OLWeekly

Low-latency neuromorphic air hockey player
Juan P Romero, Dimitrios Korakovounis, Jens E Pedersen, Jorg Conradt, Neuromorphic Computing and Engineering, 2025/07/04

What's interesting about this project is its use of spiking neural networks (SNN) that respond rapidly to dynamic environments. See the illustration. "We developed a system that uses SNNs to control a robotic manipulator in an air-hockey game. In this setup, the automated opponent uses SNNs to process data from an event-based camera, enabling it to track the puck's movements and respond to the actions of a human player." Obviously something like this would be an excellent trainer for human air hockey players.

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The Power of Offline Internet
Nichole Saad, Vasanthi Hargyono, Offline Internet Consortium, 2025/07/04

This is a report (60 page PDF) from the Offline Internet Consortium, an organization that advocates for the provision of digital services in areas where internet connectivity is not available. "The persistent global digital divide, driven by an array of social, economic, and political factors, underscores the critical need for innovative approaches to ensure broad and meaningful internet connectivity." Sounds great, but offline internet also creates a locus of control over the content that doesn't exist in the wider internet; the report mentions 'individual control' but really, whoever has the keys to the local server controls the local 'internet'.

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Autocomplete in Overdrive
Carl T. Bergstrom, Jevin D. West, 2025/07/04

This is the first of 13 lessons in a series called 'Modern Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines'. I like the way it is presented; here's a lot of scrolling, but it's also interactive, embedding interactions alongside the argument. The thesis of the first lesson is that "LLMs are predictive text generators. It is remarkable how many complex tasks can be performed in this way. But don't let the impressive capabilities of LLMs lure you into thinking that they understand human experience or are capable of logical reasoning." So, not oracles.

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Denmark to tackle deepfakes by giving people copyright to their own features
Miranda Bryant, The Guardian, 2025/07/04

The law will clamp down on "the creation and dissemination of AI-generated deepfakes by changing copyright law to ensure that everybody has the right to their own body, facial features and voice... It defines a deepfake as a very realistic digital representation of a person, including their appearance and voice." The U.S. has passed a similar law. I'm wondering what the effects will be on other extractive industries, like news and media. The evening news depends on being able to display unauthorized images of politicians, criminals, people involved in accidents, and innocent bystanders. Or will fair use apply, rendering most protections offered by the new bill moot? Via Slashdot.

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The New Skill in AI is Not Prompting, It's Context Engineering
Philipp Schmid, Philschmid, 2025/07/04

This is the latest bit of pseudo-professionalism associated with people working with AI: "Context Engineering is the discipline of designing and building dynamic systems that provides the right information and tools, in the right format, at the right time, to give a LLM everything it needs to accomplish a task." If it were really engineering, it would take four years of really hard work. But in the current context, it requires thinking about the topic for an evening. Via Miguel Guhlin. See also this article in LangChain.

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ChatGPT Now Has PhD-Level Intelligence, and the Poor Personal Choices to Prove It
Katie Burgess, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, 2025/07/04

It's funny because it's true: "Although ChatGPT is more intelligent than ever, it also has debilitating impostor syndrome. So, if it appears to be in the process of overthrowing the human race, simply tell it, 'Hey, did you hear that Google Gemini got tenure?' It will then lose its confidence and retreat to binge on Nutella and cry."

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UNESCO OER Dynamic Coalition Portal
UNESCO, 2025/07/04

UNESCO has launched an  Open Educational Resources (OER) Dynamic Coalition Portal based on the Recommendation on Open Educational Resources (OER). "The main objectives of the UNESCO OER Dynamic Coalition are to: Support the exchange of knowledge on ongoing activities - to raise the level of understanding on ongoing OER projects, networks, resources, and activities." I've signed up and will pass along any announcements and resources of note. Via OE Global.

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Students at this Kitchener school leave lasting impression with sculpture art project
Diego Pizarro, CBC, 2025/07/04

This is the sort of education I really like. "Students at Groh Public School in Kitchener completed a public art project titled Forging Legacies. Grade 7 students, along with local blacksmith and artist Sandra Dunn, spent the last school year creating a metal sculpture that will now be on display in the school's entrance." It involves students with the community, addresses something of real value, and is based on genuine input and contributions. Something to be proud of.

