Stephen Downes

This post summarizes a webinar organized in response to two open books, one on distributing (and distributed) knowledge (212 page PDF), and the other on the politics of open infrastructures (388 page PDF) (which include the challenging argument that the internet infrastructure has never been open). Both take an explicitly international perspective, and the webinar reflects this, looking at conditions of access in war-torn regions like Ukraine and systematically underserved regions in Africa. The different cases return to a common theme: "openness is not enough" (which is fair enough, but I hearken to my own principle that nothing is ever 'enough'). That said, as noted here, "the Distributed University invites us to see higher education not as a collection of autonomous campuses, but as a network of interconnected educational, research, and infrastructural capacities in which equity and openness become foundational principles." The recording is available to view online, and the slides are available to download.

This article (16 page PDF) is a response to a 2025 OECD report (26 page PDF) on "how to strengthen the role of research and initial teacher education institutions in knowledge mobilisation." Gert Biesta argues "the report assumes that the research is available but that for some reasons it doesn't reach policy and practice." There's an assumption that there is a sort of 'knowledge' - singular - around which there is evidence and consensus, and which practitioners should simply "make use of". But this represents a misunderstanding of 'practrice'. "A practice rather is collective activity held together, so we might say, by its purpose. And this purpose is not external to the practice." Different cultures, regions and industries have difference conceptions of this purpose, and you can't simply 'apply research' to them. Biesta describes this as "education's double history," corresponding to poiesis and praxis, but if we look at it, there are multitudes of histories. All in all, "what teachers do is never 'just' an instrument for bringing about certain 'effects.'"

In this article, "the authors propose the creation of integrated and open platforms that position OER as global public goods, grounded in open principles and standards." The argument is that developing these platforms could foster "inclusive, transparent and collaborative development, particularly in AI, on a global scale." Specifically, there is "an urgent need for open, transparent and publicly governed alternatives to commercial AI platforms" that would conform with UNESCO's ROAM universality indicators of "Rights, Openness, Accessibility, [and] Multi-stakeholder participation." I think there's a good argument for this, though I begin to resist when the authors go further, suggesting "the ethical deployment of AI requires adherence to ethical design principles, ensuring fairness, equity, transparency and protection of learners' privacy." I think they mean this as a premise, but in my view it's weaker than the argument it's intended to support. There is, as a matter of empirical fact, no consensus on ethical codes, and great ethical diversity globally. But there is also independently a need for social and political institutions that govern wide-reaching and consequential technologies like AI.

I can't tell whether this summary of Yuke Meng, Xufeng Zhang & Han Li's paper on 'Synthetic Credentialism' is AI-generated, but it doesn't matter, since the original article is paywalled (boo! hiss!) so this is the best we've got. Synthetic Credentialism is " the systemic condition in which AI-generated or AI-assisted academic outputs enable the acquisition of credentials that no longer reliably signal the competences they are meant to certify." The paper itself is built on signaling theory, where "economists have understood education as a mechanism through which individuals communicate otherwise unobservable qualities to employers." This paper documents the breakdown in three dimensions: 'signal decoupling', or "the growing gap between the output a student submits and the underlying competence that output is supposed to represent"; 'verification collapse', where "institutions can no longer credibly distinguish human-produced from machine-produced work"; and 'normative ambiguity', where "the norms themselves are unsettled, responsibility becomes diffuse, and the traditional misconduct-based response, investigation and punishment of individual offenders, loses analytical traction." 

Andy Lane offers his reflections on 20 years of the Open University's OpenLearn project, from its beginnings as a Hewlett-funded initiative influenced by things like Creative Commons and MIT OpenCourseWare through to its current status as a fixture of the university. What stands out to me is how much OpenLearn depended on continued funding and support from the University, and how other initiatives with less consistent and stable support were not able to achieve the same success. That said, what also emerges is the long-term impact sharing learning resources has had on the wider community. I would also like to see him expand on his comment that "the report on OER policies I linked to earlier proposed that the MOOC movement severely hindered the OER movement."

I was never part of Zine culture, though if I had ever been exposed to them I would no doubt have picked up the trend - after all, in grade school, I did write and print my own local newspaper, 'The Eagle Report', which I tried to sell in local stores (I loved eagles and birds generally; still do). Anyhow, Zines are having a moment - Doug Belshaw sold out his first limited print run, and Creative Commons celebrated its 25th anniversary with a 28 pager. In this post Alan Levine also links to one in the classic style from Becky Chambers along with her 8-page single sheet Zine template (I have no idea where I'd find a printer for paper that size).