OLWeekly

DrawSplat Feature: Mermaid Diagram Studio
Miguel Guhlin, Another Think Coming, 2026/05/29

This is an item I'm posting for myself, so I don't forget. "Type or paste Mermaid syntax on the left, preview on the right. Use templates for flowcharts, sequence diagrams, mind maps, pie charts, Gantt charts, timelines, class diagrams, and state diagrams. Download as SVG or PNG, or copy to clipboard." Great stuff; already wondering how I can integrate it into my own projects. See also this item on Drawsplat.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post][Share]

Redefining Publishing: Practical pathways to open science
Alison Mudditt, PLOS, 2026/05/29

Interesting report (37 page PDF) from PLOS on the future of open academic publishing. There's a good summary on Scholarly Kitchen if you don't want to read the whole thing. The main finding is that "open science creates value when reuse is practical at scale," however, "these benefits depend on the infrastructure, standards, metadata, incentives, and coordination needed." Related is the idea that academic credit for participating in the various elements of the scientific research stack (and not just the publication, as is currently the case). The report defines this stack as "a publishing model that connects articles and preprints with associated research outputs - data, code, methods, and materials - into a structured, open, machine-readable record." The report also addresses the role of publishers, business model reform, and regional pathways.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post][Share]

Must-Read: AI is Not a Tool, It’s a Medium-Institution (Discover Abi Awomosu)
Maha Bali, Reflecting Allowed, 2026/05/29

Referencing an article by Abi Awomosu, Maha Bali argues that AI is not 'just a tool'. "At best, Generative AI is like a swiss knife, but you can't control which item within the swiss knife comes at you at any point in time, even with 'careful prompting'. It also has hidden elements you don't know, and you also can't control whether it gets used on you, even if you choose not to use it yourself." OK, fair enough. Not just a tool. But what, then? Maybe it's more like a 'medium-institution' where "it becomes the place where social, economic, and epistemic life happens. It sets norms. It creates gatekeeping. It arbitrates who gets to speak. It builds the archives that constitute collective memory." I think that's overstating it. Here is maybe a better analogy: working with AI is like working with an animal. It can greatly extend your capacities, but it can be capricious and act like it has a mind of its own.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post][Share]

2028 Is When Traditional Publishing Plans to Quietly Kill Literary Fiction
Michael O. Church, 2026/05/29

This article makes the case for the prediction we read in the title, but it has more value as a takedown of the publishing industry in general. "The text, notably, is not all that relevant. Publishing is all about leverage and social status... As a leftist (i.e., someone who truly understands sociology and economics) you will be inadmissible into most institutions no matter how much you excel." There's a lot more (and I've cherrypicked the bits that apply to me) but the main message here is that "traditional publishing is not only aware of its impending cultural obsolescence, but actively planning it."

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post][Share]

You are here
Alexandra Mihai, The Educationalist, 2026/05/28

This interesting post discusses the concept of 'presence' and breaks it down into five elements: attention, connection, self-knowledge, reflection and curiosity and creativity (I don't know why the last two are joined as one item, but they are). But really, for Alexandra Mihai, presence boils down to this: "Being truly present means engaging all of our senses (and) a recognition that the classroom is a shared human space. Presence means truly seeing and hearing one another, paying attention when someone speaks, responding thoughtfully, sensing the emotional atmosphere of the room, and developing awareness of the group dynamic." Which takes us back to a fairly traditional educationalist's stance. But I have to wonder - is the classroom the best place to foster anything like 'presence' as described here? I have personally found it to be the worst environment to focus on anything, let alone all the stuff described here.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post][Share]

2026 EDUCAUSE Horizon Report: Teaching and Learning Edition
Jenay Robert, Nicole Muscanell, Mark McCormack, Kim Arnold, EDUCAUSE, 2026/05/28

