The Atproto Spaces Alpha is Live
Daniel Holmgren,
AT Protocol,
2026/08/21
One of the more controversial decisions made by the developers at Bluesky in the early days was to make all data public. That is, your personal data store (PDS) could be read by anybody. In what they describe as "the biggest update to atproto since it launched", the managers of the specification behind Bluesky have created 'Atproto Spaces': "You can think of an atproto space as a miniature atproto network that can be gated so that only certain people and applications are able to access the data published in it." So, in other words, private gated personal data. Still not secure, though: "It's important to remember that spaces give you access control not confidentiality. The data in a space is readable by any user or application with access to that space, it's not encrypted." Here's an example: secretsky.
Web: [Direct Link] [This Post][Share]
Agentic AI is Available to Teachers at No Cost. Here's a Job Worth Giving It.
Jason Neiffer,
Substack,
2026/08/21
This article describes how a teacher revisited curricular materials that have been untouched for years, organized them, and compared them against the current standard for gaps, then rebuilding them. "Look at what actually got built here without touching a single student record: a dusty, sixteen-year-old archive rebuilt, a 297-page College Board framework read start to finish, a curriculum audit nobody had an afternoon to run, and a seven-week plan tied to a real school calendar." You probably don't need to read the article in detail to appreciate the point. Via Wes Fryer.
Web: [Direct Link] [This Post][Share]
Vine reboot Divine is now open to everyone, no invite code required
Karissa Bell,
Engadget,
2026/08/21
According to this and several otger articles, Divine has opened to the public and no longer requires invitation codes. Divine is a reboot of Vine, a short-video streaming app that was popular before the rise of TikTok and Loops and the like. The appeal of Divine (in theory at least) will be originality; videos will need to be created directly within the app, and AI is detected and blocked. "None of the stuff you see on Divine was ever on other platforms before, it was either on Vine originally or it's now on Divine. You're not going to see the same thing that you see on TikTok and Instagram." What's interesting is that Divine is based on Nostr, a federation protocol similar to ActivityPub and ATProtocol. There's also a story on BBC News which may or may not display for you - BBC is setting up geo-based walls, or at least, is trying to. See also Videoweek, Technology.org. Here's my one-video Divine.
Web: [Direct Link] [This Post][Share]
A Vision for PK–12 Computer Science Education
Computer Science Teachers Association,
2026/08/21
This is a proposed set of standards (218 page PDF) from the Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA) for computer science education for primary and secondary students (aka. K-12). It depicts computer science as "a scientific and creative discipline focused on understanding and designing algorithms, data, and computing systems," with an emphasis on such things as algorithmic thinking, collaboration, ethics and responsibility with the set defined as concepts and practices. There's far too much in here to summarize, but it appears well thought-out and comprehensive, including core elements of traditionall computr science as well as consideration of newer AI-based methods. Via the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).
Web: [Direct Link] [This Post][Share]
Practitioner Voice
Jim Highsmith,
martinfowler.com,
2026/08/20
This article is kind of weird because it's written by Jim Highsmith and appears on Martin Fowler's website and says things like, "Martin Fowler writes this way. His best pieces don't build to the conclusion, they open with it," etc. Looking beyond that, the article purports to name something that hasn't been named, 'practitioner voice', that is, writing done by people who actually do the thing (which arguably forms the majority of the content in my newsletter). It's not a new idea - here's a reference to it from 2019. Here's one from 2024. And it doesn't follow any single form, much less the model proposed here ("Academic writing builds to the claim. Thought leadership makes the claim and explains it. Practitioner Voice starts with the claim..."). There isn't so much a 'claim' in practitioner writing as an 'experience'. Academics then 'discover' that experience, and influencers copy it and try to make it popular.
Web: [Direct Link] [This Post][Share]
Superslop, and How It Will Kill Your Book Deal
Michael O. Church,
72 Degrees North,
2026/08/20
What I like about this article is that it gives us an extended extract from the beginning of Winter Takes One, "an 89,000-word upmarket thriller" that was written by an AI and "led to a four-way bidding war and a $3.5 million, two-book deal." It's an example of 'superslop', AI writing that actually fools professional editors. I also agree with the conclusions, two of them: "Commercial writing, at any level of quality, might be dead. It's already nearly impossible for a writer to earn a living on the quality of text"; and "Superslop will continue to evolve. It will defeat AI autograders. It will defeat human literary agents." Photo by me.
