Reflections on the Journey: Lessons from My Summer of Vibe-coding
Miguel Guhlin,
Another Think Coming,
2026/11/09
I had a couple of hours this morning so I created a collaborative slide editor. Oh sure, it's still very primitive, but I have bigger plans for it. So I'm right with Miguel Guhlin here: "In the same way, blogs democratized publishing for every person, vibe-coding leverages Gen AI to create just-in-time solutions to problems, cutting out the intermediary enterprise-level company and their armies of professional coders. Is this a good thing? Yes, yes, it is." He provides examples of his own, but my own experience convinces me. I was looking at various products when I wondered, "well, what if I just code my own?" A bit of work with ChatGPT and there it is. I've replaced an estimated six weeks or work with a morning over coffee.
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Turn any document into an AI classroom: hands-on with OpenMAIC
Sofia Almeida,
AI Frontier Post,
2026/11/09
I haven't tried this - I don't have the AI tokens to spare - but the concept intrigues me (I tried the live demo but the credits disappeared quickly). "OpenMAIC turns a topic or a PDF into a full interactive classroom — AI teachers, classmates, a whiteboard, and quizzes — running on your own machine. This guide installs it with Docker, wires up a model, and generates your first lesson." This is a real challenge, I think, to what traditional companies and institutions are offering. Limitations are honestly stated at the end of the article, as well as a genuine success measure: "The useful test is not whether the classroom looks impressive — it does — but whether you learn faster from it than from the document alone." I would insert "faster and better" as the test. It's all open source on GitHub and you can run it on local AI models, it just won't be as good.
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This is the sort of thing I like: "Centuries of copyright-free art, historical photography, illustration and archival footage. Find high-resolution files by describing what you're picturing, free to use forever. Every image and video is CC0 or public domain. Free to download and use, with no strings attached." How can they afford to do this? Decentralization: "Arkivism doesn't host the collections — the works belong with the museums and archives that keep them, listed with credit on the Sources page." There's also a search for video clips. Via Grant Potter.
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Towards responsible AI-augmented evidence synthesis in Open, Distance, and Digital Education (ODDE)
Richard E. West,
Online Learning,
2026/11/06
This editorial (10 page PDF) introduces a special issue on AI-aided systemic reviews of research in online learning (also styled here as Open, Distance, and Digital Education (ODDE)). The authors respond to recent criticism of systemic reviews and survey some recent lapses, including "considerable variation in methodological approaches, reporting standards, and the transparency of review procedures." None of this is helped particularly by AI: "increased efficiency does not necessarily translate into improved methodological quality." So they propose standards for AI-assisted reviews that include stipulations that "methodological criteria must precede automation," transparency about the role of AI, systemic validation of AI decisions, and review process that are "sufficiently reproducible and auditable." There's nothing wrong with any of these, but they seem to me to set a pretty low bar. We're still in the era of (almost) any data counts, and (almost) any theory is a good one.
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Creating a New Internet Bargain to Preserve Fair Use and Protect the Commons
Lisa Macpherson, Anna Tumadóttir,
Tech Policy Press,
2026/11/06
I recognize that people will have a point of view on what it means when they share their online content, especially if they're institutions or commercial publishers. But I don't agree that "AI broke the open web's bargain" because there was never a 'bargain' to begin with. The idea that there is some sort of social contract describing a 'knowledge commons' is pure fiction. The authors here suggest that 'defensive enclosure' is the natural response to AI-based scraping, but that's only true if enclosure was always part of your 'business model' anyway. Most people don't work that way. They're not joining a 'knowledge commons', they're just talking to each other. The 'new internet bargain' being proposed will favour institutions and trample over people who just want to share their work without being drowned in legalese. Via Ben Werdmuller.
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Descartes drew a line between humans and machines. AI is blurring it.
Blaise Agüera y Arcas,
Big Think,
2026/11/06
Just a day after I posted an article called Non-Cartesian Learning this article showing us just exactly where the Cartesian 'would' is coming undone appears in my inbox. It's a good read, accurate to my understanding of Descartes, and making a good argument. "LLMs are not programmed to carry out specific tasks, nor do they merely imitate; they learn, and like us, they do so by generalizing from individual examples and feedback to broader patterns... That doesn't mean these models work the same way our brains do (they do not), nor does it mean they are equivalent to people.28 But it does mean the dogma that the human mind and AI have nothing in common is increasingly tenuous." Quite right, and so is most of the rest of this article.