This report (46 page PDF) has two major sections: trends, which can be summarized as AI, Trump, and environment; and "signals of change", which are not trends, and includes "emerging practice", which again, are not trends. The Signals of Change section can be summarized as: AI, Trump ( recast as 'improving ROI) and environment (aka 'water'), with one notable exception, a section on 'the changing landscape of education systems', which postulates two-hour school days, inverted and flexible pedagogy, and athletics as a risk (obviously this report is very U.S.-focused). The 'emerging practices' section is the most forward looking, with sections (sometimes with examples) on administration (ie., admin+AI), learning pathways (with AI and VR), and community engagement (with AI). I get the emphasis on these three themes; they are dominating the discussion. But I wish they had looked maybe just a little beyond that limited horizon.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post][Share]

A Way to Challenge the Groupthink of Scholarly Journals
Kevin McCaffree, Colin Wright, Wall Street Journal, 2026/05/28

Sometimes people make it clear what they don't know by professing what they think needs to change. Such is the case with this Wall Street Journal opinion article which attacks the concept of peer review. Now we should be clear, peer review definitely needs reform, but not for the reasons the article proposes. The authors write, "The result is an ideologically biased literature that's presented as an expert consensus... objections to progressive orthodoxy are relegated to social-media threads, blog posts and newspaper opinion sections." This of course is complete nonsense. There is far more variety of opinion in academic journals than is ever found in the pages of this and other newspapers. And it's important that the editors' desire to squelch all dissenting opinion be resisted. Anyhow. They come out with a novel concept: "a first-of-its-kind article type called 'Peer Review.'" It's a good idea - but actual readers of academic journals know it's not exactly new. My own article was just published with two adjoining 'peer review' articles. It's a format I've seen often.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post][Share]

The Costco theory of the internet
JA Westenberg, Westenberg., 2026/05/28

The basis for the 'Costco theory of the internet' is that "More results stop helping once the results are polluted. Reviews that are fake, incentivised, or written by people with no standards don't improve by multiplying." Just look at Amazon listings or Google search results for proof. Buyer beware! Even the brand names are fake. Costco addresses that. "A trusted operator narrows the field first, making the choices in advance and accepting the cost of everything it leaves out. Then it absorbs the complexity, doing the dull part before you get there: testing, comparing, rejecting, negotiating, standardising. Then it holds the floor. It doesn't have to make every item extraordinary, it only has to clear the obvious junk." I can see the point but this article was a lot to wade through, making the same point over and over. It would have been eliminated by Costco. Via Grant Potter.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post][Share]

The first social network you can trust
wedium, 2026/05/28

The tagline is: "Join the first social media platform you can trust. Bot-free, fake-news-free, kids-safe, data-protective and made in Europe for Europe." But here's the catch: "anyone who wants to interact—that is, post, like, or comment—must verify their identity. This makes sense because it allows us to prevent bots from influencing the platform, curb fake accounts, and ensure significantly greater safety and respectful interaction among users." They argue "we have entered into a contract with the German company WebID, which securely hosts personal data on a European server in accordance with the highest data protection standards." Single point of failure. Ick. Via Ben Werdmuller.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post][Share]

Do AI Risks Require Extraordinary Government Intervention?
Sayash Kapoor, AINT, 2026/05/29

I don't really agree with the argument here but readers should have the opportunity to see it. Sayash Kapoor argues against what is called here "extraordinary government intervention in response to new technology," and specifically, AI. The contrast is with an approach called "resilience", and they are characterized here as one big intervention versus many little interventions. The argument: first, "extraordinary interventions tend to... restrict activity based on anticipated harms rather than realized or demonstrated ones"; second, "extraordinary interventions impose restrictions on the liberty of actors who are not directly responsible for the harm"; and third, "extraordinary interventions bypass normal processes of governance." Against this, posited as the major objection, "investing in resilience requires action and investment by a much wider set of actors than nonproliferation does." I think that's an issue but it's not the only issue. 

