Stephen Downes

This is a good longish article in which the author reflects on her decision whether or not to use AI in her writing. I liked it cause it reflects many of the same issues I have considered. The article is fresh and breezy and really seems to reflect the personality of the author. I wonder, though. The company - 'Big Think' - is listed as a co-author. So it makes me wonder what part of her voice I'm not hearing, and what part is the company speaking through her. Still a good article though. Today: Total: Jasna Hodzic, Big Think, 2026/10/27 [Direct Link]

The story is in the headline - the popular teaching resource marketplace is banning AI-authored content. This assumes they can detect it, which isn't certain. And a number of vendors are protesting. And it comes amid other moves by Teachers Pay Teachers (TPT) to tighten its hold and extract more revenue from the platform. Today: Total: Lily Altavena, ChalkBeat, 2026/10/27 [Direct Link]

The focus here is on U.S. schools, but there is a broader point worth making. " Too many of our schools sort children more reliably than they develop them," writes Elena Silva, referencing "segregation by race and income". This is a problem because "Learning is fundamentally relational. The brain develops through attachment and interaction." This sort of interaction works best with diversity, not homogeneity. Sorting, in other words, breaks interaction. "This relationship-centered approach is not a soft alternative to academic rigor; it is its essential mechanism."

Today: Total: Elena Silva, Learning Policy Institute, 2026/10/27 [Direct Link]

This is interesting, though the full report is behind a stupid subscription wall, which is very frustrating and makes me think a lot less of them. The premise is that AI is interfering with student collaboration because all the students depend on the same AI model, which means when they come together they're already saying the same thing. Apparently the report documents this in more detail, though we get a good sense of it on this open page. The tease is 'seven methods that drive learning in collaborative groups'. We are led to believe the DEC report details a solution, though this is craftily hidden - and thus, to my view, is nothing but a fake. Here also is the press release.

Today: Total: Digital Education Council, Pearson, 2026/10/27 [Direct Link]

According to this article, "Recent advances in AI raise the possibility of building something education has never really had: a virtual laboratory for learning. At the center of this possibility are synthetic students." The problem, of course, is that we don't know how to simulate students. "When you ask a capable model to play a struggling student, its mistakes tend to come out inconsistent or superficial."Now are we good at "predicting how a particular lesson or explanation or piece of feedback changes what a student understands and remembers later." Ultimately, I think, the article is a pitch to philanthropy: "Much of what we need, it turns out, is shared scientific infrastructure that no individual lab or company has much incentive to build today." 

Today: Total: Allison Dulin Salisbury, The Humanist, 2026/10/27 [Direct Link]

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.

Today: Total: Open Book Publishers Blog, 2026/10/26 [Direct Link]