Stephen Downes

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."

Many of the criticisms of education technology (edtech) are justified, writes Alexandra Walsh, but the answer isn't to ban edtech, it's to do better. "High-quality student-facing technology should advance learning in ways that other formats cannot, strengthen rigorous classroom communities and give students authentic choices that build self-determination." I agree, of course, but the real issue is marketing and acquisition: how do we convince the people who pay for it to support technology that benefits learners not themselves?

The letter, sourced from Nvidia and signed by dozens of tech companies (including OpenAI, as of today) supports open weights AI models and warns against potential restrictions on them. "Our AI leadership will be judged not by one frontier AI model, but by whether the United States builds a strong, open ecosystem that diffuses into every sector," the letter said. "This is essential for creating opportunities for innovation and prosperity across the country." Related: Jeff Jarvis, AI Communism.

This is at once a summary and a snapshot of a wider discussion involving neural representations. These are "individuable structures or processes in the brain that have a representational role in cognition or behavior." That is, if you have a mental representation of a 'dog', then there is a physical structure (some set of neural states, for example) that serves as a 'vehicle' for that representation. Otherwise, how could the representation play any role in cognition? But what, exactly, is that vehicle? We don't really know; we can't pin it down; this is 'vehicle indeterminacy'. My own stance here is sceptical; I don't think we can talk meaningfully about mental representations as causal or effective agents of cognitive or physical behaviour. The other alternative is what might be called 'content pragmatism' - even if we can't pin it down, the concept of mental representations is useful enough to allow us to use it productively.

Good article that says a couple of important things. The first focuses on how deeply the idea of 'what school is' has been internalized across cultures. "Whatever else school teaches, the one lesson it delivers to every student without exception--more reliably than reading, more durably than mathematics--is what school is... You acquired the grammar of your native language in childhood without anyone teaching it to you explicitly. It runs below your awareness. You cannot state most of its rules, yet you follow them perfectly." The second addresses the function school serves - not simply as a mechanism for passing on knowledge (though it does that) but also as a place to keep children during the day. "The entire adult economy is built on that fact. Every workplace schedule silently assumes it. This is one of the quiet reasons the grammar cannot change: proposals that touch the school day or calendar collide not with pedagogy but with the labor force."