canada's tech sector while making Canada geopolitically and economically dependent on – and vulnerable to – the US and its tech companies." I'm not sure I want to see Canada respond to the U.S. by burning down its tech industry, as a successful enactment of the Doctorow proposal could do. But given that Americans keep on electing governments and funding corporations that exploit and renege - for Trump is by no means alone in this regard - I'm not sure I don't.
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Human Agency and Epistemic Authority Under Generative Artificial Intelligence
Mahmut Özer, Matjaž Perc, Hande Tanberkan Özçelik,
Open Praxis,
2026/08/25
This article offers less a 'framework' and more a mantra. Here it is: "students should be allowed to use all resources - including LLMs - during preparation. However, the production of final evidence of learning should occur under supervised conditions within the school environment and under teacher oversight." What strikes me about that 'framework' is its sheer impracticality. The reliance on humans to scrutinize and evaluate in-person student production was been historically a huge limiting factor in education, and it would remain one in the future under this model.
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Open Educational Resources in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) Countries: An Integrated Systematic Review
Mohamed Koutheair Khribi, Haifa Belhadj, Ahmed Tlili, Abdellatif Sellami, Mohamed Jemni,
Open Praxis,
2026/08/25
What I like about this study is that it includes MOOCs and 'grey literature' content alongside academic sources in this discussion of OER adoption in Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries. As such, it offers a more nuanced analysis of a complex landscape. "The evolution observed across the GCC thus reflects a differentiated developmental trajectory: from emergent open practices in Kuwait and the UAE, to embedded digital openness in Oman and Qatar, to policy-aligned and maturing ecosystems in Bahrain, and to a more institutionalized OER ecosystem in Saudi Arabia." The use of MOOCs in the region - "Several MOOCs platforms and initiatives have also been created in Saudi Arabia such as FutureX, KKUx, Maarefh, Doroob and Rwaq" - counters the 'MOOCs are dead' argument so popular in some circles. It's worth noting that I worked with several the authors of this report on some related MOOC and OER work with the Arab League Educational, Cultural and Scientific Organization (ALECSO) a number of years ago.
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