OLWeekly

Dear Software Makers
Jim Nielsen, Jim Nielsen's Blog, 2026/10/06

I think this post raises a good point. YouTube is releasing a new feature for creators allowing them to create different versions of their videos to see which one performs best (which in YouTube's world means gains the most and longest views, the essential conditions for monetization). This is known in the business as 'an A/B test'. But this, writes Jim Nielsen, raises questions: how do viewers know they're in an A/B test? Which versions do the comments refer to? If I share it, will other people see the same video I did? Marques Brownlee, writes Nielsen, has released a video essay asking YouTube not to do this. "There's this sort of unspoken rule of community on YouTube, that like we're all having this same experience together." Nielsen echoes Brownlee's concerns. And I have to say, I am sympathetic with the argument.

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Vibe-Coding a Self-Hosted LMS with Courses
Miguel Guhlin, Another Think Coming, 2026/10/06

Miguel Guhlin began by vibe-coding a learning management system his school could host on its own servers. Not a bad project. Then he asked, "What else would make this useful?" Turns out, he says, quite a bit. SapiqoLMS now goes beyond importing courses. This article lists a number of things hes done, including organizing learning around your people, giving learners something to do, and giving achievement a lasting record. Short post, most useful for stretching your imagination a bit. "The roadmap still calls for stronger recovery, accessible navigation, assignments, rubrics, and institutional pilots."

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Three Logics of Adaptation for the Human and AI Future
Julian Stodd, Julian Stodd's Learning Blog, 2026/10/05

Julian Stodd describes three fundamental 'Logics' of adaptation to AI. They are (quoted):  'Structural Adaptation', and it includes Agentic deployment;  'Relational AI', which is AI held within human social structures as dialogic partner; and 'Contextual Shift', and it describes an emergent condition where social context itself has moved. What's important to understand, writes Stodd, is that these do not occur sequentially. They're all happening at the same time (that's why they're 'dimensions' and not 'stages'). "The Leadership question here is not kinetic: not the top down requirement to drive adoption of one or other Logic, but rather to consider how we lead when all three Logics are present and simultaneously true."

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Ask the Chefs: What Would You Have Done Differently About Open Access/Open Science if You Predicted the World as it Exists Today?
Roy Kaufman, et al., Scholarly Kitchen, 2026/10/05

This is a two part article (part one, part two) asking some of the contributors to the Scholarly Kitchen (a.k.a. 'the chefs') what they would have done differently about open access had they been able to see the world as it has become today. There are basically two trends in the seven responses: continue to oppose open access, or try for something better than article processing charges (APC) or transformative deals (mostly involving disaggregation and multiple pricing and funding models). There's no suggestion that commercial publishers should be excluded from the system outright, which would have been my stance. 

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Learning isn’t the constraint—capacity is
Elizabeth Loutfi-Hipchen, Chief Learning Officer, 2026/10/05

"As an industry, we have spent a great deal of time talking about whether organizations can provide learning fast enough.," writes Elizabeth Loutfi-Hipchen. "I think we may be asking the wrong question. The issue increasingly isn't access to learning. It is whether people and organizations have the capacity to absorb what we are asking them to learn and turn it into performance." I think this is a good point. It may force a shift in how we think about learning from 'just in case' to 'just in time' (I know, this has been said before, but few have taken it seriously). Loufti-Hipchen expresses it this way: "This changes the goal of personalization. We are no longer trying to create an elaborate individual curriculum for every employee. We are trying to find the shortest credible path between current capability and required performance." This is a good discussion of the need with steps toward a response.

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Schools Are Experimenting With AI With Little Evidence or Policy to Guide Them
Lee V. Gaines, KQED, Mind/Shift, 2026/10/05

This article describes the way schools are experimenting with AI but expresses concern about the lack of policy, guidance or research. I want to complain that they are being overly fretful - after all, people experiment with every new technology; that's how we discover what the policy, guidance and research should be. But the article as a whole comes out in cautious favour of experimentation. "If we really close off AI experimentation, if we prevent kids from learning about AI, learning how to use it really well, thinking about how teaching could be transformed, we will set our kids back from being able to navigate a world that is changing outside of schools faster than we can possibly imagine." My thinking is: who better to learn first hand about the effects of AI on learning than teachers? That said, there is an argument for making sure organizations don't go overboard and do real harm.