Web: [Direct Link] [This Post][Share]
The Most Expensive Private School in Oklahoma: And It Has No Teachers
Tim Green,
SmarterArticles,
2026/08/20
This article might have a good story to report - an Oklahoma school that is completely automated that costs more than any other school in the state. But it's mostly an exercise in weak AI writing - see the process here. On the surface it seems to be well written, but oh! it goes on and on and on, doesn't have any real sense of a narrative arc (much less of the inverted pyramid), and is filled with filler. I read every one of the 5104 words in what should have been, at most, a 1000 word article. So much agony! Like this: "W. Ian O'Byrne, an associate professor of literacy education at the College of Charleston who has studied digital literacy for two decades, put the pedagogical objection cleanly in The Conversation on 15 June 2026: effective learning is not always efficient." Or, "The legal position is worse than most parents will assume." Or "The second half of the question is what this does to teaching as an occupation, and here the answer has less to do with any individual school than with the signal a price sends."
Web: [Direct Link] [This Post][Share]
You can hear the squeak of sphincters closing
Doc Searls,
Doc Searls Weblog,
2026/08/19
I don't use AI to write any of my text mostly because (a) I think I'm a better writer, and (b) the AI can't draw on my experience the way I can. The first may be hubris and is entirely subject to change, but I can't imagine the second ever changing. I don't have any opposition to AI, and I use it to generate code and to remove noise from my photos. And it's OK with me if other people use AI to write (though I really wish they would optimize for brevity). But key in all this is that AI is a tool that should be subject to the wishes of the person using the tool, and that's where Anthropic's watermark fails. "Watermarking is misdirection: a way for goods to appear to do one kind of thing while secretly doing another. Real writers (e.g. Gruber, Teare, and Jarvis) are calling bullshit on it." This is really important, because if it can secretly do one thing, then it can secretly do any number of things. I can protect my code with tests and my images with my eye, but there's no way to protect my writing.
Web: [Direct Link] [This Post][Share]
The College Success Rulebook: Practical Advice for College and Beyond
Nathan Nobis,
2026/08/19
I'm not sure what advice I would give to students any more. It wouldn't be this (24 page PDF) - it would never have been this, which mostly amounts to "do what you're told" with a little bit of "show some initiative" added. That would never have worked for me, and would leave students falling far short of getting the best out of university. I think there are three keys to success (or, at least, there were, before AI): writing well, which also supports reading well, and is the key that unlocks the content; connecting with other students to share the workload; and extracurricular activities to develop skills in what's valuable to you. The usual "habits of excellence" help if the details become overwhelming, but for the most part success is created when you define what counts as success and then work the system to attain that.
Web: [Direct Link] [This Post][Share]
Young people, learning, and generative AI: A rapid literature review and implications for PreK-12 education
Natasha Arthars, Hongzhi (Veronica) Yang, Matthew Hill, Danny Liu, Lina Markauskaite,
Barker Institute, University of Sydney,
2026/08/19
This report (52 page PDF) is styled as a 'rapid literature review', and while I'm not exactly sure what that means (I've asked) the result is still worth a look. The authors studied 271 of 975 papers considered to compile research which is admittedly still in its early stages. "Affective gains are common. GenAI use is often associated with increased interest, engagement, motivation, and reduced anxiety," however, "evidence of impact on higher-order reasoning, transfer, self-regulated learning, and durable learning is more uneven." A lot depends on external factors (this should surprise no one). "This includes the characteristics and developmental needs of learners, how the GenAI tool is designed, what the task asks students to do, who participates in the activity, and the wider cultural and institutional context."
Web: [Direct Link] [This Post][Share]
The Three Screens That Made Us Still
LarsGoran Bostrom,
SOE PublishingLab,
2026/08/19
I am of the belief that television caused far more harm to society than social media ever did, or even could. As LarsGoran Bostrom writes, "Television did not assault its viewers. It invited them to surrender. The screen demanded attention but offered no resistance, no requirement for response beyond the passive receipt of images flowing at thirty frames per second." Into the passive and receptive receiver it poured propaganda and advertising, building a comfortable mythology alongside a consumer society. I've always felt that digital technology offered a possible way out. Bostrom writes, "Will we remain the watched, the fed, the guided? Or will we reclaim the role of the watcher, the thinker, the one who chooses? The answer depends on whether we remember how to turn off the screen..." No. Not exactly that. The answer depends on whether we use the screen, or whether we merely let it use us.
