Stephen Downes

I've seen this referenced in a few placed. Tyler Gaw argues, "Those things we're missing aren't gone. They're still right here. They never went anywhere, they just got layered over by time... I don't consider myself an outlier here. I would wager (without any data) that most people who had a personal site and/or blog 20 years ago, still have one today. And there's a high likelihood they've maintained it throughout those years... But Good Internet is still here. We're still making stuff we care about and sharing that stuff on our websites. We're making it for ourselves first, but we're also making it for you." Yup. That would be me. :)

I used to hate groupwork, but that was usually because one of the five problems with collaborative work described by John Spencer in this reasonably detailed article. The problems are: one student does all the work (usually me, heh); one student takes creative control (also me); groupthink (except for me); conflict (usually with me); and project management (not needed, because of me). OK, I jest a bit, but Spencer identifies some good approaches to address these issues (without once mentioning the jigsaw method, though properly speaking that's a cooperative work approach).

I always ask "whose values" when I see stuff titled like this. But anyhow: "The case studies and scenarios in the toolkit are intended as a starting point rather than a prescription. Every teaching context is different, and the activities can be adapted for a wide range of disciplines and levels. By grounding AI integration in design values and pedagogic reflection, we hope the toolkit empowers educators to build confidence, spark debate, and support students in navigating an evolving creative landscape."

"The initiative brings together a consortium of 24 partners from 16 European countries, including 14 beneficiary partners and 10 associated partners...  to reinforce community-led publishing models and improve coordination across disciplines, institutions, and national contexts." Obviously this is a welcome development, especially right after reading about the Canadian initiative. Maybe we're finally releasing the stranglehold of commercial publishers over academic discourse. In case you're curious, the orginaztion is called Activate European Guidance and Incentives for Sustainable Open Access publishing (AEGIS-OA).

This is a long post that is very much worth reading. "In summer 2025, a startup technology company from Silicon Valley announced the launch of a genetic IQ test for embryos," reports Ben Williamson. "Now we could just respond to this by saying it's modern eugenics and snake oil, as other critics have." But we shouldn't. For one thing, despite the questionable ethics, what we've seen is people would if they could. So it could become a thing. And as Williamson makes the case, the necessary infrastructure is already being set up, and it doesn't really matter whether it's a 'real' science or not. "Educational genomics needs to be understood as an inventive science," he writes. It doesn't just unveil what's there, it fabricates or invents "new genomic facts about learning."

We've seen the argument a few times now that computation and embodiment are fundamentally different, and that AI is one, and humans are the other, and that therefore AI cannot be conscious. I linked to The Abstraction Fallacy making this point a few days ago, and Barton Friedland links to Anil Seth's The Mythology of Conscious AI making much the same case back in January. I've covered both here. My response is to collapse the distinction; computation is embodiment (that's why, for me, a 'connection' exists only when one entity can change the state of another). Here, Friedland takes a different approach, combining the two layers via the mechanism of 'augmentation'. "In the human-AI arrangement, value lies not inside the machine, not inside the skull, but in the configuration between them." It's an interesting idea. Writes Friedland: If cognition is distributed, enacted and extended, then the relevant unit of analysis is not the individual brain (biological or artificial), but rather the configuration in which intelligence operates."