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post][Share]

How we made our site more readable for AI agents and how you can too
Burt Herman, Hacks/Hackers, 2026/05/27

I'm not sure I'll do this myself (who has time?) but it's a neat idea and might catch on. The idea here is to make your website more readable and accessible to AI agents, and to also build in functionality that helps a human reader user their own AI to interact with the page. One example of this is the "set of buttons on every post that take you to your AI of choice with a pre-filled prompt. Think of these as an AI take on the usual social sharing buttons. Instead of pointing at Facebook or LinkedIn, they hand the user off to ChatGPT or Claude." They've also "also implemented an MCP (Model Context Protocol) server so agents can query our archives directly rather than scraping web pages," which makes a lot of sense to me. I think I should do these things, but again... time.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post][Share]

Advancing pluralism through education
GEM Report, World Education Blog, 2026/05/27

Readers understand, I think, that I endorse pluralism, and I think this is a good overview of what the concept means: "We understand pluralism as resting on two core pillars of reciprocal recognition and belonging: Reciprocal recognition means acknowledging the dignity, experiences and contributions of different groups in society. Belonging goes further than individual feelings of inclusion; it also means being meaningfully recognized within institutions and having real opportunities to shape collective life." I was thinking of that this week when reading In Education, for example, Jennifer MacDonald's review of Leddy and Miller's (2024) Teaching Where You Are: Weaving Indigenous and Slow Principles and Pedagogies (sadly behind a paywall). There's a skill - and it's hard, I think - to find that line between respecting values and feeling obligated to endorse those values as principles that guide one's own life. 

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post][Share]

The Gap Between Knowing and Deciding
Colin Beer, Col's Weblog, 2026/05/27

As is well known, writes Colin Beer, there are two typoes of authority: that derived from expertise, and that derived from authority. It is ironic, then, that universities, which produce the former, are governed so often by the latter. Consequently, Beer advocates in this post for what Gary L. Anderson calls democratic professionalism, "which is neither passive compliance nor open conflict, but a persistent insistence on the value of expertise through the quality and visibility of the work itself." He adds, "For me, the irony here is not that there is a tension between authority and expertise, but that institutions capable of producing entire fields of knowledge aren't terribly good at eating their own dog food.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post][Share]

So, how’s retirement going?
Martin Weller, The Ed Techie, 2026/05/27

Martin Weller reflects on how his retirement is going (well, from the sound of it) so I may as well reflect for a moment on mine. I've settled into a bit of a routine - wake up when I want (yay!), spend time reading and writing posts, work on my CList application, and get out for bike rides. I worry most about money (because I'm a pensioner now) and am paying more attention to my health (which typically took a back seat when I had a day job). I have a 'consultancy business' with no current clients, but I can't bring myself to do the LinkedIn song and dance it would take to make that work. But that's OK. I still feel deeply engaged in my work, which always was, for me, my hobby. 

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post][Share]

Choosing to Stay Human
Ethan Mollick, One Useful Thing, 2026/05/27

"I am cool with a lot of cognitive surrender," writes Ethan Mollick. "I don't remember phone numbers anymore because my phone does that for me. I am happy my kids didn't need to learn cursive. I am fine with calculators doing my daily math and my computer figuring out how to schedule my classes. These were once useful skills, but we were probably right to get rid of them." But we need to be intentional about this, and we need to continue the work that sharpens our ideas and defines our own unique style (which is why I write all these posts by hand, with no AI interaction). It's not that AI writing is bad, per se, but that when badly prompted, it's not sharp or clear or intentional. "Balancing using AI with our own mental abilities is going to be a defining challenge of the coming years," says Mollick. I agree.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post][Share]

Attention Isn’t Given. It’s Spent.
Mike Taylor, Mike Taylor, 2026/05/27

I think Mike Taylor is on the right track here as he reframes what we're talking aboiut when we talk about attention. The most important thing is that there isn't some predefined attention span (equal to that of a goldfish or whatever). A moment's reflection will prove this. When I race my bicycle down a hill, my attention doesn't waver or run out of 'span'. Attention is something that starts and stops as a result of a decision, and this decision can be prompted. Taylor credits John Keller's model - Attention, Relevance, Confidence, Satisfaction (ARCS) - but of course it's also the first item in Gagne's nine events. Where Taylor is wrong, I think, is in drawing an analogy between attention and money. Try, the language of capital infuses our vocabulary, so we 'pay money' and 'pay attention', but attention is not a type of "rational economics". It's messy and complex, emotion-driven and context-sensitive, just like everything else human (except a banker's heart).

