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Distributing knowledge for equity — An evolving concept and a call for action
Open Book Publishers Blog, 2026/10/26

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This post summarizes a webinar organized in response to two open books, one on distributing (and distributed) knowledge (212 page PDF), and the other on the politics of open infrastructures (388 page PDF) (which include the challenging argument that the internet infrastructure has never been open). Both take an explicitly international perspective, and the webinar reflects this, looking at conditions of access in war-torn regions like Ukraine and systematically underserved regions in Africa. The different cases return to a common theme: "openness is not enough" (which is fair enough, but I hearken to my own principle that nothing is ever 'enough'). That said, as noted here, "the Distributed University invites us to see higher education not as a collection of autonomous campuses, but as a network of interconnected educational, research, and infrastructural capacities in which equity and openness become foundational principles." The recording is available to view online, and the slides are available to download.

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What kind of research for what kind of education? Lessons for the OECD and others
Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education, 2026/10/26

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This article (16 page PDF) is a response to a 2025 OECD report (26 page PDF) on "how to strengthen the role of research and initial teacher education institutions in knowledge mobilisation." Gert Biesta argues "the report assumes that the research is available but that for some reasons it doesn't reach policy and practice." There's an assumption that there is a sort of 'knowledge' - singular - around which there is evidence and consensus, and which practitioners should simply "make use of". But this represents a misunderstanding of 'practrice'. "A practice rather is collective activity held together, so we might say, by its purpose. And this purpose is not external to the practice." Different cultures, regions and industries have difference conceptions of this purpose, and you can't simply 'apply research' to them. Biesta describes this as "education's double history," corresponding to poiesis and praxis, but if we look at it, there are multitudes of histories. All in all, "what teachers do is never 'just' an instrument for bringing about certain 'effects.'"

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Building sustainable futures: Responsible development of AI-enabled open educational resources as digital public goods
Javiera Atenas, Robert Farrow, Nicholas Caldwell, Éamonn Costello, Leo Havemann, International Review of Education, 2026/10/26

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In this article, "the authors propose the creation of integrated and open platforms that position OER as global public goods, grounded in open principles and standards." The argument is that developing these platforms could foster "inclusive, transparent and collaborative development, particularly in AI, on a global scale." Specifically, there is "an urgent need for open, transparent and publicly governed alternatives to commercial AI platforms" that would conform with UNESCO's ROAM universality indicators of "Rights, Openness, Accessibility, [and] Multi-stakeholder participation." I think there's a good argument for this, though I begin to resist when the authors go further, suggesting "the ethical deployment of AI requires adherence to ethical design principles, ensuring fairness, equity, transparency and protection of learners' privacy." I think they mean this as a premise, but in my view it's weaker than the argument it's intended to support. There is, as a matter of empirical fact, no consensus on ethical codes, and great ethical diversity globally. But there is also independently a need for social and political institutions that govern wide-reaching and consequential technologies like AI.

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AI-Generated Work Is Breaking the Links Between Degrees and Real Skills,
Courtney Benton, Science, 2026/10/26

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I can't tell whether this summary of Yuke Meng, Xufeng Zhang & Han Li's paper on 'Synthetic Credentialism' is AI-generated, but it doesn't matter, since the original article is paywalled (boo! hiss!) so this is the best we've got. Synthetic Credentialism is " the systemic condition in which AI-generated or AI-assisted academic outputs enable the acquisition of credentials that no longer reliably signal the competences they are meant to certify." The paper itself is built on signaling theory, where "economists have understood education as a mechanism through which individuals communicate otherwise unobservable qualities to employers." This paper documents the breakdown in three dimensions: 'signal decoupling', or "the growing gap between the output a student submits and the underlying competence that output is supposed to represent"; 'verification collapse', where "institutions can no longer credibly distinguish human-produced from machine-produced work"; and 'normative ambiguity', where "the norms themselves are unsettled, responsibility becomes diffuse, and the traditional misconduct-based response, investigation and punishment of individual offenders, loses analytical traction." 

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Making Haiku[photo]comic Daily Create #tdc5397
Alan Levine, CogDogBlog, 2026/10/26

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The DS 106 Daily Create has been running non-stop since 2012. The idea is simple: post a creativity prompt once a day and a hashtag people can use to identify their contributions, aggregate them, and enjoy. It started as a Twitter thing but migrated some time ago to the Fediverse. You can follow it here. In this post Alan Levine reintroduces the Daily Create and talks about how he spent 25 minutes over breakfast making Friday's. What I like is that I can picture it as though it were myself - though I don't contribute at all regularly to the Daily Create (it's more like once in a blue moon) I nonetheless identify with the idea of waking up in the morning and spending the day creating. That is what I do, and it is to me a good way to live my life. 

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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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