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Open Education Week Events Calendar
Open Education Week, 2025/03/03

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Open Education Week starts today and this is a calendar of more than 243 events and activities on the OEWeek Calendar. I thought it might be nice to watch the opening keynote being offered by Flower Darby (and still do, as it's an hour from now as I write) but when I tried to find out when it takes place (I still can't convert from UTC in my head) I was led down a rabbit's warren of link after link after link. This I'm afraid got my dander up and I looked at a number of calendar links that did the same - taking me to registration forms, collecting my email, advertising in-person only events, signing people up to text messages, promoting fee-based programs. Not that the organizers of OEWeek are at fault; they're doing the good work needed by all - I think it's just that members of the academic community still don't really agree on what is meant by 'open education'.

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The Cognitive Wilderness
Carlo Iacono, Hybrid Horizons: Exploring Human-AI Collaboration, 2025/03/03

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I get this argument but I want to reframe it. "Each interaction with generative AI subtly reshapes our expectations of what thinking should feel like... We begin to outsource not just the expression of our thoughts but their formation, delegating the essential cognitive processes that once defined intellectual development." If this is true, then it's probably true for any value of 'generative AI'. For example, substitute 'mass media' instead. Now we are delegating cognitive processes to mass media (are we? I will refer the question to viewers of Fox News). Substitute 'reading'. Or 'math class'. All media is an outsourcing of the formation of our thoughts. For better or worse.

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What is Vibe Coding? How Creators Can Build Software Without Writing Code
Jacob Anderson, Creator Toolbox, 2025/03/03

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Doug Belshaw points to this new bit of jargon: 'vibe coding', which "is an AI-assisted approach where you describe your software idea in plain language and the AI writes the code for you." I can dig it. Anyway, D'Arcy Norman offers a good example where he created a sleep monitoring tool by describing what he needs to Claude and iterating back and forth on the result. I feel him on the insomnia thing. There are limits; the AI will build simple tools but can't get too complex yet (for example, it will reliably build an API for one service, but not five). I would imagine these limits will be exceeded in  short order and we'll acquire software not by licensing it but by building it ourselves.

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The Effects of Virtual Tutoring on Young Readers: Results from a Randomized Controlled Trial
Qingyang Zhang, Rose E. Wang, Ana T. Ribeiro, Dora Demszky, Susanna Loeb, arXiv, 2025/03/03

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This paper from some researchers at Stanford is getting some attention so I took a look. "Our study quantifies who's getting (attention) and who's not, contexts where students are getting attention, and the surprising gaps that emerge," writes one of the authors in an email. Maybe, but it's a very narrow look. It studies only U.S. students being tutored in pairs online in the context of a tutoring program they are coy about naming, but which the reference cited reveals to be called OnYourMark (somehow found on page 01623737241288845 (which equates to page 8)). The only variables considered are gender, race, and ability. It's random only in the sense that they looked at everything - all "157,970 utterances from 5,249 2-on-1 tutoring session." Do in-person educators discriminate in tutoring sessions? Probably, but I wouldn't conclude it from this study.

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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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