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View of Privacy and Emotional Intelligence in Technology-Based Learning
Yuliya Frolova, Canadian Journal of Learning and Technology, 2025/07/03

Arguably, "perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use are pivotal in shaping users' attitudes toward mobile technologies, which subsequently influence their behavioural intentions to adopt such technologies." This study examines some specific attitudes related to privacy and emotional intelligence. Why these together? "Individuals with heightened meta-emotional awareness are likely to exhibit more sophisticated privacy management strategies," writes Yuliya Frolova. Using data collected from 272 respondents in Kazakhstan, the study suggests "privacy orientation is a critical determinant of positive attitudes and intentions toward mobile technology learning." Obviously there are limitations to the study.

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Is ChatGPT really rotting our brains?
Anne-Laure Le Cunff, Ness Labs, 2025/07/03

This is a short overview of that study from MIT purporting to show that ChatGPT use causes cognitive loss. The study shows no such thing, of course, and this article has a couple of paragraphs explaining why.

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Cloudflare creates AI crawler tollbooth to pay publishers
Thomas Claburn, The Register, 2025/07/02

I've long wondered how Cloudflare would leverage its position as a prominent intermediary between web publishers and web readers. Here's one sign: "Cloudflare has started blocking AI web crawlers by default in a bid to become the internet's gatekeeper." They will, in effect, monetize the web. "Each time an AI crawler requests content, they either present payment intent via request headers for successful access (HTTP response code 200), or receive a 402 Payment Required response with pricing," explained Will Allen, VP of product, and Simon Newton, engineering manager, in a blog post."

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Here are the biggest misconceptions about AI content scraping
Sara Guaglione, Digiday, 2025/07/02

The main thing to glean from this article is that the nature of web site scraping is changing. "There are two main types of AI bots - RAG AI bots and training data bots... Training scrapes are 'one-and-done' to feed a model's general knowledge... RAG AI bots, or agents, retrieve factual, current information in real-time. They respond to user prompts in AI products like Perplexity and ChatGPT by searching the web. Responses include links or citations to the original sources, such as publishers' sites. RAG can surface and summarize articles without storing them in training data, which makes the threat to traffic and monetization even more immediate and harder to regulate."

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University Autonomy Stems From Corporate Rights
Michael Banerjee, Inside Higher Ed | Higher Education News, Events and Jobs, 2025/07/02

According to this article, "To preserve institutional autonomy and defend academic freedom, universities should exercise their powerful claims to corporate rights." Without getting into the specifics of political affairs in another country, I would hasten to add that I have seen no case to support the idea that corporations are singularly immune to political pressure. Sure, I've seen corporations push back against government - but in the end, they all cave. Autonomy and freedom depend on the constitution of the people, not the constitution of the nation.

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Inside a plan to use AI to amplify doubts about the dangers of pollutants
Dharna Noor, The Guardian, 2025/07/02

Following up from yesterday's thread. "An industry-backed researcher who has forged a career sowing doubt about the dangers of pollutants is attempting to use artificial intelligence (AI) to amplify his perspective." It is likely we will see such examples multiplied manyfold in the future.

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Google is opening its NotebookLM AI tools to students under 18
Antonio G. Di Benedetto, The Verge, 2025/07/02

According to this article, "Teachers using Google Classroom will be getting new Gemini features, like assigning students curriculum-based AI Notebooks." A comment on Reddit (in between all the new crypto threads): "Google just killed MagicSchool."

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Learning and memory in molecular networks
Thomas Lissek, 2025/07/01

Today's newsletter tells a story, from start to finish. It's not a simple story, it's a long and complex story, and many parts are missing, but I'm hoping readers will see the thread here... This article (17 page PDF) argues for an interpretation of memory such that every part of a human - every molecule - records a memory. "Molecular memory formation is proposed as a universal concept to explain adaptive organism phenotypes and can elucidate memory phenomena in the brain, immune system, skeletal muscle, skin, endocrine system and during development among others." This challenges our (traditional) ideas of what it means to learn, what part of learning is 'natural', and the relation between who we are and how we function as a society. Image: Guilherme, et al. Via Matthias Melcher.