Web: [Direct Link] [This Post][Share]
Open edX & n8n: Build Powerful Dynamic Workflows
Abstract Technology,
2026/08/19
The details of this are useful mostly to OpenEdX users, but the concept generalizes and is worth noting. In a learning management system (LMS) things happen - a person registers, a grade changes, etc. - and this has an impact on external systems or should trigger actions. Most every LMS has a set of notifications - in OpenEdX they're Django signals - that are created when these events happen. Usually the provider writes code to 'wire' them to other systems. This article describes how an automation platform called N8N is used instead to perform the same function. You can try this for yourself, but I would reserve more than a weekend for it.
Web: [Direct Link] [This Post][Share]
Engaging Digital Learners Through Affective Objectives
Sarah Sniderman,
IntechOpen,
2026/08/19
The 'affective domain' describes how we feel about things. "We know that interest, confidence, motivation, and commitment impact learner engagement and performance, but how do we design for these feelings in an intentional way?" That's the question posed in this article, and it draws on Krathwohl's Taxonomy to offer a response: receiving, responding, valuing, organization, and characterization. Unfortunately the meaning of these terms appears to have drifted through time: for example, we read here that 'receiving' is "being aware of or sensitive to the existence of certain ideas, material, or phenomena and being willing to tolerate them", which in this paper it is characterized as "learner pays attention". Similarly, valuing is originally described as "willing to be perceived by others as valuing certain ideas, materials, or phenomena," while here it is "learner believes that what s/he is learning is worthy."
Web: [Direct Link] [This Post][Share]
Senate Subcommittee Holds Hearing on How Corporations Use AI Surveillance to Set and Charge Consumers Higher Prices
NTD,
2026/08/19
This is a video recording of a Senate Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism hearing titled "Your Data, Their Profit: The Consumer Cost of AI Surveillance Pricing." If you don't have the 90 minutes to watch the video, Liz Brandt has written a summary on LinkedIn. The idea here is that companies use surveillance technology to learn about you and then adjust their prices accordingly. Practices include, for example, charging more for a Lyft ride if your phone battery is low, being charged $150 more if you're in the Target store, selling personal data, and changing electronic price labels minute by minute. I think that if education has a role in all this (and it should, right?) it should be in helping people respond: building connections, sharing information, forming cooperatives, organizing, the like. We don't see that so much in education. Usually students learn how to work for companies rather than to push back against them.
Web: [Direct Link] [This Post][Share]
How Claude's text watermarking works
Anthropic,
2026/08/18
There has been a lot of discussion about Anthropic's proposed 'watermarking' of AI-generated content. This article explains how it works, which in turn informs our intuitions about why it's so objectionable. Basically, what the system does is to subtly alter word selection when generating text, creating a difference in the probability of what it outputs as compared to what it would ideally output. This difference is essentially a 'signature' attributing the content to a certain AI. Anthropic will later offer an API which allows people to test for thaat signature. The problem is, if you use AI, the AI is messing with your text to embed hidden messages in that text, which is (to say the least) problematic. John Gruber calls it patently offensive. Tim Moon and others calls it a digital scarlet letter.
Web: [Direct Link] [This Post][Share]
rabbithole: type a word, fall in
reppie,
rabbithole,
2026/08/18
This is a clever tool that helps the reader explore deeper and deeper into a topic. Pick something to explore and it surfaces a bunch of related resources: "surprising associations, facts, links and short videos around anything." You can read the resources or pick one of the new associated concepts to dig even deeper (click on the title, then the 'dig deeper button' - the interface isn't intuitive). I guess my only criticism is that you tend to get more and more general as you dig; my search on B200, for example, led to 'neural network' and 'matrix multiplication' (it's like the old saw where when you followed the links in Wikipedia, you always ended up at Philosophy). Via Nele Hirsch.
Web: [Direct Link] [This Post][Share]
I didn't set a cookie.
Kuber Mehta,
I didn't set a cookie.,
2026/08/18
This is "a live demonstration of everything a website learns about you before you click anything. No cookies, no permissions, no consent dialog. Nothing is stored." And yet, it can create a precise 'fingerprint' of your browser and computing environment detailed enough to create a profile that can be reused over time. It's a nice, effective demonstration that makes a compelling point. Via Grant Potter.
Web: [Direct Link] [This Post][Share]
Dickovers, baggravation and botiquette: 18 new words to describe our tech hellscape
Stuart Heritage,Ling Ko,
The Guardian,
2026/08/18
We've all experienced the many irritants that tech has brought into our everyday lives - everything from panes that cover up the content (aka 'dickover'), one of which you'll experience on this article as you go to read it, to anoying email subscriptions following product purchases ('limpitlisting'), self-checkout travails ('baggravation'), parking lots that require you to download an app ('parkware'), and products that require fees in order to be used ('hostageware'), among many more. Someone should write an article with an equivalent list for edtech.
