Stephen Downes

As Cory Doctorow says, "the 'art' of all of Trump's deals can be summed up in a single word: 'renege'." And so the utterly predictable has happened again. So we in Canada find ourselves at odds with a trading partner that, as Doctorow has noted, has always had the advantage. "The systems that Trump has dismantled as unfair to the US were, in fact, sources of tremendous advantage to America." And as he has previously, Doctorow recommends upending that advantage by undoing the agreements and legislation that have enabled that advantage. "Canada made itself easy pickings for America's tech giants, who wiped out Canada's tech sector while making Canada geopolitically and economically dependent on – and vulnerable to – the US and its tech companies." I'm not sure I want to see Canada respond to the U.S. by burning down its tech industry, as a successful enactment of the Doctorow proposal could do. But given that Americans keep on electing governments and funding corporations that exploit and renege - for Trump is by no means alone in this regard - I'm not sure I don't.

This article offers less a 'framework' and more a mantra. Here it is: "students should be allowed to use all resources - including LLMs - during preparation. However, the production of final evidence of learning should occur under supervised conditions within the school environment and under teacher oversight." What strikes me about that 'framework' is its sheer impracticality. The reliance on humans to scrutinize and evaluate in-person student production was been historically a huge limiting factor in education, and it would remain one in the future under this model.

This article applies an LDA analysis of articles from a set of relevant journals (listed, figure 6) in open and distance learning to describe historical trends in the field. As someone who has been present for all of that history, the topic is naturally interesting to me. And I don't see the trends as particularly surprising - 'web based learning' was big in 2006, not so much now. AI was almost irrelevant in 2006 and tops the leaderboard today. There's a bit of cross-categorization here: I'm not sure 'health education' belongs on the same chart as 'MOOC' and 'technology-based education'. I wish also there was some sense of the specificity of the terms used. The biggest surprise? The emerging and continuing rise of 'technology acceptance'. I'm also curious about what a similar analysis from a broader set of resources would produce, and of course, what a similar analysis of OLDaily would produce.

As Brave reports, "AliExpress wasn't recording users but instead playing a silent sound and measuring how users' specific devices processed it in order to fingerprint them." Clever. But we have a word in Canada that describes such practices: greasy. The sort of underhanded behaviour you expect from people who are fundamentally untrustworthy. 

What I like about this study is that it includes MOOCs and 'grey literature' content alongside academic sources in this discussion of OER adoption in Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries. As such, it offers a more nuanced analysis of a complex landscape. "The evolution observed across the GCC thus reflects a differentiated developmental trajectory: from emergent open practices in Kuwait and the UAE, to embedded digital openness in Oman and Qatar, to policy-aligned and maturing ecosystems in Bahrain, and to a more institutionalized OER ecosystem in Saudi Arabia." The use of MOOCs in the region - "Several MOOCs platforms and initiatives have also been created in Saudi Arabia such as FutureX, KKUx, Maarefh, Doroob and Rwaq" - counters the 'MOOCs are dead' argument so popular in some circles. It's worth noting that I worked with several the authors of this report on some related MOOC and OER work with the Arab League Educational, Cultural and Scientific Organization (ALECSO) a number of years ago.

I am not socially magnetic. I've learned to live with that. But the concept interests me, especially when it's presented as a "set of learnable behaviours", as it is here. The two behaviours? "The first was communal behavior: how warm, friendly, and well-intentioned someone appeared. The second was agentic behavior: how confident, assertive, and willing to take the lead they seemed." Fair enough. But the two words doing most of the work in this characterization are 'appeared' and 'seemed'. In my case, I'm not willing to fake it. There are cases when I'm not going to be warm and friendly, and there are times when I'm quite unwilling to take the lead. Abuses of power, especially, turn off the 'socially magnetic' part of me.