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Engram (neuropsychology)
Wikipedia, 2025/07/01

"An engram is a unit of cognitive information imprinted in a physical substance, theorized to be the means by which memories are stored as biophysical or biochemical changes in the brain or other biological tissue, in response to external stimuli." From where I sit, the engram is a purely theoretical unit and unnecessary in any account of learning (and hence, learning technology), but there is a sense to be made here if the idea of specific physical configurations responding to (or 'recognizing') specific physical input. The concept of the engram is supposed to stand for the semantic content this capacity to recognize represents. What's interesting is that engrams of simple conditioning are associated with specific physical regions of the brain (such as the lateral interpositus nucleus (LIP)) while more complex representations are largely distributed in the brain. So - simple conditioning appears 'natural' while complex representations appear 'learned'. Image: Science Direct.

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Capitalism Needs Champions
Matthew Hennessey, Wall Street Journal, 2025/07/01

This article asserts that dog-eat-dog capitalism is "natural" and complains "each generation somehow produces naïfs who are certain that collectivism is the true longing of the human heart... This is a failure of education, yes. Basic economics is rarely taught in high school or required in college. But it's equally a failure of public relations. Who is making a sustained and coherent public case for American-style capitalism?" If I had to judge based on what's out there, it's crypto scams and casinos. But Matthew Hennessey argues, "Socialism is incompatible with human nature. People are driven to build, to invest, to strive and be productive, to pursue their own families well-being above all. Socialism subverts these impulses." Most WSJ content is hidden behind a paywall; this for some reason isn't, but just in case, here's an archive version. Via Jeff Jarvis.

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Trump, Musk, Republicans, and the Empathy Bug
Robert Reich, 2025/07/01

What is natural for a human being? I think a lot of people would count empathy as natural. This article recounts an effort to teach it out of people. "Elon Musk revealed the core of the ideology animating the richest person in the world. 'The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy,' Musk said, adding that liberals and progressives are 'exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response.'" Whether or not it is natural, it is arguable that "Empathy is a necessary precondition for a society. Without empathy, we'd be living in a social Darwinist jungle animated only by selfish individuals pursuing selfish needs."

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OEG Voices 084: Board Viewpoints with Takaya Yamazato
Alan Levine, OE Global Voices, 2025/07/01

This is a link to a podcast interview with Takaya Yamazato, who joined the OEGlobal Board of Directors in 2024. I'm linking to it mostly for this quote referenced on the web page: "The education that a person needs now is to grow people who are able to do the right thing. We must grow people who are not just for efficiency, profit, or national gain, but also for the good of the world." I mean, sure, but whose decision is that to make? What counts as the right thing? How does that benefit the learner? There are many things - empathy, critical thinking - that matter, but don't place people (necessarily) onto a specific track. Let's not decide for them; let's give them the tools to decide.

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The Death of Critical Thinking Will Kill Us Long Before AI.
Joan Westenberg, Westenberg., 2025/07/01

Miguel Guhlin references this article, musing that "I feel they should be shorter. Evidence, perhaps, of what this article asserts: '...the death of critical reading harms the sentient minds of billions.'" I personally think that critical thinking has never really entered the mainstream; it has mostly never been taught in schools, and most 'media literacy' programs died from lack of consistent funding. Even this article represents a confusion between 'critical reading' and 'remembering' and even 'comprehending'. "Too many of us have lost - or are losing - the focus and patience for lengthy, complex texts." As a society we have a very short memory, forgetting that a higher education - and anything resembling critical thinking - was until only a few decades ago the preserve of the private school set.

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An "Indie Rock Band" That Appears to Be Entirely AI-Generated Is Making Alarming Amounts of Money on Spotify
Futurism, 2025/07/01

So I listened to The Velvet Sundown on YouTube and it frankly was no better but no worse than the generic faintly country-pop pablum the studios have been churning out for decades. From my perspective, it makes no difference to me whether it is human or AI controlled. I don't care who makes money on Spotify. What I think we need to be watching for is when the emotional power of music is unleashed. Could we ever get an AI-powered Woody Guthrie or Neil Young? Or even an AI Marseillaise? 