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The Aging Brain Isn't Declining – It's Adapting, Study Finds
David Nield, ScienceAlert, 2026/10/06

This article summarizes a paper on how the brain ages. "Prevailing theories of cognitive aging depict late life as a period of compensatory decline," write the authors. "We propose instead that aging represents a continuation of development: a genetically conserved, adaptive reorganization of memory systems that parallels the brain's earlier-life transitions." The paper is paywalled but has been covered by other publications, including APS (here),  See also the Continuity Theory of Aging. Of course as I reach the age papers like this are talking about the subject is of more interest to me, though there isn't a lot I can do about whatever the actual progression turns out to be, other of course than to continue using and challenging my brain as much as possible.

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Testing a Knowledge Library for AI Agents
Joon Suh Choi, Kumar Garg, Renaissance Philanthropy, 2026/10/06

"We are piloting a knowledge library for AI agents in the field of learning engineering," write the authors. "You can connect to your agent so that it uses the index directly here. A simple chat agent that uses the index as a reference. A browsable web app is here." I haven't tried it out but I'm keeping it here for reference; this is something that a personal learning environment (PLE) of the future might want to plug into.

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Partitives, groups, and wholes
David Nicolas, Jonathan D Payton, The Philosophical Quarterly, 2026/10/06

This article dives into the weeds but raises an important issue always worth keeping in mind. "There's an attractive view in social ontology on which a group is identical to its members," begins the paper, but "whether something counts as 'one of' a plurality turns on how that plurality is carved up." We say a wall may be composed of bricks, but how those bricks are organized matters. We may say a group is composed of people, but how those people participate matters. Even identical properties render differently depending on how individuals are counted: compare "Two of the players are Québécois" with "Two of the teams are Québécois."

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Comparisons | FlatWorld
FlatWorld, 2026/10/05

We haven't mentioned Flatworld for a while. They started as an open educational resources (OER) platform but then shifted to a commercial model, prompting co-founder David Wiley to leave and start an alternative, Lumen Learning. This page, published by Flatworld, compares its offering with commercial textbooks and with alternative OER platforms, including Lumen, OpenStax, LibreTexts, Top Hat, and vanilla OER resources (these would be found in places like OERCommons, OASIS, MERLOT, OEGlobal, OpenLearn, SkillsCommons and many more (none of these is mentioned by Flatworld)). The commercial textbooks are much more expensive and lock you into a platform. The OER platforms, writes Flatworld, offer content for free but usually sell access to a course or homework platform. It's still cheaper than Flatworld's bundled courses, but, they say, "OER best fits faculty with the time and institutional support to assemble and maintain a course." Via Delmar Larsen, who says "their numbers are screwy and incorrect." Obviously the presentation favours Flatworld, but as a while it offers a glimpse at a particular competitive landscape.

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On Salience
Maritina Dimopoulou, The Cynefin Co, 2026/10/05

I first encountered the term 'salience' reading Robert Stalnaker's book Caounterfactuals. Something is 'salient' if it is 'more vivid, more relevant'. It stands out. To me, it marked the difference between just any similarity between things, and relevant similarities. Stalnaker, and also David K. Lewis, analyzed salience in terms of possible worlds. I analyzed it in terms of neural networks; something was 'salient' if it stimulated a neural network response. A pattern of perception. This article analyzes salience from a phenomenological, analytical and affective perspective. "Salience as an embodied familiarity," writes Maritina Dimopoulou, "what jumps to attention is an entanglement of the observer with their world." Salience comes with expertise. "Pruning irrelevant dimensions is one of the manifestations of expertise: the domain expert has internalised so many distinctions that deviations from the pattern are visible to them." 

