Stephen Downes

Not being a verified K-12 educator in the U.S., I can't test Anthropic's brand new Claude for Teachers myself, but it looks clever. "Claude for Teachers connects to Learning Commons, giving Claude access to academic standards across all 50 states—and beneath each standard, the smaller learning competencies... Claude for Teachers also brings in trusted curricular resources like OpenSciEd and IM v.360 from Illustrative Mathematics." Via Marcus Green. See also Chalkbeat. Today: Total: Anthropic, 2026/07/15 [Direct Link]

The Digital Credential Consortium is moving from MIT to Strada, an education foundation, where it will be refocused and renamed the Digital Credential Commons (DCC). It "will build upon the infrastructure incubated at MIT Open Learning to scale an open-source and open standards-based ecosystem in which learners fully own, control, and can use verifiable digital records of their skills and achievements." Obviously this is something I want to support in my CList personal learning environment. via Doug Belshaw. Today: Total: Strada, 2026/07/15 [Direct Link]

The authors advance a new version of open science (aka 2.0) based on a transition from 'access' to 'understanding'. But what do we mean by understanding? We might answer in traditional cognitivist terms - ontologies, explanations, predictions, principles. This article references verifiability, expertise and impact. I'm not really sure these count as 'understanding' either, at least in the normal sense we understand me them. Today: Total: Ashutosh Ghildiyal, Maria Machado, Gareth Dyke, The Scholarly Kitchen, 2026/07/16 [Direct Link]

This article uses the example of resistance in the Minneapolis–Saint Paul metropolitan area to make its point, but the message is relevant even without the political overtime. It describes the way large centralized organizations get all the press, money and credit for organizing in contrast with the important roles played by networks of small decentralized community groups that operate without funding and in relative obscurity. "Centralized organizations are easier to identify, easier to contact, and easier to evaluate using conventional metrics." We see the same dynamic play out in education where the large organizations take the credit and get the funding but where the real work is being done in quiet local communities without fanfare, often by people with the most precarious employment. Today: Total: Neeraj Mehta, SSIR, 2026/07/16 [Direct Link]

This is a set of slides from a conference presentation that treats a set of Reddit subreddits as epistemic communities, in this case, a set of them specific to Taylor Swift. To a large degree, sourcing matters to people who post (less so for people who comment) and while the usual media of record is relied upon, there are some surprises (such as one sub classifying the NY Times as no more credible than a gossip column). I wouldn't exactly consider Reddit a reliable source (though that varies widely by sub) but I do think studying the communities' epistemic practices is important and informative. Today: Total: Samantha Vilkins, Sebastian Svegaard, Axel Bruns, Katherine M. FitzGerald, Snurblog, 2026/07/15 [Direct Link]

The suggestion here is that "The more audiobooks I’ve read, the more I’ve finally embraced the reality that listening to audiobooks is reading." Sarah Clinton-McCausland adds, "Recent research has started confirming what audiobookworms have known all along: a 2019 study, for instance, found that 'the semantic representations evoked by listening versus reading are almost identical.'" That's my experience as well; I see myself as having 'read' Moby Dick even though I actually listened to it. Today: Total: Sarah Clinton-McCausland, ACRLog, 2026/07/15 [Direct Link]