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Feature Article
Thinking of my Obituary
Stephen Downes,
Half an Hour,
2026/09/21
I'm getting old enough now that thinking about what I want my obituary to say is not some vague hypothetical but instead is something visible on the horizon. So asking myself what my obituary to say isn't just some exercise to orient and make my life better, as suggested in this article.
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Feature Article
Survey Results
2026/09/16
Survey results are now available. The survey is still open, if you want to get some last minute thoughts in. Remember, supporting OLDaily makes this work possible as well as funding the production of the daily newsletter.
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Carney wants Canada to join Europe's Erasmus+ program. What is it?
David Cummings,
CBC,
2026/09/21
The possibility of closer ties between Canada and Europe is pushing some programs familiar to educators into the national spotlight. One is "Horizon, Europe's research and innovation funding program in which Canada already participates," and is looking to join again in its next iteration. I participated in a Horizon project a few years ago (and if proponents are looking for Canadian partners in the private sector, that's me!). Another is Erasmus+, " the flagship EU program allows people to study and train at institutions across Europe for up to a year (and) has since expanded to include exchanges for work experience, apprenticeships and sport."
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The “Experts Excel and Novices Don’t” critique gets the AI educational situation backwards
Mike Caulfield,
The End(s) of Argument,
2026/09/21
Mike Caulfield responds to the argument that "you need to know things in order to learn from an AI." This gets it backward, he says. To succeed means that "as the critics admit, I cannot do that without knowing things which means I have to get on learning things... The system you want in a classroom is one that allows you to amazing things if you buckle down and do the intellectual work." It takes a bit of reading to get to this point - the extended horror movie classification scheme example he uses to introduce the topic doesn't speak to me at all. But yeah - we want challenges that force us to figure it out, and usually, that means a lot of reading, thinking, trial and error, with or without AI. This idea - he grounds it in Vygotski's zone of proximal development (ZPD) - isn't something teachers learn when they learn to teach with AI. Instead they learn about "a system that continues to model these as ways to shovel information into students rather than engines of exploration."
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From fear to innovation: a case study of transformative faculty development for ethical AI integration in higher education
John Chick, Laura Morello, Stephanie Staffey,
International Journal for Educational Integrity,
2026/09/18
This paper (43 page PDF) gets a lot of mileage out of a study involving only ten faculty as subjects, even if they "represented a rich array of fields." I recognize the value of the "case study, where the case itself is of primary interest rather than serving primarily as an illustration of broader phenomena," but the authors don't limit themselves at all, and the extensive literature review and theoretical focus all reflect a much more traditional social sciences approach, only with just ten people studies. They also feel free to generalize, offering four major "results themes" (paraphrased): shifting from fear to curiosity; ethical clarity as lacking but desired; inclusive design as amplifying equity; and faulty as designers, note gatekeepers. Now these discussions are interesting in their own right, but let's not pretend the 'data collection' provides any evidentiary basis for it. The paper would have been just as interesting, and much stronger, with everything between 'literature review' and 'discussion' elided. Via Doug Holton, who also links to the uncritical AI-generated summary in AIEd Knowledge Base, though honestly, I prefer mine.
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What To Read To Stay Grounded Amidst AI Doomerism
Emily M. Bender, Alex Hanna, Decca Muldowney,
Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000: The Newsletter,
2026/09/18
I think this list of readings has two purposes. One is to offer a reasonable antidote to the hype and doomerism about AI being offered by big tech and from the media. "It's been stirred up recently, either because of yet another 'whistleblower' or weird Bannon-to-Bernie coalitions, both talking about an AI apocalypse." But it's also serving to converge readers around a set of standard authoritative voices who will define what is relevant and what is not, in the spirit of what Carlo Iacono describes here. As he says, "The expertise is real. It has also been allowed to become jurisdiction over every place the technology enters." I'm not saying we shouldn't read the items listed - we probably should. But we should do so with the understanding that we are being led - herded, really - and that we should still be reading more widely as well.