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Can the #openweb reboot scale without copying the #dotcons?
Hamish Campbell, #OMN (Open Media Network), 2026/10/02

This is very much the sort of question that has been central; in my thinking for the last few years. "Can a federated network scale without turning itself into a platform? And underneath that is can the openweb grow without becoming the thing it was built to replace?" My response is that anything that looks like centralization is a point off weakness, a potential point of failure. That includes initiatives like the Openweb Governance Body (OGB), "the proposal for a native governance layer for a federated network, using the same principles that make federation possible – autonomous communities, open protocols, distributed participation, federation between communities, local decision-making, shared standards, negotiation and mediation, accountability between participating groups." I know, OGB doesn't look very central, but to my view the seeds are there.

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Why AI doesn’t replace education - it demands it
Brent Yergensen, eCampus News, 2026/10/02

"There are three reasons AI demands that we go to college. We need to study its effects and see it as a viable human tool. We must confront our need to discern and critique it. We need to be able to use it in a data-now, rapid world of information sharing. And we need to realize it is a new professional industry that, at its foundation, is an extension of human thought and inquiry." I know this looks like four reasons, but only the latter three points (discern and critique, be able to use it, extension of human thought) are discussed at any length. Of these, probably the first is most important. And we need to be able to set AI reasoning against human experience in a way that makes sense. 

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Taking ideas for a walk: Forging a path into experiential learning
Sharon Boyd, Andrew Gardiner, Cynthia Naydani, Andrea Roe, Teaching Matters, 2026/10/02

I had to look up what the author could possible mean by 'Easter Bush' - it could be a type of plant, but more likely, the reference is to the University of Edinburgh campus of that name. The reference comes up in this discussion of experiential learning, and specifically a 'walk-shop', or walking workshop, modeled after Berger's essay Why Look at Animals, but instead titled 'Why look at Easter Bush' (one wonders after reading Berger: are the students like animals in a zoo?). The point, though, is to actually see what is there, more in the spirit of Kimmerer's Learning the Grammar of Animacy. "Imagine the access we would have to different perspectives, the things we might see through other eyes, the wisdom that surrounds us." As the article says, "Walking in this way can quickly become a radical act because the ideas you get are sometimes far-out and unusual. It provides us a moment to be playful and sometimes some of the best ideas come that way." That's my thinking as well, and why I take care to experience the places I visit, and to not merely pass through them. Of course, being able to do that in a place like Easter Bush is a privilege.

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Reddit is ending RSS support: What this means for Inoreader
Inoreader blog, 2026/10/02

The popular social media platform Reddit is killing RSS support. As they explain, "Because RSS is now a common surface for large-scale scraping and automated abuse, we'll stop supporting RSS feeds on November 13, 2026 while preserving moderation workflows that depend on it through supported alternatives." I should note that the website is also a common surface for large-scale scraping, so there are probably plans in the works to limit access to this as well. The change hits moderators especially hard because they often use RSS to view posts within their own workflow. As one commenter notes, "Dropping a text based interface and replacing it with a UI only control panel is a huge loss of usability. Anyone who works with technical stuff knows this." Via Grant Potter.

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Why real intelligence is something more than optimisation | Aeon Essays
Sasha Mudd, Aeon, 2026/10/02

This is a very nice article framing the discussion of machine intelligence within the context of the debate between David Hume and Immanuel Kant. Reason, said Hume, is and ought to be a slave of the passions. This includes (I would add) for Hume a moral sense, which is not (but should have been) discussed in this article. Kant, by contrast, argues that reason is the source of our freedom, giving us the means to determine which of those passions (goals, wants, ideals) are rational and consistent with the world and society within it. The AI argument that intelligence is no more that optimization, argues author Sasha Mudd, aligns with Hume's view, but this leaves us passive clients of machine intelligence. "What if we become so accustomed to being predicted, nudged, ranked and served that we lose confidence in the older, harder activity of asking what ends deserve our allegiance in the first place?" I don't agree, but I appreciate the crystal clear and accurate summations of Hume and Kant's respective philosophies, and the argument Mudd has build on them. Via Fredrik Graver.