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post][Share]

Advancing Democracy Through Education: A Discussion with the Honourable Elizabeth Dowdeswell
Kelsey McCallum, Teach Magazine, 2026/05/26

It's just coincidence (probably) that this article comes out at the same time as the SSIR article I also posted about today on the link between education and democracy. Here's how it's phrased here, in this interview with Elizabeth Dowdeswell, the 29th Lieutenant Governor of Ontario: "A well-functioning democracy is built upon foundational and strong institutions: the government and its supportive public service; a respected and independent judiciary; a dynamic media; and a vibrant, informed, and involved civil society. At the core is education, because education is empowerment." Most of what is said here is well thought-out and reasonable. I find myself asking, though, where in education do we find democracy? Dowdeswell talks about ethical responsibility, learned behaviour, respect and civility. All fine things, but there is a danger that education presses too hard to instill these social virtues, at the expense of the autonomy and agency of the individual learner.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post][Share]

Educating as if Democracy Depends on It
Catherine E. Lhamon, SSIR, 2026/05/26

This article is very U.S.-focused, though of course there are many other democracies in the world. In all of them, education is seen as central to democracy, and the reasoning runs something like this: "science teachers who teach scientific inquiry must be conscious, while teaching the periodic table of elements, that they are also teaching students how to challenge, test, and dispute; to be open to proof and to findings that are counterintuitive; and to act on evidence-based conclusions - all of which are essential skills for democratic participation." Now I won't dispute the utility of that approach, but on reflection after reading this article, it occurs to me: if democracy depends on education, then democracy (as a form of government) has been designed with a serious, and possibly fatal, flaw. All it takes to eliminate democracy is to eliminate education, and in a society governed by (say) billionaires and corporations, that could be very easy to do. I think we should be very wary of this argument - and to educate as though it brings numerous and diverse benefits, and to strengthen democracy so it does not depend so critically on the political will of the day.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post][Share]

The Legacy & History of Open Education
Jennryn Wetzler, Cable Green, Kathryn Kure, Angela DeBarger, Creative Commons, YouTube, 2026/05/26

This video presents the history and legacy of open education from the perspective of Creative Commons. The panelists all address topics like localization, open educational practises, and the impact of AI. They also tie it directly to the political dimension - Angela DeBarger says "open education comes down to paying attention to power. To me, open education is about making explicit who has voice and choice in decisions about what and how learning happens." The focus is thus on leaders, networks, money and policy, but (as Cable Green notes) this is an effort that never ends; "you're constantly keeping an eye on it." I've always felt this divide between my perspective and that of Creative Commons. To me, it's less about movements, lobbying and money and power, and more about creating and putting practical tools into the hands of people who need them.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post][Share]

From Levy to Liability: Why Canada Risks Facing Hundreds of Millions in Retaliatory Tariffs Due to the CRTC's Online Streaming Act Ruling
Michael Geist, 2026/05/26

Michael Geist argues "the CRTC's Online Streaming Act ruling, which triples the mandated payments for large Internet streaming services, has attracted widespread criticism given fears the approach could result in higher consumer fees and a trade backlash from the United States" (like a good journalist he has placed what is essentially the whole story in the first pragraph - I like that). My own take on this issue is a bit different (and more in line with Cory Doctorow's) - Canada has already face an unprovoked 'trade backlash' and measures like this respond to the U.S. with the greatest impact: presventing them from asserting what is basically a monopoly in digital goods and services, including streaming, software and AI. And this is about more than just tariffs. We have different (more social and communitarian) values here in Canada, and we should resist seeing them overwhelmed by the culture being broadcast from the south.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post][Share]