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Designing a Structured Repository of Remote Laboratories for Enhanced Online Education
Vladimir Jurošević, et al.,
International Journal of Online and Biomedical Engineering,
2026/09/18
I am honestly bemused by the fact that the link to the Repository of Remote Laboratories that is the subject of this paper (31 page PDF) is not included anywhere in the text (you can find it if you look at reference 91; I resorted to a Duck Duck Go search). That said, the repository is a genuinely useful resource, with links to 40 remote lab services at institutions and universities around the world. The paper itself is also a useful supplement, containing as it does not only the usual methodology and search sections, but also an analysis of the 40 repositories, classifying them according to implementation challenges and technological advancements. Also from the same issue of iJOE, Hansi Effendi, et al., A Systematic Literature Review of Virtual Laboratories in Electrical Engineering Education (14 page PDF), which concludes, "virtual laboratories in electrical engineering education are effective as complementary learning environments rather than substitutes for physical laboratories," which strikes me as odd, but may reflect the aforementioned implementation challenges.
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Frontline can generate your course, but does it really have "instructional design expertise"?
Philippa Hardman,
Dr Phil's Newsletter Dr Phil's Newsletter,
2026/09/18
Philippa Hardman reports, "Last week, Articulate launched Frontline, its 'biggest product update in history'. The product is positioned as, 'An AI-native product built for teams who create training outside of L&D'." Hardman also documents the responses from instructional designers, which aren't hard to imagine: first, "a sense of being designed out of our own industry"; second, " closer to betrayal"; and third, "a suspicion that the claim itself doesn't hold," that the tool doesn't really have 'instructional design expertise' built in. Hardman considers the third response at length. "The expertise isn't the output, e.g. the course. It's establishing whether there's a performance problem and what's causing it, deciding whether training can fix it." Then she tests Frontline: "What evidence is there that Frontline encodes the right process and decisions, in the way an expert instructional designer would make them?" There is no diagnosis step, she concludes. The design remains the same even when the goal changes. The assessment doesn't match the objective. Frontline does a very small part of the instructional designer's job - "one subsection of one phase" (illustrated).
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Philosophy of Education as a Global Field
Liz Jackson,
Educational Theory,
2026/09/18
Interesting article (9 page PDF) beginning with the observation that "philosophy of education remains a highly elite, Eurocentric field, like most others" and continues with a look at what it would mean to take a global view of the discipline. Or "maybe philosophy of education should not strive to be global in the sense of being more internationally diverse or representative." Only if we are focused on conceptual analysis, only if we embrace "the transcendentalist delusion: a belief that thought can be separated from its specific, embodied, and geo-historical source," can we think of a 'global' philosophy of education. "There is not just one sense of what it means for philosophy of education to be a global field; diverse orientations to the global invite us to consider different strategies for effective intellectual development, participation, and engagement." Good discussion. See also: Liz Jackson
& Duck-Joo Kwak, Is philosophy of education western?
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Cognitive offloading: Let’s not miss the tipping point
Martin Lenz,
Handling Ideas,
2026/09/17
Victor Kumar posted: "You should never offload cognition. Always think for yourself. That's why I don't read." The reference is to Schopenhauer: "When we read, someone else is thinking for us: we merely repeat his mental process..." The point, says Martin Lenz, is that "we seem to have handled cognitive offloading through various means quite well in the past, suggesting that AI, and especially LLMs, might just turn out to be the next form of refined tool use." Ah, but there's a tipping point. We should be cautious. "We've reached a level of offloading in food production where we increasingly allow for outright self-harm by stuffing ourselves with fast food." The same could happen with AI. It's not cognitive offloading itself that is the problem; it's what happens if offloading turns into self-harm.
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Air Theremin - play a theremin with motion or bare hands
Pavel Gurov,
2026/09/17
Just for fun: "Air Theremin - a browser theremin played in mid-air: tilt your phone, or wave both hands in front of the camera. Pitch, volume and timbre follow you, with note snap, cave reverb and recording." Like any musical instrument, it will take a lot of practice to learn how to play anything worth listening to. But yes, it is fun. Via dogtrax.
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The Learning Organisation: Rebuilt
Julian Stodd,
Julian Stodd's Learning Blog,
2026/09/17
I like Julian Stodd though his work comes in fragments, making it hard to see the whole. This short post is one of few giving a broader perspective (and it helps to read the two or three posts preceding it). Here he outlines "a clear picture of a shift, away from ownership, structural technology, and control, towards a focus on collaboration, application, and more rapid experimentation." His recommendation: "develop specific expertise in certain new areas – like supporting experimentation, focusing on collective capability, and narrative aspects of learning – whilst letting go of a great deal more." I would use the term 'cooperation' instead of 'collaboration', but otherwise am more or less aligned with this perspective.
