Stephen Downes

There's a lot of interesting thinking going on here, though the implementation is a little but clunky - the design is fine, but scrolling is not smooth and there's a short lag every time you click a link. The site is called Interpoll and the idea is twofold: first, there's no central server at all, everything runs peer-to-peer, and content is replicated as it propagates; and second, "a key lives on your device and signs every action you take. No relay or server can forge a vote in your name." It's based on a "a peer-to-peer database (GunDB). Every connected device holds a copy" (I'm totally not on board with that branding). There are some complaints on Reddit about the use of AI, but on the other hand, the creator is a 14 year old who enjoys coding. Similar projects include Nostr and Scuttlebutt (more).

I'll just quote Mike Caulfield on this one: "I really don't think Science should publish any articles on education anymore if they think 0.07 is a 'sizable signal' -- I want to be upset but I'm more embarrassed for them. I normally wouldn't even call them out except for some reason we use a publication run by chemists and physicists to determine the education of our children, and it has been doing damage there -- embarrassingly obvious damage -- for the past 20 years."

The is the approach I'm trying to take with CList: "With the capabilities of natural language processors, we can create a new approach to teaching UIs. User-driven UI. Instead of pushing features onto the user, the user pulls them in when needed. The software always presents a new user with the Minimum Viable Product (MVP)." That sounds easy, but it isn't. What is that minimum? Is it feed reading? Writing posts? And how are the new features unveiled - what is it to 'pull' new features into the interface? "For user to reach maximum value in complex software, they need to be in the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD). This requires multiple approaches. In the past, teaching has been considered an after-thought to making the product. This is a mistake." Via D'Arcy Norman.

"Many who succeed in academia become reliant on the recognition of its gatekeepers - tenure committees, journal editors, prize juries—until that recognition becomes the currency of existence." See also: qualifications and brain monsters. I left academia (properly so-called) some 25 years ago, though my career at NRC was a sort of proxy. But now I have nothing I can write in the 'institution' field in conference and event forms. "Picture two scholars. One has kept the same question alive for a decade because it grips her and would go on asking it in a shed with no audience. The other cannot begin a project without first asking whether it will count— whether it will be noticed, indexed, rewarded." The prevalence of the latter where I studied made it easy for me to leave. But the questions that grip me have never faded, though I feel much better now after all these years about the answers I have found. There was no registration wall on this article, but it's IHE, so that could change. Via ApostolosK.

Via a Mastodon post from Alfie Kohn posted today I encountered this great 2014 article on how urban legends are perpetuated in academic writing. The article looks at the chain of commentary around the idea that spinach is a great source of iron (it isn't). You have to  read it carefully: it's a maze of assertions that might be true ("messages that pass through several links have the unfortunate tendency to become modified or altered along the way, as in the whisper game") or might not be ("we are currently experiencing an 'avalanche of low-quality research'"). Even the URL to one of the references in the bibliography (intended to point to Hamblin, 1981) points instead to a study on cocaine on rigid OS (whatever that means). This sort of error is really easy to make I make a point to check the articles being cited in the links I cite - for example, one recent article said there were different types of consciousness, when the original paper said there were different models of consciousness - I posted the correct term, silently correcting the error, but it's a daily occupational hazard.

This article is much too long and has a but of a tone, but it is chock full of evidence to back up what it says, and what it says is important: the media itself is responsible for the near total control of the tech industry over its domain. The reason for this, argues Michal Wozniak, is that the media companies unthinkingly participate in, and endorse, tech silo platforms that give them all the power. "How much would any other company have to pay for placing a small logo on a large news site? How much more for the logo to appear under every piece published on that site? X/Twitter gets it all for free." My own take is that this is what media companies would have done themselves, had they had the foresight. Subscription walls and silos are commercial media's natural home. This preference has landed us in an environment where nothing published in social media can be trusted.