Stephen Downes

It's disappointing to read this. "For 35 years, Campus Manitoba has supported Manitoba's post-secondary landscape through collaboration, care, and shared commitment. We are now sharing an important and difficult update. Due to changes in provincial funding, Campus Manitoba will be closing its doors on June 26, 2026." The change appears to be pretty sudden, as they just recently advertised for a new position, and also just recently made the switch to Bluesky. They operated the the OpenEd Manitoba Repository, which "is no longer being updated at this time." There's no similar notification on eCourses Manitoba, but I would expect changes there too.

The two big impacts in software developers early in 2026 have been increasing AI costs and usage limits. Claude Code has been hit especially hard, with widespread complaints about session limits, but the trend is evident across the board. I think what we'll see is more of an emphasis on on-premises AI (to avoid the usage limits) using more open-source and open-weight models and software (to address costs). 

Obviously there's a lot of room for scepticism in this announcement, but I would be remiss if I didn't mention it here, because it will probably form the basis for a lot of the discussion - pro and con - of AI-informed learning in the future. "TED, Khan Academy and ETS announced a joint plan to launch the Khan TED Institute, a new higher education collaboration designed for an AI‑driven era. The Khan TED Institute aims to prepare learners for the next generation of jobs while cultivating the uniquely human skills required to thrive in work, life and society amid rapid technological change."

There's this thing where some educators argue students must be thinking of the precise educational point at all times, and that anything else is a distraction. That's what's happening here. But it is, in my view, the wrong approach, because it completely does away with association, and focuses on rote memorization. But which outcome is better: a memorized fact about the underground railroad, or a person associating biscuits with the underground railroaf every time they make biscuits, for the rest of their life? The same, though less obvious, point can be applied to mathematics. "Were they thinking about math concepts? No, they were thinking about rectangles, lines, and shading." But those are math concepts - just not formalized notational math. Abstract concepts not associated with ground truth are lost, not only forgotten, but never useful in the first place.

As Tim Bray says, if you're not using a password manager, you should probably start using one. I personally use 1Password, because it works quite well with my browser. But the whole business of managing credentials is about to get more complicated and more important as we begin to use services (and especially AI services) to access our various accounts. This post compares 1Password to BitWarden. My experience was similar. 

I like what Tim Klapdor is doing with Bloom's Taxonomy, both in the last post and in this post. "What I'm really trying to achieve is a more three-dimensional version of Bloom's. Learning has height, breadth, and width – but the affective and operative components have often been lost. These are often dismissed as 'soft skills' or treated as trade-specific concerns, but they matter deeply in higher education. Higher education that includes vocational training and degrees in which cognitive, affective, and operative development are genuinely intertwined." Quite so. There's a lot to be discovered analyzing these concepts in detail - though at any point it may be tempting to crystalize that emerged in a far too quick abstraction.