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Data in Dialogue: An Interactive Atlas of Critical Data Visualization
Marian Dörk, Fachhochschule Potsdam, 2026/10/02

As the 'About' section says, "This atlas holds an expanding body of work about the power dynamics at play when visualizing data. It is an attempt to keep tabs on projects and publications that show how data visualizations can foster conversations about intricate matters." The sites - too many to count - are presented first as a loosely connected graph, but you can also view them as cards or in a list. There's a lot of great stuff - websites, papers, maps - all discussing data visualization. The image, for example, is from Kusnick, et al.'s Survey on Visualization-based Storytelling, which is listed in the collection. There's an RSS feed, which I've added to my list. Via Alan Levine.

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The AI Crisis in Higher Education: A Strategic Proposal
Mark Carrigan, University of Manchester, 2026/10/02

This short book (63 page PDF) looks at the issues around the use of AI in educational institutions and considers ways to cope with it. There's a lengthy discussion of what it is and what the dangers are. I note especially that the core danger outlined here is lock-in - institutions get to the point where AI is an essential technology, whereupon providers start squeezing them on price and capacity. How could institutions gt to this point? The issue, argues author Mark Carrigan, is that universities especially lack the institutional capacity to respond to change. "The point is to keep building institutional capacity while the ground shifts beneath our feet. This is what has often been missed by both agendas. The organisation itself needs to change while this is taking place, connecting professional development to the networks through which academics cluster into disciplinary and problem-based communities." This means building learning networks, forums for discussion, distributed governance, professional development, LLM-ready learning designers, and technology deployment. Via Alan Levine.

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Nothing about me without me: Moving from Student Voice to student partnership
Emily McIntosh, Teaching Matters, 2026/10/02

I've seen student representation on boards, committees and agencies from both sides. There's truth to what's being argued here, but it's not the whole truth. Emily McIntosh argues here that student representatives feel like they do not matter - no matter what they say, the decisions have already been made without them. McIntosh argues for "Authentic Student Voice (that) is not simply being listened to. It combines influence, ownership, and shared responsibility." I don't disagree with any of that. But if we go back to the beginning of the column we read that the student "had been invited to a significant institutional meeting as the 'Student Voice'." They were 'selected' or 'chosen', presumably because they could be counted on to do the research and to be responsible. Something like that. But an authentic student voice is often much less compliant that an especially selected student voice. They won't take the same truths for granted, and won't share the same background assumptions about presentation and decorum (and not should they; for all the good intentions in promoting student agency, we all know that as soon as agency becomes pushback there is the risk that it will be shut down).

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I’m a College Professor Too; I’ll Take Joe Cruz’s Bait
Steve Krause, Steven D. Krause, 2026/10/01

There's a lot of bait to rise to in this article (for example, the economics of having expensive professors teach a mere 25 people at a time) but Steve Krause's response to a paywalled NY Times article has some nice misdirection in it that merits our full attention. Krause is responding to Joe Cruz, who is arguing against the idea that most students learn to think only by writing. The clue to this misdirection is in the 'gotcha' at the end: "isn't it interesting that Cruz decided to write this down?" I'm not sure how else Cruz was going to get paid for a NY Times article. Similarly, Krause notes that Cruz favours "real-time interactions between people talking with each other." Which is also language. Which also involves the same skills of composing series of words, just in a different medium. Which means they are saying - and doing - the same thing, since they both teach using dialogue and composition. To really get at the heart of the idea that learning to think does not necessarily require text we need to get away from institutions (like a university or the NY Times) that are inextricably text-bound. 'Thinking' isn't the same as 'thinking in text'.

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You have a voice. Use it!
Alexandra Mihai, The Educationalist, 2026/10/01

This article reminds me of my presentation and article on the role of the educator. Alexandra Mihai is, of course, defending the educator against encroachment by AI. "We are architects... we are hosts... we are role models... we are artists." Etc. My point back then was that each of these is a specialized skill, and it made more sense to think of them as individual roles, and not something one single person could, or ought to, provide. I mean - a classroom teacher has a lot of skills, but are frankly limited by imagination and resources when it comes to "design learning spaces that support learning experiences." Mihai adds three human skills to supplement these roles: attention, intuition and empathy. I think this overstates the unique capacities of humans - we already know AI pays attention (it's in the founding documents). Intuition and empathy (or equivalent artificial states) could easily be next.