Walking Through the Future in the Present: Teaching Practices in Postdigital Learning Spaces
Postdigital Science and Education, 2026/05/26

For background, per Florian Cramer, "the 'post-digital' describes an approach to digital media that no longer seeks technical innovation or improvement, but considers digitization as something that has already happened and thus might be further reconfigured." This current article uses the mechanism of the social imaginary - "a narrative about our experience of the world" - to reflect on what postdigital learning spaces might look like, and then "explores how the attributes of a refurbished classroom were experienced by the first cohort of teachers to use it." The resulting class was bigger and multifunctional (it reminded me of the 'open concept' classes teachers experimented with in the 1970s). "Working in teams, teachers develop fluid practices balancing physical movement with stationary digital orchestration whilst responding to spatial layout and the placement of digital tools." 

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post][Share]

Digital Platform Charter of Rights
Daniel Supernault, RespectfulPlatforms.org, 2026/05/25

It would be hard to disagree with anything in this Charter, released over the weekend by Daniel Supernault, the creator of Pixelfed, though I guess Meta has issues with it, as it has started blocking links to its decentralized competitor (as 404 reports, "Pixelfed is an open-source, community funded and decentralized image sharing platform that runs on Activity Pub, which is the same technology that supports Mastodon and other federated services"). Tyler's comment on 404 summarizes my view: "It's probably within their rights but it always feels so childish when companies throttle links to their competitors. Clearly they don't have enough faith in their product to compete in the 'free market' so they have to cheat." Meanwhile, organizations can commit to uphold the pledge (all pledges are reviewed before being publicly listed). As for me, I'll just indicate my general support here (and note that I am very much following these principles as I design CList, fwiw).

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post][Share]

I’m not sorry: Should we punish?
Thomas Nagel, London Review of Books, 2026/05/25

Discussions of ethics of technology in learning often focus on the three schools of ethics - virtual theory, consequentialism, and deontology. They rarely mention contractualism, which tells me simply that their foundations in actual ethical theory are slight. This essay, a well-written and accessible review of T.M. Scanlon's collection of essays, Morality and Responsibility (itself behind a paywall, sadly), helps address that deficiency. Scanlon's work reshapes some core assumptions about ethics: the idea that what counts as 'ethical' is contextual and based in relationships, and the idea that attributions of responsibility and consequences do not require a foundational theory of free will. "An action or policy is wrong," says Scanlon, "if any principle that permitted it could be reasonably rejected by someone affected adversely by that principle."

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post][Share]

Kitchen Table Stoic: Chapter One
Miguel Guhlin, Another Think Coming, 2026/05/25

I like the way Miguel Guhlin is recasting Epictetus's Enchiridion, a core work in Stoic philosophy. He sets up the series with this podcast episode and then settles in with the actual chapters (three of six so far: one, two, three). "It opens with the Stoic premise stated plainly: 'some things are up to us, and some things aren't. What's up to us is our own perspective, our goals, and our choices. What's out of our hands is our health, our wealth, and our reputation.'" Or, put another way: "Look, the person who can give you what you want, or take away what you're afraid of losing - that person is your master. If you want to be completely free, stop wanting things from other people and stop fearing what they can do. Otherwise, you're just a slave in a nice suit." Now, of course, there are things we can do that influence our health, reputation and wealth - we don't live in the year 135 any more. But the advice - that we should focus on what is within our control - is still good.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post][Share]

How to make a mint off the coming higher ed contraction
Hollis Robbins, Anecdotal Value, 2026/05/25

I love how this article presumes it will be a company that creates an alternative to university credentials, and not (say) a government, a cooperative or a community. Presumably that's because the idea here is centered around a product: "This new product would be a registry, a kind of credit bureau, land registry, and LinkedIn all at once. The registry confirms you learned something and registers it. The world can check the registry when it needs to know what the student can do. An examination will surely be involved but the registry, not the examination, is the asset." But why would it be a (centralized) registry? One of the strengths of the university system is that it is decentralized - you can't simply replace it in one go, and it doesn't fail with the collapse of a single institution. 