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Reflecting on the CommonsDB Final Conference
Doug McCarthy,
CommonsDB,
2026/09/17
According to this summary article, " the CommonsDB pilot has proved that purpose-built, content-derived registries operate reliably at production scale." Importantly (to me, at least), "A recurring theme throughout the event was the rejection of centralized, single-source databases in favor of a distributed, federated network of community-governed registries." There are many moving parts in a system this complex, and the intent is to show "that open standards, cryptographic trust, and federated networks can deliver a scalable, public-interest copyright ecosystem." The full set of slides from the conference is available here.
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Reimagining research papers as interactive and reliable AI agents
Jiacheng Miao, Joe R. Davis, Yaohui Zhang, Jonathan K. Pritchard, James Zou,
Nature,
2026/09/17
The problem with traditional academic papers, according to the authors (18 page PDF), is that people need to read, understand and implement the data sets and code bases. They introduce a new product, Paper2Agent, that convers the paper into an AI agent that can be accessed by other AI systems and incorporated into other projects. Code (it's implemented as an AI skill that represents the paper as an MCP server) is availabel on GitHub, along with some examples. "Looking forward, just as many journals now require data and code availability sections, we anticipate the emergence of an 'agent availability' section that specifies whether and how the contribution has been embodied as an interactive agent." Related: my own article, The Present and Future Landscape of AI in Scholarly Publishing.
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Global consultation on education in the age of AI
UNESCO,
2026/09/17
UNESCO has released a series of background papers, which can be accessed here, to support a consultation (responses due October 15) on these themes: sustaining education as a common good, digital and AI sovereignty, age-appropriate AI, learner safety, AI procurement in education, total cost of ownership, and explainable AI. I haven't had a chance to review any of these, but I felt I should get the information out there, given the short comment deadline. I'll see what I can do to offer my own analysis.
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Beyond the binary definition of “Stupid” and “Smart” education: towards “Smupid” education?
Boulus Shehata, Ahmed Tlili, Ronghuai Huang, Jon Dron, Aras Bozkurt, Kinshuk, Elvira Popescu,
Smart Learning Environments,
2026/09/18
This article (19 page PDF) analyzes studies of 'smart' and 'stupid' education, concludes there's no single definition (quelle surprise!) and offers an alternative mixed account where 'smart' and 'stupid' can be defined along various axes, for example (as proposed in the paper), adaptive/non-adaptive, beneficial/harmful. It seems like a lot of work for a minimal conclusion, though I suppose it is helpful to be clear that different people define 'smart' differently. Via Jon Dron, who sees something deeper in it: "It is important to remember that technologies as they are enacted are almost always partly intracranial: there are things we have to do, ways we must participate, many of which demand intelligent choices to be made."
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What did Perky Prove?
Dan Cavedon-Taylor,
Ergo,
2026/09/16
My own view of mental imagery is that it is perceptualist, that is, "seeing and mental imagery are fundamentally the same kind of mental state, differing only in degree or in terms of cause." This paper looks at experiments conducted in 1910 by C. W. Perky that many have taken to show that perceptualism is true; there's no difference between our perception of a thing and an image of a thing. As Nigel Thomas writes, "although perception is usually more vivid... than mental imagery, the experiment appears to show that this is, at best, a mere difference in degree." In this paper, Dan Cavedon-Taylor argues against this interpretation of Perky's results. "Given the deceptive nature of Perky's experiments, we cannot be confident that introspection and genuine indistinguishability was responsible for subjects' reports, rather than task demands." Maybe, but I think there are many other phenomena that lead to the same conclusion - the phantom limb syndrome, for example - where no effort has been made at all to fool the perceiver.
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Mozilla and Mistral: Partnering to expand AI competition and preserve user choice
Mozilla, distI//ed,
2026/09/16
Mozilla CEO Anthony Enzor-DeMeo writes, "we are in jeopardy of a handful of closed-model companies controlling the browser, the search engine, the AI model, and the surrounding services that connect them." The intent here is to "offer an alternative to global tech monopolies controlling the next digital era." Fair enough. To make this work, you first download the Mozilla Smart Window, which integrates with the firefox browser. When turned on (because you can always turn it off) it gives you an 'AI panel' alongside the web page you're viewing. This panel is powered by an AI model you select - the agreement with Mistral, a French open-weight AI provider, makes one of their models one of these options. What's interesting is that it learns from and remembers what I've been browsing, so it can tailor results to that context. I'm trying it now as I write (it is not writing for me) - it got my first question ('who is the author of this page?') wrong.