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Academia Criticizes Itself, Adds 57 Authors
Csaba Szabo,
LinkedIn,
2026/11/06
This is a link to a LinkedIn article, for which I apologize, but I wanted to highlight this. Csaba Szabo takes note of a paper called 'How contemporary academic structures constrain scientific creativity and hold back early-career researchers' and its 57 authors. Szabo writes, "What is remarkable is academia's ability to take a set of complaints that have already been repeated for years, repackage them as another publication, distribute the authorship over 57 CVs, generate another citable item, and thereby reproduce almost perfectly the very system the paper is criticizing." Quite right. Szabo should have also noted that this useless scientific output is behind a paywall. That's why I won't link to it directly (you'll have to search for it, like I did, because there's no link to it in the post, and I'm not going to click a dozen times to get through 88 comments to find the ubiquitous 'link in first comment').
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The UK Government Asked 14,000 Children About AI. It Ignored Their Answer.
Sam Illingworth,
Slow AI,
2026/11/06
Leaving aside the internal U.K. politics, which are beyond the scope of this newsletter, the contrast in the two approaches, and the option selected by most governments, is interesting. "In the UK's Growing Up in the Online World consultation, young people's most consistent demand was mandatory labelling of AI-generated content. The government response never mentions labelling, watermarking or provenance, and neither did 23 peers in the House of Lords debate on AI and children." There have been attempts to label AI-generated content, but in a murky "you can't see it" sort of way. After seeing the debates and policies around food labeling, I can't see anything clear and straightforward being developed. Nor can I see the social media bans enduring for any significant length of time.
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Google responds to political backlash over removing search from schools that ban AI
ArticleHeader-author,
CNBC,
2026/11/05
This is a fast-moving story that begins with Google removing search from schools that ban AI and ends uncertainly as it's set against the background of a dramatic election that completely shifted the balance of power in the U.S. "In a blog post titled "Designing responsible AI for learning," Google said it's bringing AI into its Classroom offering with a product called Guided Learning. The New York Times published a story saying that the company will turn off search for schools that reject AI entirely." Google says it intended to give schools more choice, but this sounds like the opposite.
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The Paradox of Critical Pedagogy on AI
Reflecting Allowed,
2026/11/05
Maha Bali is of two minds in this post. On the one hand, when it comes to talking about AI in education, she writes, "I have to focus more on supporting others to reach their own conclusions, rather than try to enforce my own, through dialogue and experience and reflection." On the other hand, there's the whole list of problems of AI use, which she lists again in this article. She would like to see collective action, "and yet we can't get everyone to agree on one thing, because not only are harms and benefits of AI different per discipline, it is also different per human being using it."
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Delving into Dimensions
Heart Soul Machine,
Heart Soul Machine,
2026/11/04
What strikes me about Tim Klapdor's six dimensions of learning is how much overlap there is with my own critical literacies (note that I am not suggesting anything wrong here; I appreciate the similarity, nothing more). The middle four especially. I like the idea of a 'perceptual' dimension of learning; I want to think about that more. And I'm not sure I'd make 'creating' a separate dimension; to me, read-write are just two sides of the same coin. Overall, the broader system Klapdor is constructing is a useful frame (paraphrased): the dimensions and domains provide the structural framework; the learning types translate that framework into a learner-centred perspective; and then the learning patterns then provide building block.
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Who gets to call something a micro-credential?
Wendy Palmer,
Lifelong Learning Edge,
2026/11/04
Good discussion of micro-credentials, and in particular, how we trust that a micro-credential is worth anything in the first place. After all, anyone can issue a micro-credential (I actually built it into some of my MOOCs years ago). But why trust them? Wendy Palmer looks to food lables as an analogy. "I keep coming back to the food certification example. We have different standards and certification arrangements for different purposes, whether that's organic production, food safety or country of origin. Each tells us something different about the product. We don't expect one certification to cover everything, but we do need to understand what each certification means, who is responsible for it and what standards have been met."