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From a Registry to a Registry Ecosystem: CommonsDB and the future of EU copyright infrastructure
Paul Keller, Sebastian Posth, CommonsDB, 2026/10/01

Even though there's no formal requirement to register a work to establish its copyright status, "CommonsDB is an EU-funded pilot project that has established a functional public registry of rights information for public domain and openly licensed works." This way people can verify that the open work they are using is indeed openly licensed. As the CommonsDB website states, "The registry allows anyone to check the public domain status of media files found online." But a big centralized registry is an expensive single point of failure, so the plan is to decentralize it. As this strategy paper (31 page PDF) summarizes, "The feasibility study committed the project to federation as a core design principle, and the pilot has delivered on its architectural promise. The registry includes a distributed layer, implemented as an open-source service over the Iroh peer-to-peer protocol." As so many others have discovered, "Identity is the hard part. Registries require proper authentication of the declaring party... Qualified organisational credentials remain rare among the institutions that hold relevant collections." And you need to make it cheap or nearly free to register a work as open or public domain.

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The Dot and the Swarm
Ethan Mollick, One Useful Thing, 2026/10/01

The highlight of this post has to be the 'Bitter Lesson' video crafted by AI to explain the concept Ethan Mollick has in mind: "the hard truth, learned over and over again, that things that we thought required elaborate human rules and thinking can be solved with the brute force of better machine learning systems and more AI." At least, I thought the video was pretty good. In the current case, the task is AI agent orchestration, which people thought would require a lot of human oversight. Not so much. Now we have Dot and Muse and Grok Bot, Instinct, and Gemini Spark all doing this work. Next up: swarms of AI agents. 

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Microsoft Fabric is where AI agents learn how the business works
Frederic Lardinois, The New Stack, 2026/10/01

Here's the problem: "Agents are a very, very strange animal, and I always like to say it's like Drew Barrymore from 50 First Dates. Every time they open their eyes, they forget everything that happened before." Microsoft's response is called "Fabric IQ, a shared intelligence layer that connects enterprise data, business metrics, and operational context across the Microsoft ecosystem." There's a lot more tech stuff in the article, but what isn't clear to me is whether your AI is consuming tokens every time it reorients itself. It's an issue I've run into as my own environment gets more complex, leaving each agent with that much more to learn to catch up.

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First steps of the PLC organization
Public Ledger of Credentials Organization, 2026/10/01

The Public Ledger of Credentials (PLC) now formally exists. "The PLC directory is a system that collects and distributes updates to AT Protocol accounts, which are identified by random-looking strings like did:plc:i65vdx4ylh5ahdjyd7f2gpnp. Updates include an account's handle (@plcred.org) and the choice of PDS hosting that account's data." The Decentralized Identifier (DID) is a unique portable identifier owned by an individual that does not require the use of a centralized registry.  

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The Big Bets Education Needs in the Age of AI
Allison Dulin Salisbury, The Humanist, 2026/10/01

From where I sit, this article is an excellent example of why philanthropic foundations shouldn't be the ones who decides what the future of education looks like. Not only do they lean heavily toward a privatized system, they view education from a very specific perspective. This is from an interview with Sara Allan, formerly of at the Gates Foundation, and now president of the Valhalla Foundation. "The outcome we want: kids leave high school with stackable credentials that hold real labor market value, because they've already figured out their path and taken the first steps toward their future. Assessment would need to be entirely reengineered around that outcome—and it has to be competency-based." Education is and ought to be about far more than labour market preparation. And in the age of AI, we should be at least contemplating a post-work future.

