Stephen Downes

You can read my essay on consciousness or you can read this article - the point being made is exactly the same (and certainly not unique to either of us). "Experience is not over and above the processes that happen in the brain, as Chalmers assumed upfront. The dualism between a first-person description of experience and a third-person (or scientific) account of the same is a normal perspectival difference: the same brain phenomenon as experienced by that same brain itself, or by another. Experience for both - not evidence of two different kinds of reality."

The tagline says it well: "this is "an article dispelling myths about W Social, the new European platform that aims to rival X: it is a fork of Bluesky that shares many similarities with Eurosky and requires government ID to sign up." Leaving aside internal European politics, it's worth noting that W Social was launched at Davos with a lot of fanfare (while Eurosky, the European Bluesky instance, set up a side event, and Mastodon, also based in Europe, went unmentioned). There's a lot more in the article, but as Elena Rossini says, "W Social is set to launch tomorrow May 9th on Europe Day. As it happened when it was first announced in January, it is likely to receive a lot of uncritical, superficial press coverage. Please exercise critical thinking and try to look at the reality behind its hype." (p.s. I'm stealing the 'written by a human' image from this page :) ).

This is an interesting project (paradoxically written in Razor) that presents itself as an "open-source, federated alternative to Linktree," or more specifically, a "decentralized link-in-bio that connects to the Fediverse (where you can) share links, collect badges, and own your online presence (with) no corporation in the middle." Code on GitHub. Via Johanna Botari.

"The internet is not dying," writes Terry Godier, "A commercial veneer glued on top of it is dying." I'm not a fan of the muted text in dark mode and the scroll reveal presentation, but the message in my view is sound. Godier presents a three-layered internet: platforms, which are the commercial veneer; services like GitHub and Cloudflare, which can be large and influential but are not actually necessary; and finally, the actual set of protocol-based services, things like Icecast (shoutout to Soma.fm), RSS (I subscribed), HTML (you're soaking in it) and finger. Boring: "too useful to disappear, too uncool to hype, too federated to acquire, and too awkward to turn cleanly into a platform."

This article blends the ideas of generative AI and open educational resources and the results are about what is to be expected. The authors begin with licensing concerns, asserting that "educators must still assign an open license if they intend for others to use, share, or adapt that content freely," though they are aware that "a creator might not be able to assign a license because the work is not copyrightable." They offer a 'GenAI-OER Adoption Framework' based around the idea of adoption, adaptation and building. They should have included 'share' somewhere in there. The rest is boilerplate advice: start slow, share what you've learned, "align practice with the core values of openness, equity, agency, and care."

This week's big story is a confirmed data breach at Instructure affecting students' private information. As TechCrunch and others report, the hacking group ShinyHunters claimed responsibility. Hacks started Tuesday and continued through the week. The company is reported to be held for ransom by the attackers. Ian Linkletter comments, "Instructure has been bragging about their data hoard to investors for years, and now it's been stolen." In all, "the hackers claimed to have stolen data from almost 9,000 schools around the world, with the stolen files allegedly containing information on 231 million people." Here's more.