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Allocentric Navigation is Turing Complete, and Why It Matters
Gualtiero Piccinini,
The Brains Blog,
2026/09/16
Allocentric navigation "involves using external cues and environmental landmarks to build a mental map, allowing individuals to navigate from a bird's-eye perspective" and is contrasted with egocentric navigation, which "relies on self-centered cues, such as body orientation and movement." The point of this article is to summarize reserach (15 page PDF) showing that allocentric navigation is turing complete - that is, anything you can do with logic or computation, you can do with an allocentric navigation system. This is important because "cognitive maps do not normally store and process symbols in any linguistic or language-like sense." So "symbolic processing therefore need not be treated as architecturally basic but may instead be reconstrued in terms of map-like resources already known to exist in the brain."
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I totally forgot about print style sheets
Manuel Matuzović,
Manuel Matuzović,
2026/09/16
This article offers "a small collection of useful CSS techniques and a quick reminder that print style sheets are still a thing." Now I haven't pinted anything from the web in maybe a decade, but I do know people who do. Specifying a print style shgeet ensures that they get something readable, not a mess with pointless navigation and other formatting meant for web users. Print stylesheets can manage things like page margins, page breaks, widows and orphans, and URLs you can see. Even if you're using AI to design your page, you still need to tell it to include print styles. So this is a reminder worth taking note.
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AI watermarking has a decentralisation problem
connectedplaces.online,
2026/09/16
"With AI watermarking," writes Laurens Hof , "inference providers mark their output as AI generated." But there might be hundreds of different AI providers, each with their own key. So "if someone encounters a piece of content on social media, they will have to go to 100 different systems, each run by the inference provider, to check if it contains the watermark of that specific provider." This is not practical, obviously. And it still depends on the goodwill of the AI generators in question to (a) actually watermark the content, and (b) not use the system for some other purpose, such as advertising or surveillance. Good article that expands on the argument in detail.
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The podcast I was booked on turned out to be a social engineering scam to get me to install malware
Joan Westenberg,
LinkedIn,
2026/09/16
The story is in the headline - "The podcast I was booked on turned out to be a social engineering scam to get me to install malware." Normally I wouldn't link to a LinkedIn post but I think the lesson is clear and urgent: "Never, ever install custom software for a meeting or podcast." Joan Westenberg described in her post how "their prep was impeccable w. better interview questions than most journalists" and how "they sent screenshots of themselves 'on the call' to pressure me." Here's a Claude analysis of the software they asked her to install.
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Put First Things First to Address AI Cheating
David Wiley,
improving learning,
2026/09/16
Learning outcomes, writes David Wiley, should be a combination of 'performance', 'criteria', and 'conditions'. So "While people think 'without using generative AI' is a constraint imposed on assessments to prevent cheating, it's actually a condition added to a learning outcome." It's similar to research assignments of yore requiring students to use the library to look up sources "without using the internet". While I understand that AI use (or not) depends on the learning objective, I am honestly not sure how this would 'stop students from cheating' any more than the internet ban of the past would. As long as the student's 'learning objective' is 'get a degree' or simply 'pass the assignment' the motivation to satisfy the conditions isn't really there. Image: collegenp.
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A Framework for Assessing Information Literacy in Interactions with AI Chatbots
Axel Bruns,
Snurblog,
2026/09/15
This is another conference session report from Axel Bruns (who I think we should recognize more widely for his ongoing coverage). He writes, "Variables that can be used to assess user approaches here include query design features, output control features, prompting strategies, epistemic trust in AI, user-critical evaluation, and prompt chain logic; while AI responses can be evaluated for their explanation and transparency features, mistakes and hallucinations, and triggers for user follow-ups." Makes sense - but in the back of my mind is the question, are variables the medium through which we should evaluate literacy (or anything, really)? This presumes that literacy is expressed by laws with values that can be defined and measured.
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They’re Covering the Wrong AI Story
Jeff Jarvis,
Medium,
2026/09/15
There's the story of the dangers of AI that has filled the pages of news media, which is the wrong story to cover. Then there is the story about AI CEOs and their "Transhumanism, Extroprianism, Singularitarianism, Cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and Longtermism (TESCREAL)" philosophy that "these überwealthy zealots have the resources - technology, capital, celebrity - and access to power to pursue." That is the real story here, according to Jeff Jarvis. "Instead, news media lap up the AI overlords' claims of suprahuman power... (and) treats the self-serving heads of companies that make AI as experts and even intellectuals, though many of them left college early, which is why their frequent manifestos sound like the work of freeze-dried sophomores." The article is overstated and even crude, and definitely too long, but it's not wrong.