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Can you spot an essay written by AI?
Eval Liu, University Affairs, 2026/09/30

This is important: "To say there is a definitive checklist approach to AI detection is unreliable, and at times dangerous." I would also add that our confidence that we can detect AI versus non-AI writing is probably misplaced. Having said that, I think this is at least partially true: "I was able to gain a direct sense of how each student writes in their own, authentic voice - how arguments were organized, evidence was cited and personal styles were manifested." It feels to me that if you read a lot you can feel a sense of narrative arc - or reasoning, story-telling, movement toward an end - that just isn't present in AI writing, not because AI inherently can't, but because of current context-window limitations. Articles I spot as overly-long AI pieces go from one topic to another to another, each related to the other, but none of them leading to any overall point. Again, though, I would hesitate before pronouncing with certainty that anything is AI or not.

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Sunsetting the HASTAC Network After 25+ Great Years
Cathy Davidson, HASTAC, 2026/09/30

This post announces the closing of the Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory (HASTAC), the self-described "world's first and oldest academic social network". It will also be the final year of the final year of the HASTAC Scholars, the student version of the network. "A social network is costly and tremendously complex to run and, after more than 25 years, is no longer sustainable.  Rather than let HASTAC dwindle and die, we are sunsetting it with dignity and enormous pride in a quarter century of thinking together about, through, with, and sometimes against new technologies and their application in society." I don't see why running a network is so 'costly and complex' - real networks, like (say) the RSS blogging network - are decentralized and distribute cost and complexity across participants, rather than being centrally managed. See also: Cathy Davidson: How to Lead an Academic Social Network.

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Theory of collective mind
Garriy Shteynberg, Jacob B. Hirsh, Wouter Wolf, John A. Bargh, Erica J. Boothby, Andrew M. Colman, Gerald Echterhoff, Maya Rossignac-Milon, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 2026/09/30

I've been doing some background reading on the concepts of collective experience, collective consciousness, and collective mind. Mostly, I don't think there are any such things, at least, not in the way they're talked about in this paper and also in Garriy Shteynberg's Psychology of Collective Consciousness. It's based on what's called 'autonoetic cognition', the idea that inherent in any experience is the idea that "I am" having that experience; in the same way, collective autonoetic cognition generates an experience that "we are" having that experience. This paper takes the idea of representing 'our' experience further, on the one hand, arguing for the "necessity of collective mind representations," and on the other, offering empirical arguments "identifying a social context, the synchronous arrival of information." Like I say, I disagree - if there are collective minds, they're more likely to be described as in Dynamics of collective minds in online communities, originating in network interactions in communities, and not based in some form of common experience or consciousness. But there's much more to read and to say about all this.

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OpenAI launches Dots, its Muse competitor
Emma Roth, The Verge, 2026/09/30

OpenAI has launched Dots, "a customizable AI assistant capable of browsing the web, making purchases, generating documents, tracking goals, and more." This article frames it as a response to Meta's AI assistant called Muse. The plan seems to be to get people addicted, then upsell. "OpenAI notes that conversations with your Dot won't count toward ChatGPT usage limits. 'In the future, you'll be able to add more dots, and scale the output of each dot by either increasing its speed or the total amount of work it can take on per month.'" For most of us, there's not much value here - access is limited to people paying $100/month or more.

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A new prayer for the fruit fly connectome
Matt Webb, Interconnected, 2026/09/29

Matt Webb is feeling some qualms about the way the fruit fly connectome (ie., the full map of neurons and the connections between them) of the fruit fly is being used for fun and games on the internet. "Do I imagine that the simulated fruit fly is someone being trapped and tormented, again and again and again, in a software prison? No, the fruit fly connectome is unlikely to be sentient. (But) at some point on the scale, sentience starts to be meaningful." Future AI might be based on a kernel of very real connections and weights, something that - perhaps - requires our ethical consideration. Suppose you copied your cat's connectome to create an AI. Suppose you copied your nephew's. Your own.

