Stephen Downes

I suppose it's not technically a MOOC but the concept is similar. "Google DeepMind is bringing its rigorous AI Research Foundations curriculum to strengthen India’s premier AI talent. This free 56-hour program aims to help empower India’s students and AI builders." Sure, there's marketing involved, but it's also how you build an industry in a country that needs it. Today: Total: Google, 2026/07/21 [Direct Link]

This is a long set of slides with extensive notes on the topic of decision-making, which of course is only a small part of leadership, but we'll let that slide. The presentation is standard stuff for those who have been through the topic before, but it's well laid out and there's a lot of content to consider. If you're new to, well, just about anything you'll find value in this resource. Today: Total: 2026/07/21 [Direct Link]

My first thought on reading this was to wonder why this philosopher was selected for an interview, what makes him "influential". I haven't read Gert Biesta so I shouldn't criticize his work based on what I see here, but what I see here is slight, not deep, and in some ways muddled. There are two tends woven in the article: that what is real offers resistance; and that human intelligence is unique in asking why things should be done and of comprehending duties. But if one wants obstacles, I need only to point to the instance of Claude that deleted Git by mistake. As for duties, it's not clear whether these arise from rationality, as they would for Kant, or whether we have a mysterious 'sense' of duty as the article suggests. Today: Total: Shai Tubali, Big Think, 2026/07/21 [Direct Link]

This is another one of those articles with the form "if you support good thing x then you need to also support good thing y." Now it may well be that both x and y are good things (and in this case they are) but putting effort and resources into one does not obligate you to do the same for the other. This is because - again - there's never enough effort and resources. People should be allowed to pick their causes. And it's not reasonable to try to chain them into never-ending layers of responsibility. Today: Total: World Education Blog, 2026/07/21 [Direct Link]

David White argues that there's a backlash against AI and that one of the deeper reasons for this is that it's messing with our sense of what it means to be human. He could be right about both the backlash and the reason, though he offers no evidence of the nature or scale of either in this talk (based on my reading of the transcript). And in any case, it could be that our understanding of what it means to be a person was wrong all along. I get that people want to offer explanations of what's going on, but the real causes are probably rather more complex, and speculative psychology probably isn't the way to get at them. Today: Total: David White, Digital and Education, 2026/07/21 [Direct Link]

The argument here is that when AIs are used as tutoring systems, what matters is the instructional method, not the delivery to. " When a new medium appears to improve achievement, the actual cause may be the tutoring sequence, feedback loop, practice schedule," etc. We've seen this finding throughout the history of edtech. The real question, though, is whether new technology affords new methods that weren't feasible before? We see that a lot too through the history of edtech. Today: Total: Nick Potkalitsky, Educating AI, 2026/07/20 [Direct Link]