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What is HAX
Bryan Ollendyke, et al., 2023/06/06

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I saw this at the Reclaim Open conference (online) today, and while I thought it was a good idea, the presentation and documentation were almost impenetrable. As nearly as I can judge, HAX is a system for authoring web components and inserting them into NPM, Drupal and WordPress websites (among others). What are web components? "Web components are a set of web platform APIs that allow you to create new custom, reusable, encapsulated HTML tags to use in web pages and web apps." How do we use them? "Using a custom element is as simple as importing it, and using the new tags in an HTML document." Ack... they said 'simple'. Run away, run away. Seriously, the trick is in importing them. You create some Javascript code (that's what HAX does) that produces some HTML code, and then it just works in a browser. What makes HAX different (again, as nearly as I can tell) is that it integrates these into various content management systems. Anyhow, this isn't the presentation from the conference but a more useful presentation explaining how to install it on Reclaim Cloud.

 

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Two steps for L&D - Learnlets
Clark Quinn, Learnlets, 2023/06/06

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Clark Quinn  argues there are two things learning and development ahould be doing: measuring results, and "looking at going beyond courses. Not just performance support, but here I'm talking about informal and social learning, e.g. innovation." So, first, I guess people have been saying these things since forever, though the go-to is still the page-turner online course (my employer just throws these at me like confetti). But more significant are the deeper questions Quinn doesn't touch: what should be measured? How are informal and social learning best supported? How do you get from the point where the company is stuffing mandatory training into employees' brains to the sort of learning that is self-motivated, ongoing, and productive? For people who go on and on about 'myths' there's certainly a lack of soul-searching in the corporate e-learning community.

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Why AI Will Save the World | Andreessen Horowitz
Marc Andreessen, Andreessen Horowitz, 2023/06/06

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This article (though undated) came out today, and it's interesting reading. I wouldn't say I agree with it about everything (and especially the discussion of AI Risk #4, which is just wrong-headed), but there's a lot of overlap with my own thinking. Especially this: "Big AI companies should be allowed to build AI as fast and aggressively as they can – but not allowed to achieve regulatory capture." And this: "Open source AI should be allowed to freely proliferate and compete with both big AI companies and startups." I don't agree that "there should be no regulatory barriers to open source whatsoever" - that would be stupid; it should be illegal to use AI for the things that are already illegal. But the sort of thing Apple pulled this week - more than 5,000 patents for the Vision Pro - should not be allowed in AI either.

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Accessibility Powered by AI: How Artificial Intelligence Can Help Universalize Access to Digital Content
Hong Zhou, Sylvia Izzo Hunter, The Scholarly Kitchen, 2023/06/06

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While most people are running around in a panic about AI in education, fewer, it seems to me, are writing about how AI will open access to people. The authors write, "More than 1 billion people around the world have some type of disability (including visual, hearing, cognitive, learning, mobility, and other disabilities) that affects how they access digital content. Digital transformation can (turn) it into an inclusive place for people with and without disabilities, with accessibility powered by artificial intelligence. This post provides an overview of how AI can improve accessibility in different ways, illustrated with real-world applications and examples." There's the ubiquitous warning that "creating accessible content and systems requires a collaborative effort that includes publishers, product, tech, design, and other teams," because this is the Scholarly Kitchen, a mouthpiece for publishers, but the rest of the article is on point.

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We publish six to eight or so short posts every weekday linking to the best, most interesting and most important pieces of content in the field. Read more about what we cover. We also list papers and articles by Stephen Downes and his presentations from around the world.

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