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5 Takeaways From Microsoft’s Global AI in Education Survey
Sarah, Alex Sarlin, Ben Kornell, Jen Lapaz, Edtech Insiders, 2026/09/29

This post summarizes a new report from Microsoft on AI and Education based on a survey of a few thousand students from selected countries. The report is behind a spamwall but this direct link to the 33 page PDF might work. The summary follows a standard order of presentation - people are using AI, think learning is important, are concerned about some issues in common, and are cautious about the future. There's a section on internationalization (takeaway 3) that relies more on an earlier Ipsos report. My takeaways are a bit different - first, how confident leadership is in its own understanding and how different its perception of AI is from the rest, and second, the table of modes of working with AI: Asking, Delegation, Collaboration, Exploration.

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Pressing Prompts: An OER for AI in Higher Education
Stefanie Panke, AACE, 2026/09/29

According to this article, "Pressing Prompts is an open collection of teaching activities and resources designed to help higher education instructors engage students in discussions about the social and ethical implications of artificial intelligence." It's divided into topics such as 'Can we trust AI?' and 'Is AI biased?' and doesn't try to answer these questions so much as to structure activities and resources to support student discovery around them. 

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FediHome
Samuel Lison, 2026/09/28

I like the ambition of this project though I fear future maintenance because of its dependence on Node. Still, I like how a lot of attention has been paid to ease of installation and startup. "FediHome is a self-hosted, single-user Fediverse home — blog, photos, video, audio, and a live following feed, all on your own domain via ActivityPub. 1.0 marks the project production-ready: a test suite + CI gate every change, the security-audit findings are resolved, the dependency stack is current (Prisma 7, Next 16, Fedify 2), and a public demo runs the exact code at fedihome.social." Here's the source.

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Some things I have learned about generative AI
Jon Dron, 2026/09/28

This is a good overall summary of an informed perspective on AI in education that avoids the cliches and sees AI as something that is fundamentally new, and not defined by simple metaphors. I appreciate this perspective. Not that I agree with it all - my first reaction on reading the first part was to post this on Mastodon: "Some day in the future philosophers will agree that 'meaning' is a construct invented by logical positivists to play the same role previous (and no longer accepted) constructs like 'noumena' played in earlier metaphysics." Anyhow, Dron also says, "no more cognitive offloading: it's cognitive redistribution," whicch I agree with, and "the answer is not to keep humans in a loop (but) to think of genAIs as being part of the web of people, tools, processes, structures, theories, models, appliances, devices, and other artifacts that extends our cognition," which also makes sense to me.

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The Fediverse is social tech built by people
Hamish Campbell, Open Media Network, 2026/09/28

"Let's stop pretending," writes Hamish Campbell, "we need to be honest, the community side of the Fediverse is a mess. The instance as a community, was a good idea, but just that an idea, it never worked, as the was no code that was needed to build the links that mattered, no mod tools, nothing." The existing fediverse, he says, is built on control, when it should be built on trust. "We need to balance collectivizing resilience. Just like with food, we need shared kitchens, food co-ops, and community gardens – not just individual allotments." I tend to favour a third option - not individualism, not collectivism, but cooperation, based on connections rather than commonality.

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rabbit r1 — a pocket AI device powered by rabbit OS3
Rabbit, 2026/09/28

OK, I don't really get it, but I can imagine playing with this device is a lot of fun, as Doug Belshaw has done here. From the web page: "rabbit r1 is a pocket AI device powered by rabbit OS3, and a native physical way into OS3. unlimited AI conversations, translation and voice recordings for $199." Rabbit OS3 is something like an AI-based operating system where you decide what you want and the OS assembles the resources needed to do that.

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Glossary of Digital Learning
Institute for Infrastructure and Interoperable Data in Learning, 2026/09/28

This is I2IDL's new glossary of digital learning terms, including learning engineering, xAPI, interoperability, learning analytics, learning science, and more. Sources: Learning Engineering Body of Knowledge (LEBOK), Modernizing Learning by J.J. Walcutt, J.J. & Sae Schatz with Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL), The Science of Remote Learning by Jim Goodall and Aaron Kessler, Exploring Learning Engineering Design Decision Tracking by Lauren Totino and Aaron Kessler, IEEE LTSC, IEEE xAPI, IEEE xAPI Profiles, IEEE ICICLE, and the UNESCO Thesarus.

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