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post][Share]

The Time My Students Used AI in Their Final Reflections – and I Liked It!
Maha Bali, Reflecting Allowed, 2026/05/25

Though sceptical of AI, Maha Bali describes in this post her efforts to "encourage them (students) to use their own judgment to see where AI can support them in doing the work, without replacing them or limiting their creativity, their voice, their identity." And if they do use AI, she says, "I just ask for transparency." I think this is a good approach, and as this article documents, she was rewarded in turn. "Students are getting better at using AI, not in the sense of getting better at prompting it to do more work, but in the sense that they are becoming better judges of what appropriate use looks like and what inappropriate use looks like. And able to self-control and take agency over their use of AI when I gave them freedom beside critical AI literacy." 

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post][Share]

Separate AI Literacy and Assessment Integrity
Mike Kentz, How We Frame Machines, 2026/05/25

"Teaching AI Literacy and Preserving Assessment Integrity are not the same problem," writes Mike Kentz. This should be obvious but apparently the issues are being conflated in meetings convened to address 'the AI problem'. "The key insight: assessment integrity can be preserved or rebuilt without involving AI literacy at all. AI literacy can be built without navigating around AI cheating. These are separate tracks aiming at separate outcomes." For those who are wondering: breaking complex problems down into simpler parts is known as the Cartesian method, and was introduced in his Discourse on Method (1637). 

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post][Share]

This is not Utopia: Surviving an Outage
Elisa Baniassad, LTIC, UBC, 2026/05/25

I lot of people pointed to the response to the Instructure outage by the Learning Technology Innovation Centre (LTIC) at UBC as an example of best practice, so it's good to get this quick post mortem from its director post crisis. "We made, from scratch, findmycourse.ubc.ca to help students find their way to their courses. We published an alternative course hosting page, redirected the forbidden URL to a student facing website... We started a discussion forum... we spun up two options for hosting course materials, and many options for the satellite functions such as media and discussions." Preparation (even if not for this specific event) was key. "We were very lucky to have in our back pocket a very mature Blogs site ready and waiting for automated integrations like enrollments and media. We had an open source Moodle install that we rapidly expanded." Via D'Arcy Norman.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post][Share]

In his first encyclical, Pope Leo XIV says AI must serve humanity, not the powerful few
Claire Giangravè, RNS, 2026/05/25

The Pope's first encyclical, 'Magnifica Humanitas', tackles the social, economic and political challenges associated with artificial intelligence, according to this article. It covers a lot of ground and obviously I will disagree with some of it, but I agree with this: "When such power is concentrated in the hands of a few, it tends to become opaque and evade public oversight, increasing the risk of distorted forms of development that give rise to new dependencies, exclusions, manipulations and inequalities." Also, as many have pointed out, "There are clearly harmful uses, such as the manipulation of information or violations of privacy. Yet there is also a subtler danger, for when AI systems present themselves as neutral and objective, they end up reflecting and reinforcing the stereotypes or ideological bias of their designers and developers."

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post][Share]

ACL Statement on Desk Rejecting Papers with Hallucinated References
ACL 2026, 2026/05/25

The Association for Computational Linguistics, on removing around 100 papers for containing fake references, makes a statement that really should be unnecessary: "Scientific integrity requires that every claim and reference be grounded in verifiable reality... An author who fabricates a citation commits a serious breach of ethics." Via Dawn Ahuhanna, who comments, "You had 1 job-do research(FA) & share written findings(FO)." Also via Tito.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post][Share]