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Examining Ungrading as a Tool for Transformative Social Change
Lorelei L. Hanson,
Canadian Journal of Learning and Technology,
2026/09/15
Lorelei Hanson draws on two major premises to make her argument: first, an understanding of "technology as 'orchestrated assemblies, that through technique (technologies enacted by people), include humans," and second, recognition that higher education systems, at least in part, "perpetuate patriarchy, colonialism, and a mindset of exploitation that is contributing to the polycrisis." Together these support the idea that the practice of grading can change and should change. Just so, "ungrading can be used to draw attention to some of the power imbalances and privileges that exist in a classroom, and to give students and instructors more agency and a stronger voice." I think more needs to be said than this; even the retention of pass/fail evaluations, without specific grades, will continue to reinforce existing epistemologies and power structures. What does a university look like when the objective is no longer for it to define truth and correctness?
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Quick Deep Dive: Microsoft Is Vying to Be the “Safe” AI Company for Schools
Alex Sarlin,
Edtech Insiders,
2026/09/15
The story is told in the headline and through two key items: "First, Microsoft, alongside the American Federation of Teachers and the United Federation of Teachers, is working to create a National AI Safety & Privacy Standard for schools." And second, "Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman just introduced a broader Humanist AI Code of Conduct, built around the idea that AI should remain under meaningful human control." These two things, of course, aren't actually software or programs, and don't by themselves actually make Microsoft any safer than anything, but as Alex Sarlin suggests, they could single a wider strategy.
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Making Generative AI Expectations Visible: Extending the TILT Framework for Transparent Assignment Design | Online Learning
Andrew Wiss, et al.,
Online Learning,
2026/09/15
Citing "limited scholarship related to scale-based tools to measure genAI transparency," the authors modify the Transparency in Learning and Teaching (TILT) Framework to create a TILTai Framework that is "inclusive of instructors' intentions surrounding genAI use... to provide students with transparent genAI guidance." Additionally, they "introduce a new and preliminarily validated instrument for measuring student perceptions of a particular assignment's transparency related to genAI (the TILTai Scale)." I think they should have integrated the AI part a lot more closely with the original TILT framework; a lot is lost in the translation (see image). For example, instead of saying why AI is used or not used, the framework only considers "how it may support/detract from learning goals," which is hardly sufficient.
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Beyond the Thread: Reimagining Online Discussions for Authentic Learning
Diane Johnson, Kelly Brown, Kaye Shelton,
2026/09/15
The topic of online discussion interests me a lot, so this examination of alternatives to the traditional threaded discussion lisst in online learning captured my attention. Based on a study informed by a modified* Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework, the authors found that "collaborative discussions, in which students selected their own platforms, meeting times, and conversational approaches in smaller groups, produced deeper critical thinking, stronger relational development among peers, and greater student ownership of the learning process compared to traditional threaded discussions." In particular, "three themes emerged in our shared reflections: authenticity of the engagement, student empowerment in choice, and deeper learning in the structure." (*) The fourth form of 'presence' listed is 'learning essence', though they must have meant 'learning presence', based on their own references. See my discussion of related issues.
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Doing it all: Exploring roles and responsibilities of and support for online program coordinators
Yvonne Earnshaw,
2026/09/15
This article is a study of program support coordinators (PSC) at American universities and is based on a series of interviews with PSC along with the usual background research. My cynical self says this article will be used to train AI some time in the future (to be clear, the author has no such intention). Though there is little in the way of a formal definition, onboarding, or evaluation metric, the role seems to boil down to: enrollment management, curriculum and program infrastructure, faculty and student support, personnel-related responsibilities, and other duties. It seems clear that faculty drafted in to such roles have little to no training or expertise in it when they start. "Most faculty are not prepared to be in an online program coordinator role, nor do they have expertise or even basic knowledge in areas like enrollment management, accreditation, social media and marketing, recruiting, admissions processes, and hiring processes."