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AI Audiobooks: An Update
Lance Eaton,
AI + Education = Simplified,
2026/11/04
Lance Eaton describes a ChatGPT skill he's working on to create audiobooks out of plan text versions of those books (being clear that he's doing so only for audiobooks that don't exist and never will. I like this concept; I've also tried ElevenLab Reader (and even paid for it once) but wasn't impressed. And there's tons of stuff I'd like to listen to while driving, cycling or in the evening. Eaton also reviews ElevenLab's "full cast" production of Frankenstein (you can listen for free but you have to sign up - hang on to your wallet). I have a deep love for Old Time Radio and can see how well this could play - but there's a long way to go before matching the innovation and creativity of Philip Marlowe or Johnny Dollar.
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Tech News Outlet Rest of World Faces Shutdown After 6 Years
A.J. Katz,
TheWrap,
2026/11/04
I've referenced articles in Rest of World numerous times and so find itunfortunate toreport that it "faces a January shutdown after six years as founder Sophie Schmidt searches for a new home amid declining web traffic." It was started with $60 million of seed money, which was probably what made it unsustainable, though its own decisions probably didn't help: "Rest of World attempted to strengthen its readership by prioritising Western audiences, increasing its focus on markets such as China and introducing a free registration requirement for regular readers." Most articles I've looked at on this attribute the decline to Facebook's changing piorities. "News publishers contend with declining referrals from search engines and social platforms, alongside the emergence of AI tools that answer questions without directing users to news websites." Related (via Alan Levine): Global Voices "is an international, multilingual community of writers, translators, and human rights activists." They're also facing a funding shortfall.
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Rapid Collegiality and How to Achieve It
Alex Usher,
HESA,
2026/11/03
This article is ultimately a pitch for a new service, but it's developed in an interesting way. The question is how "to find ways of making decisions more rapidly without sacrificing the notion that in a shared governance system, decision-making responsibilities have to be broadly inclusive." The traditional formal structures, like a Senate, are too rigid, don't meet often enough, and are subject to internal politics. Alex Usher recommends, in the end, that "what institutions need to tackle 'big' issues is a focused, time-limited body that mixes breadth of perspective with expertise and is sent on its journey with some in-depth, balanced research." My first (and best) thought was that Usher has reinvented the Royal Commission process for universities!
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AI Sandbox Series: The Embedded Catalog | The Signal
The Library of Congress,
2026/11/03
Matthew Miller writes about some experimentation with vector embeddings at the Library of Congress. "Vector embeddings, in the simplest terms, are numbers that represent text. They are used in many machine learning and AI tools and provide a way to reduce natural language to numbers, which enables us to interact with language using algorithms." What they did was to transform a user's query into a "phantom record" in order "to find where in the embedding model and our existing records it would be located." Visualizing the catalogue, the system "also has a 'Communities' toggle that provides a view of the catalog in line with the embedding model's internal organization." Here are all the embeddings files.
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Making the national curriculum machine-readable: one shared model for every developer
Mark Hodierne,
Oak National Academy,
2026/11/03
This is really interesting. "We've turned the national curriculum... into a formal knowledge graph - a way of storing things (such as subjects, topics and concepts) and the relationships between them as structured data, rather than text that software has to interpret." View it on GitHub. Related, and what led me to this: Doug Belshaw's post on curriculum (and honestly, it was the cool diagram that drew me in). The Oak project is an algorithm, but maybe the better way is to think of curriculum as an heuristic: "arriving at a solution by trying different actions to see if they produce the result that is wanted, rather than using strict rules." Belshaw also links to a post from Nick Dennis where the title gives you the gist: The Social Construction of Curriculum in an Age of Technological Solutionism. "Can we create an aligned AI within a fundamentally misaligned economic, political and social system?" He also makes me want to read Emma Taylor's book An Elite Education: How Privilege is Produced in a Private School (sadly paywalled by, yes, an elite institution). " What's important," writes Belshaw, "is to avoid a technocratic approach to learning which treats young people as having to adapt to the algorithm, rather than the algorithm adapting to them."
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They laid us off. We're rebuilding their SaaS.
