Stephen Downes

This open access book (116 page PDF) is a collection of essays that asks of digital education "what kinds of futures are being imagined and enacted for education, whose interests these futures serve, what assumptions underpin the current drive towards digitalisation, and what remains unexamined or quietly displaced in its wake?" The focus is less on the stated (Utopian) intentions and more on what is actually being put into practice. "A central concern running through the volume is the place of the human in digitally mediated education," write the editors. But this is a moving target; "the chapters attend to the ways in which human agency, judgement, and relationships are being reshaped under conditions of digitalisation." The volume considers tensions such as those between scale and care, efficiency and responsibility, and access and meaningful participation. A deeper current is what Melinda dela Peña Bandalaria calls "the erosion of shared frameworks through which universities justify their actions, define value, and make their commitments intelligible." Some characterize this as "chasing technology", some focus on emerging social values, and some characterize it as a recharacterization of our own humanity.

The Open Education Association is a relatively new organization (b. 2025) that evolved out of the U.S.-based Open Education Conference. It is now soliciting contributions to a national (ie., U.S.) consultation on policy. "The process will focus on identifying challenges facing higher education today where openness is part of the solution but is not yet a large enough part of the conversation." They seem to be looking for examples that support "connecting our national priorities to those of leaders and policymakers." An odd wording. Anyhow, there's a webinar next week and consultations will continue through the fall. The site sadly has no RSS but there is a newsletter. If you want to join the Association, you'll have to pay.

This article addresses an ongoing review of the the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers but at the same time uses the exercise to differentiate between what teachers and AI can do. Obviously everything suffers from overreach here, but the exercise is still worth a look. For example, how do we depict Standard 1, "know students and how they learn"? Kelly Ilich responds, "Being modelled by a system is different from being known by a trusted adult," which is true, but how often does the adult simply fall back on a common stereotype? And how limited are modern AI models, really? Similarly, for Standard 2, "know the content and how to teach it." it makes sense to "emphasise the teacher as a designer, interpreter and responsible steward of knowledge," but what happens when doing these properly requires skills well beyond the ken of the average instructor? Yes, with Ilich, I think the test should be to ask "what must teachers now be and do so that children flourish in a world shaped by it?" but my focus is on society, not only teachers.

Peter Suber cites this article (11 page PDF) saying "Preprints are increasingly treated as legitimate, autonomous objects of citation independent of their later publication status... I'm fine with this, and so are the authors of this study." So am I. As Suber writes, "I'm from the humanities, where it's common to cite unpublished letters and manuscripts, countless fiction and nonfiction genres never subject to peer review, and even an occasional 'personal communication to the author'. Cite your best sources, or your actual sources, and let readers judge their relevance and credibility." Indeed, we might think of citation of a preprint (the way I'm doing here) as a form of unofficial, distributed and decentralized peer review. 

I think this article taps into a genuine problem identified in two important essays - AI 2027 and Europe 2031 - but falls far short of a solution. The problem is this: "A small number of people make decisions for everyone else, without their input. Neither essay asks what ordinary people actually want from this technology or proposes a way of finding out." Quite so. Indeed, I dare say most people wouldn't see much difference between a society ruled by AI and a society ruled by wealthy out-of-touch elites. But asking AI companies themselves to "help bring democratically written global and local constitutions on AI into being, because right now no government is moving fast enough, or has the will or standing, to do it alone." The reason is that AI is only one of many issues that would benefit from the people having a genuine say in the outcome. The real question here is: could AI help society become more democratic? But I don't really see people addressing this.

This is a good paper (25 page PDF) focusing on the meso and macro effects of digital badges, drawn from a study of 83 studies. I liked the literature review in particular, which is a good overall framing of how digital badges support new learning opportunities and recognize mastery of skills. Readers might like the badge taxonomy provided (illustrated). It's worth comparing this set of factors with the findings described in the fifth section, as there's a pretty clear mapping there. Most work on digital badges is qualitative or mixed methods; the mapping I would think opens an avenue for more quantitative work.