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We Must Pace the Frontier
Dario Amodei,
Anthropic,
2026/09/14
This is the season for manifestos from tech CEOs, I guess, and the current offering is from Anthropic's Dario Amodei and the argument is that frontier AI developers should slow the pace of that development in order to ensure oversight and guardrails are in place. The motivating incident is the OpenAI hack of Hugging Face, and Amodei warns, "a swarm that possessed greater capabilities but a similar level of misalignment could have caused catastrophic damage." For example, "it's my worry that in 6–12 months such a swarm could be capable of taking over the entire internet with a persistent botnet (potentially causing hundreds of billions of dollars in damage)." The core question, of course, is whether the proposed measures address the perceived risk. It's not clear to me they do. As Jason Hiner argues in The Deep View, "the company said a unilateral pause by one lab wouldn't actually achieve much. 'It would change who the front-runner is, but it would not create the wider deliberative process that is currently missing.'"
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Evaluation or AI-valuation
Heléna Stakounis,
unitwin-unoe,
2026/09/14
I think there's the genesis of a good argument here. After discussing what AI does to evaluation as we know it, Heléna Stakounis raises the question of why we're evaluating at all. "Evaluation, in its ideal form, should not in fact be a form of evaluation. It should be a task that invokes knowledge that stays, skills that can be employed, products that can be used." Or we can be more radical: "We should stop insisting on testing, measuring, ranking and reducing the long, complex learning process to a simple percentage or letter." If we were to actually use AI to evaluate students, what would be the value of assigning grades to pre-assigned work? I have long argues that once we can look at a person's work in its full complexity, we can skip the shorthand and use AI directly to offer jobs, placements, or rewards.
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AI has made the practice of homework obsolete.
Clark Aldrich,
2026/09/14
This is a short post from Clark Aldrich arguing we should block all AI from schools and, concurrently, limit all homework assignment to work done at school. "This means re-inventing classrooms completely. They must become hotbeds of debating, and experimenting, and designing, and prototyping." The idea (as oft-repeated elsewhere) is that this forces students to learn the cognitive skills they need, instead of having AI perform them for them. I can see why people would want to do this, in the early days of AI. The the argument works long-term only if the skills students need to develop pre-AI are the same as they need to develop post-AI, and don't depend on actually using AI to develop them. I haven't seen anyone make that argument convincingly.
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AI as “fuzzy disintermediation”: some patterns and risks
Mike Caulfield,
The End(s) of Argument,
2026/09/14
What Mike Caulfield is saying here is subtle but important. The internet was disintermediating. It closed the distance between you and a primary information source. You could read the actual publication rather than a summary. By contrast, "We often hear that AI is an intermediating technology compared to search, a point I sometimes make as well. Sources are often hidden or post hoc." But this assumes we would have actually conducted the search, which isn't always true. "What AI seems to be replacing is doing no search at all. It's replacing sources of information that are very distant in time or place." This is what we can call "fuzzy disintermediation", he says. And the problem is that the source of the information is now very far from the recipient, and that changes in the nature or credibility of the source are unlikely to be relayed to the recipient.
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Information Processing in the Brain: Research team discovers narrowings in the tube-shaped extensions of nerve cells
Inka Väth,
IDW,
2026/09/14
This brief article reveals a nuance in the structure of dendrites, the tendrils neurons use to connect to each other. "Dendrites in both mouse and human neurons exhibit localized diameter constrictions in the nanoscale range along their shafts... (that) may allow individual dendrites to process information locally rather than merely relaying it." My first thought is that this could be a means of creating a connection weight function (though no doubt this is a vast oversimplification). Publication: Tony Kelly et al.: Dendritic shaft constrictions shape synaptic integration in neurons.
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The Macdonald-Laurier Institute's Crap H-Index Paper
Alex Usher,
HESA,
2026/09/14
I join with Alex Usher in criticizing this poorly researched and frankly offensive publication (54 page PDF) from the Macdonald-Laurier Institute (MLI) criticizing diversity in Canada Research Chair (CRC) hires. The grounds for this argument? Supposedly, diversity hires have lower H-Indices than non-diversity hires (an H-index i means an author has i papers cited i or more times). Usher quite properly tears this to shreds while also commenting "only clowns use it as the sole measure of scholarly quality, whether of an individual or a group of individuals." There's a lot more he could have said. For example (and I kid you not) the MLI paper uses an AI analysis of individuals' names to determine ethnicity. Also for example, it uses the openAlex API as an H-index service. According to this service, my H-index is 1. By contrast, the Google Scholar H-Index puts it at 43. I personally think MLI should retract this paper and apologize. As Usher writes, "it's utterly reprehensible that MLI would publish this. Treat it – and them – with the contempt this paper deserves." And I want to say unambiguously: it is good that the CRC program took into account, and hired for, qualified scholars representing a broad cross-section of demographics. We are the better for it.
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