Stephen Downes

There's some buzz in the socials about the recent refocus at Bonfire, an online community platform. "Bonfire was never meant to be one more feed that grabs your attention. Today it takes the shape we've been building toward: Bonfire for communities. A tool for groups that need to organise together, not just post at each other. Shipping today: groups and topics, events, shared organisation profiles, embeddable federated comments, customisable themes, and a first set of governance tools." Suggested applications include publications, research groups, and communities. It's free and open source, and this in particular is a good strategy: "Bonfire combines the power of federation and open data formats to create interoperable toolkits that people can use to easily build their own apps to meet their specific needs."

If you want to learn about the causes and solutions to airplane crashes you'd be hard pressed to find a better source than Mayday, a video series comprising almost 500 episodes of dramatization, description and analysis. I've watched almost all of them. Here's the episode for Air France Flight 447, the airliner that disappeared over the Atlantic in 2009. What the series teaches you most of all is to eschew simplistic analyses like "the aircraft asked its pilots to do the one thing they had stopped practising: fly it themselves... the judgment underneath it had gone soft, and nobody noticed until it was needed." Yes, there was a training and ergonomic design issue that contributed to the crash. Training is often among the culprits. But what the series makes clear is that these are singular and generally unprecedented cases in a system of pilot craft, training and automation that works extremely well. Nobody is "abdicating judgment" on an airline crew. It's a severe case of misdiagnosis to suggest otherwise.

This article is a combination of quotes from Simon Buckingham Shum and Michael Feldstein, economic data about the size of the education market ($6 trillion, if you're interested), and an overview of some recent advances into education by OpenAI and Anthropic. In this case, though, one plus one plus one does indeed make three. "Let's not be naive," says Simon Buckingham Shum, professor of learning informatics at University of Technology Sydney, adding that education is "absolutely a marketplace for these companies". Via Mark Oehlert, who calls the article a "signal".

This is a good list of new and alternative browsers. "2026 has brought a wave of new entrants — from well-funded startups to Big Tech — all betting that the browser is about to become less like a window onto the web and more like an assistant that gets things done for you." OK, I can sort of see that. But what's really mysterious is the complete lack of any mention of Firefox - the brower I use on a daily basis. The other thing it doesn't address is whether any of these can perform the most basic function Firefox allows for me - block advertising. (Yes, that's right, I don't see advertising when I browse the web).

We don't read about it a lot in the English-language press, but as this article reports,  "long before the term "Diamond Open Access" existed, or became a term international policy bodies reached for, it was simply how most of Latin America published research. Public universities ran their own journals and provided hosting either internally or by partnering with fellow institutions. Editors worked without author fees because the idea of charging researchers to publish, or readers to read, never took hold the way it did elsewhere." The article describes how the Public Knowledge Project (PKP) Open Journal Systems (OJS) played a role in this region, and how it learned from it in turn.

Fresh from the heat of D2L Fusion, Phil Hill takes a look at the company's product strategy. It's a good overview I'm sure will please company officials. "I saw much more coherence in strategy. Core Brightspace got unglamorous, daily-friction investment with dates attached. The announced Learner Mode is perhaps the most pedagogically explicit answer to the ChatGPT question (although still a bet). The content strategy is cleaner across native tools through Creator+ and H5P up to CreateSpace, with services added on top."