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Open Educational Resources Search Index
OERSI, 2025/07/02

"The Open Educational Resources Search Index (OERSI) provides a central point for searching for open educational resources in higher education by bringing together the content of distributed OER repositories and other sources of open educational resources." It's something I would like to add to CList (assuming I ever have the time to get back to working on CList). Here's the search API I would use.

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Open Syllabus
Open Syllabus, 2025/07/02

I just want to make sure I record this as a link before I forget: "Open Syllabus is a massive non-profit archive of the main activity of higher education: teaching. It provides top-down views of the curriculum across thousands of schools to support curricular innovation, lifelong learning, and student success." There's also an associated Open Syllabus Analytics, with a free (pre-2018) version, and a commercial version priced at a per-FTE rate, with a minimum of $2500 per institution. And there's an Open Syllabus print store, which is pretty cool. Contents "are obtained by 'scraping' publicly-accessible university websites." 

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Generative AI and Open Access Publishing: A New Economic Paradigm
Leo S. Lo, Library Trends, 2025/06/30

This paper (18 page PDF) is a balanced and conservative look at how AI impacts open access publishing. A lot of the paper is exposition; if you're familiar with the field you really only need to read the introduction and perhaps the nondescript call to action at the end. But the paper works well with an audience not familiar with the nuances of open access publishing and the potential offered by AI. "AI technologies promise to streamline workflows, potentially reducing the costs associated with manuscript preparation, peer review, and publication. Generative AI tools can assist in drafting papers, performing literature reviews, managing peer review, and generating data-driven insights," writes Leo Lo. "However, the economic implications extend beyond mere cost savings. Generative AI also opens up new avenues for value creation and monetization in publishing. AI-driven analytics, personalized content recommendations, and advanced search capabilities could become premium services, potentially creating a new tiered system of access to knowledge. This raises questions about the future of truly 'open' access in an AI-enhanced publishing landscape."

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We Still Have Time to Protect the Last Frontier of Privacy
Alexandra Frye, Blog of the APA, 2025/06/30

If you aren't thinking of these things, you aren't thinking ahead: "brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), neuroimaging, neural recording devices, neural decoding." We're talking maybe decades here, not centuries. And when the time comes, there will be a lot of reaction along the lines of "we should ban these completely", but they'll be too useful. Alexandra Frye says, "the potential of this technology for ethical compromise seems clear to me. Issues like privacy, consent, cognitive liberty, inequality, mental autonomy, and the risk of exploitation by bad actors are all deeply implicated." It's not clear to me that we'll have a better understanding of any of these than we have today, but that won't be for lack of opportunity. We can't just go into these debates with a list of (supposedly unassailable) ethical principles. We should be thinking about not just what we want and don't want, but how we as a society make and enact such decisions. 

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Some dog content to temporarily distract you
Michelle, Bluesky, 2025/06/30

I am not distracted. I mean, using 'it' as a pronoun for a dog? But mostly, this video reminds me to say, once again, that knowledge is pattern recognition. You don't need words or language, you don't need models and semantics, you just need to associate a pattern of experience with what happens next, and you know, even if you're a dog.

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Beyond AI and Copyright
Paul Keller, Open Future, 2025/06/30

What bothers me, I think, about some of the schemes responding to the idea that AI is "appropriating" public knowledge and information is that writers are tying themselves in knots trying to avoid the one approach we have always used and which we know actually works: taxation. The basic idea is that if somebody makes money while benefiting off the common wealth - whether it be intellectual property, physical infrastructure, security services, whatever - then they are taxed a reasonable portion of that money that goes back in to support those services. All the other contortions - ranging from 'preference signals' to 'user pay' to the "market-deployment levy framework" - are simply attempts to curtail that democratic process, for example by stipulating, as this article (17 page PDF) does, that our tax dollars should be paid specifically to "creators and rightholders", "public service media organizations", "open access information providers", and "public AI models and services". That's better than most, but why privilege these groups? What's left for the people who sweep the floors where these creators ply their craft?

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Ethics Is the Edge: The Future of AI in Higher Education
Maya Georgieva, John Stuart, EDUCAUSE Review, 2025/06/30

Short and not very insightful article about ethics and AI in higher education. We are told "a new framework outlines eight ethical principles to guide higher education's implementation of artificial intelligence" but it's really just the same old framework with no depth or insight added.

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