Stephen Downes

I agree with this, and with much of the argumentation that leads to it: "We find ourselves in a crisis that brings clarity. AI has made visible the deep tensions in how we organize intellectual production, tensions that the IP regime has papered over for decades. If we respond only by trying to shore up that regime, we will miss the opportunity to build something better."

I think this article accurately describes the state of affairs around language learning and language acquisition. "I went to Brazil without a word of Portuguese and came out speaking it. I studied French in a classroom for years and cannot hold a conversation in French today. This is not an unusual experience. It is the expected outcome, and it has been the expected outcome for as long as we have had formal language education." The issue, according to Shrey Shah, is that language learning asks, first, what can be measured, and teaches for that, and as a result, ultimately fails to support actual language acquisition. "Before reaching for what can be measured, it is worth asking what the user actually needs to do, and what stopped them from doing it before." The answer is almost never 'better test scores'. But how can we imagine a system of education without them? Can we imagine a learning application that doesn't work like that?

I saw a comment from someone on the socials today referring to Canada Day - which is today - as a "slightly-problematic-holiday". It has bothered me all day. For while I get the point of the comment, and indeed am sympathetic with it, I think the commenter in turn isn't getting the point of Canada Day. And so while I haven't trotted out this post for a while, it's still pretty foundational to me and to what it is I think that we're all up to here in Canada. If you haven't read it, please do.

I think what Creative Commons has done over the last 25 years has been remarkable, both as an alternative approach to copyright licensing, and as an interesting exercise in viral marketing. But it's important to keep the lines of causality straight. This article suggests that Creative Commons induced millions of people (at one point it suggests billions, which is... no) to share their content. But from where I sit (and I was there back then) Creative Commons was responding to a need already present in the community where people did want to share their content, but without some content farm slurping it up and calling it theirs. There were already millions of pieces of open content online., and various licenses already existed and any of them would have done the job, but Creative Commons always approached this as a lobbying and marketing exercise, and when they teamed up with (eg.) MIT OpenCourseWare they became unstoppable (I've documented this in the past).

This is most likely marketing for Abstract Technology but I found some technical bits of interest and also was faced with the wider question: why couldn't this have been done with Moodle. Basically, the article describes a migration from Moodle to a fully managed instance of Open EdX in order to offer courses for doctors in bandwidth limited locations such as Uganda for an NGO - University College for Missionary Doctors and Students (CUAMM). . They do try to dazzle in the middle: "CUAMM's domain- training.doctorswithafrica.org - was configured with custom DNS routing, SMTP integration via Google for learner communications, and a CI/CD deployment pipeline managed through GitLab. The entire infrastructure - from Terraform provisioning to Ansible configuration - runs under our managed hosting model." But this - and everything else they mention - could also have been done with Moodle. Why OpenEdX? Is it that MIT brand?

This site is making the rounds on the socials today: "Your photos reveal a lot of private information. In this experiment, we use the Google Vision API to see how much can be inferred about you from a single photo." Sure, they're pobably using it to train AI - none of us is that naive any more, right? Anyhow what's funny is how laughably wrong these accounts are, including the one on me that says I'm conservativ, support traditional values, am not adventurous, and seek to avoid exercise. Or... maybe my whole life is a lie? You decide - have a look at the whole report.