2026/11/03
I do like this: "Laid-off engineers, armed with AI and public documentation, are building clean-room, open-source, drop-in replacements for the platforms that rent our own industry back to us — one seat at a time." I'm thinking, as well, that once these platforms are opened up, people will start building better on top of them. That's what I'm thinking about these days. Via Jon Udell.
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Can Machines Perform Emotional Labor in Education? Tracing Debates in Early Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence
Noah Khan,
Educational Theory,
2026/11/06
This is quite a good article that looks specifically at the term 'emotional labour' and asks whether an AI could be credited with doing it. The discussion is framed through the work of 1950s and 60s philosophers who argued over essentially this question. It's interesting because it's not simply a matter of whether a machine performs the exact behaviour a human does, but whether it can be attributed the emotional states that constitute emotional labour. "Ziff, Smart, and Putnam disagree about whether feeling is restricted to living organisms or attributed through physical or behavioral organization. Weiss, Scriven, and Danto disagree about whether relation, technical honesty, or language can warrant an attribution of inner feeling. Dyer, Ortony et al., and Arbib disagree about whether cognition-first computation captures emotion or excludes constitutive bodily processes." Great discussion, though I would in the end disagree with the conclusion. Image: Arlie R. Hochschild, Philonomist.
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Does AI deliver? Observing the effects of interactive learning experiences with an AI-powered chatbot
Michael Hudson,
Duke Learning Innovation,
2026/11/06
One of the long-standing challenge with the xMOOC is that while it may enroll thousands of participants, there is virtually no interaction among them. Historically participants have responded by creating they own backchannels on social media, discussion boards or mailing list. But these are hit-or-miss. Duke's answer, described here, is to add a chatbot called Dialogue and given the name 'Coach'. They report positive results - and I guss having some interaction is better than having none - but I personally would want to interact with other people in the course. After all, I can interact with AI any time I want. But people who are doing the same thing I'm doing are harder to find.
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The AI-Empowered Leader: How Tech Amplifies Human Agency
Eric Sheninger (noreply@blogger.com),
A Principal's Reflections,
2026/11/02
On the one hand, educational leadership (or any kind of leadership) looks too complex and messy to be served well by the standard formulae often offered by AI. On the other hand, the tools are on the desktop and they can make life easier. We need to get past the idea that it's a simple choice between eschewing AI entirely or embracing it in everything. "We have to stop treating AI as either a silver bullet or a forbidden toy. Educational leadership in this era means holding two opposing truths at once: we need these systems' analytical horsepower to keep pace with a changing world, and we need our own stubborn human intuition to keep them honest." This article looks at some of the applications of AI in an education leader's life, and while a bit simplistic, still suggests how AI may play a role in the future.
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An Audit Finds Serious Flaws in Research on AI in Education | KQED
Jill Barshay,
KQED,
2026/11/05
I think the argument in this article is probably sound, though we need to be careful about drawing too many conclusions from it. The assertion is essentially that the research to date, and especially the meta-analyses,are not reliable. There are many reasons this is the case, including bad methodology, poor comparisons (eg., "AI + Something versus nothing), unrepresentative data, changes in AI technology, etc. But we should also be cautious about the assessments. We have an MIT researcher, for example, saying "her team has collected almost 900 studies on AI in education and determined that only 20 of them were of high enough quality." Well, anyone could do that (I sort of do it every day). But what counts as quality here? That is an open question in many ways - it's not like medicine, where both human bodies and treatment interventions are describable and quantifiable. So take all of the research, including the criticisms, with a healthy dose of scepticism.
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Understanding the True Purpose of Generative AI in Ads
Ketan Joshi,
2026/11/02
I think this is why a lot of people hate AI. "Kyle is the entire lifecycle of AI-assisted theft enacted by mediocre white guys who've always stolen the work of young people, people of colour and women their whole lives, but who now have access to a machine that does it breezily and effectively. Kyle is the person, the act and the output. Kyle is the feeling: the deep, unchecked joy he feels when he's cheated his way into success rather than earning it." I get it. But the underlay is an entire culture centered around this sort of think. AI just accelerates; the real issue was (and is) the culture. Anyhow - do view the Microsoft ad in this article and judge for yourself. Via Alan Levine.
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Copyright 2026 Stephen Downes Contact: stephen@downes.ca
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