Stephen Downes

"The message this conference had to land was we're back," writes Phil Hill. "The message it could easily have landed instead was we're alive—a company going through the motions because not having a conference would have looked worse." The company is staffing its new leadership team and preparing a new strategy (one that hopefully for them does not involve taking on mountains of debt). Hill deftly summarizes the set of new features and offerings the company has planned, including Ally, which leads on accessibility work, and Cursive, which "captures a continuous record of the writing process—keystrokes, pace, revisions, time on task—from first draft to submission, producing something an instructor can review rather than a probability score."

Lots of interesting stuff here. First, Grav is an "open source flat-file content management system (CMS). No database, no SQL, no installation wizard. You unzip it, drop Markdown into a folder, and you have a fast, secure, version-controllable website." So already we're talking m,y language. Helios, meanwhile, is a theme for Grav - you have to pay $50 for this; it's among Grav's premium offerings. Finally, Grav Helios Converters "convert Common Cartridge LMS exports (Canvas, Moodle, Brightspace, Blackboard) and Pressbooks books into portable Markdown files for Grav Helios Course Hub and Open Reader, built on the open-source Grav CMS."  That's the part that interests me the most, because it (potentially) makes a lot of open content that much more portable.

There's some buzz in the socials about the recent refocus at Bonfire, an online community platform. "Bonfire was never meant to be one more feed that grabs your attention. Today it takes the shape we've been building toward: Bonfire for communities. A tool for groups that need to organise together, not just post at each other. Shipping today: groups and topics, events, shared organisation profiles, embeddable federated comments, customisable themes, and a first set of governance tools." Suggested applications include publications, research groups, and communities. It's free and open source, and this in particular is a good strategy: "Bonfire combines the power of federation and open data formats to create interoperable toolkits that people can use to easily build their own apps to meet their specific needs."

If you want to learn about the causes and solutions to airplane crashes you'd be hard pressed to find a better source than Mayday, a video series comprising almost 500 episodes of dramatization, description and analysis. I've watched almost all of them. Here's the episode for Air France Flight 447, the airliner that disappeared over the Atlantic in 2009. What the series teaches you most of all is to eschew simplistic analyses like "the aircraft asked its pilots to do the one thing they had stopped practising: fly it themselves... the judgment underneath it had gone soft, and nobody noticed until it was needed." Yes, there was a training and ergonomic design issue that contributed to the crash. Training is often among the culprits. But what the series makes clear is that these are singular and generally unprecedented cases in a system of pilot craft, training and automation that works extremely well. Nobody is "abdicating judgment" on an airline crew. It's a severe case of misdiagnosis to suggest otherwise.

This article is a combination of quotes from Simon Buckingham Shum and Michael Feldstein, economic data about the size of the education market ($6 trillion, if you're interested), and an overview of some recent advances into education by OpenAI and Anthropic. In this case, though, one plus one plus one does indeed make three. "Let's not be naive," says Simon Buckingham Shum, professor of learning informatics at University of Technology Sydney, adding that education is "absolutely a marketplace for these companies". Via Mark Oehlert, who calls the article a "signal".

This is a good list of new and alternative browsers. "2026 has brought a wave of new entrants — from well-funded startups to Big Tech — all betting that the browser is about to become less like a window onto the web and more like an assistant that gets things done for you." OK, I can sort of see that. But what's really mysterious is the complete lack of any mention of Firefox - the brower I use on a daily basis. The other thing it doesn't address is whether any of these can perform the most basic function Firefox allows for me - block advertising. (Yes, that's right, I don't see advertising when I browse the web).