Stephen Downes

The argument is that "Higher education must prioritize AI policy development so that AI is trustworthy and used for good." I think we can agree we want these, but are they ensured (or even made more likely) by higher education policy development? Higher ed policy governs only higher ed, but AI development and use happens in the wider community, so even if effective, the policies are limited in their application. Anyhow, the short article lists 14 AI policy areas and 52 AI policy competencies.

This story reports that "Sesame Street continues airing on PBS and has not been replaced by drag queen storytime." What it misses is, I think, the main point, which is that it would be good if children were able to watch drag queen storytime and that early exposure to different and diverse cultures could do much to erase the intolerance and prejudice that exists today.

I've had a lot to say about this over the years, and there's more coming. But I want to set the record straight here. Pete Croatto writes, "The Mercury News would become widely regarded as the first newspaper to put its entire content online, initially for free. The decision established a lasting expectation that online news should be free." It did not. What created that expectation was that, on the internet (in contrast to closed commercial services like AOL) everything was free. You paid for your own computer, and you paid for your own internet access (or maybe your institution did), and then, you shared your content with everyone else. It's important to understand that you don't actually need commercial content to make the web work. You don't even need to pay for content production. People will create their own content, including news content, for free. 

You might not know about EUDI yet, but it - or something like it, if you're outside Europe - will be coming into your world soon. The European Digital Identity Wallet (EUDI Wallet) is a new method for Strong Customer Authentication (SCA) into digital services. Crucially, in Europe, "all private relying parties in regulated sectors - including banks - must support the European Digital Identity Wallet for SCA-related processes by 2027." The EUDI wallet supports core online functions: login, payment, data access, whitelisting, personal information, and consent. This article looks at EUDI in more detail, and EUDI in education is on my watchlist.

Miguel Guhlin shares his summary of the "Carnegie Learning AI in Education webinar facilitated by Amanda Bickerstaff. The webinar is accompanied by a link to a report from Carnegie Learning." There's not a lot new here, but it's nicely packaged, and I mainly want to express appreciation for Guhlin's coverage of this and consistently good coverage of AI and critical thinking over the last few months. I'm not linking to everything, but it's all worth a read.

Ben Werdmuller references "a lovely piece about Mike McCue, who, through Flipboard, Surf, and his general activities through the community, has become one of the open social web's most important figures." He points out that while Surf is different from them, it's not forcing people to make a technology choice. "This is the point that A New Social is making too: it's not about picking a protocol, because the protocols can easily be joined together." This is a refreshing change from silos like Facebook and X/Twitter. Closed access systems, like authoritarian governments, may seem to make things better for a while, but as Jonathan Last writes, "no empire can survive the degeneration of its people."