Web: [Direct Link] [This Post][Share]
They used an umbrella as a microphone to report a broken road; 3 Maharashtra schoolgirls went viral and got results
The Times of India,
2026/08/18
Readers by now know how much I like stories like this. Here, three schoolgirls recorded a video 'news report' (using an umbrella as a microphone) to document the potholes in the road they use to walk to school. You can see the video in this report on OneIndia. According to this article authorities saw the report, which went viral, and repaired the road. OneIndia reports, though, that the filling of potholes after monsoons has become an annual ritual. That doesn't detract at all though from what was the students' best educational experience of the week.
Web: [Direct Link] [This Post][Share]
Mozilla’s CTO thinks AI should be built like the internet
Itika Sharma Punit,
Rest of World,
2026/08/18
This is a good interview with Mozilla's CTO Raffi Krikorian. Mozilla is the company that distributes the open Firefox browser, which is what I use daily. He "explains why businesses are turning to open-source and open-weight AI models for greater control over data, costs, and customization." I think there's going to be a lag in open weight models (much lss fully open source models) because the cost of running them is still too high. The Canadian Cohere model called Command A Plus requires at least one B200 GPU set, which costs $6 per hour to run (or $45K to buy). Now I remember when Compuserve cost $6 per hour to access, back in the 1980s. So we can imagine a world in which this is attainable for most people. But it won't be soon. Meanwhile, though, it makes sense to focus on the creation of the open source infrastructure we need to make sure that when the time comes, it actually is available to all. Image: Nvidia. See also: What's going on with open weight models?
Web: [Direct Link] [This Post][Share]
The Present and Future Landscape of AI in Scholarly Publishing
Stephen Downes,
International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning,
2026/08/18
"Artificial intelligence will have a substantial impact on journal publication," according to this report (20 page PDF), which I wrote. The article "surveys existing examples, practices, and tools" but more importantly points to "the wider trend, which sees new practices being developed at every point of the research publication process. That is why not only are AI trends useful, so are trends that also challenge the model of publishing itself, such as the Octopus project." Indeed, for example, "Perhaps the journal should be something else entirely. Perhaps one part of it could function as a pre-registration of empirical research with another part devoted to replicating previous results, and yet another for theoretical integration (assuming we have a common understanding of the role of theory in an era of mass data)." Image: Scholarly World.
Web: [Direct Link] [This Post][Share]
Thanks For Joining the Movement: French Constitutional Council Strikes Down Kids’ Social Media Ban
Michael Geist,
2026/08/17
As Michael Geist observes, the Canadian plan for a ban on youth social media use is vulnerable to challenges on two grounds: "freedom of expression, since blocking an entire cohort of Canadians from accessing information and expressing themselves on social media infringes Section 2(b) of the Charter, and privacy, since enforcing the ban will require millions of Canadians to verify their age to use social media services." As noted here, a French court overturned that country's ban on similar grounds. "A different movement may soon emerge, one that rejects ill-considered bans as unconstitutional on both expression and privacy grounds," he writes.
Web: [Direct Link] [This Post][Share]
Media Use and Wellbeing
Media Smarts,
2026/08/17
After this overview there are five short pieces about media use and young people. It's a level-headed assessment and seeks to correct popular misconceptions (for example: "Our sense of how much time other people – for instance, our children – are spending on media is often inaccurate." And it argues that healthy use is defined by self-control, not screen time: "To promote healthful media use, we have to develop kids' sense that they understand the digital world, that they can control their interaction with it and that their interactions are purposeful. With the exception of the very youngest kids, therefore, our goal isn't to reduce screen time as much as possible, but to help them develop habits that will let them balance the harms and benefits."
Web: [Direct Link] [This Post][Share]
For students who make websites
L. Jeffrey Zeldman,
Jeffrey Zeldman Presents,
2026/08/17
According to this short item, "WordPress.com maker Automattic is expanding into education with a new, free product designed for teachers and their classes called WordPress.com Education. The suite for classrooms includes a full WordPress.com domain for each student, plus free domain names (on the .blog or .art domains) and plug-in support." See also this item on TechCrunch. Reclaim Hosting, of course, has been offering Domain of One's Own for years, and Edublogs (Incsub) a similar service for even longer.
Web: [Direct Link] [This Post][Share]
This newsletter is sent only at the request of subscribers. If you would like to unsubscribe, Click here.
Know a friend who might enjoy this newsletter? Feel free to forward OLDaily to your colleagues. If you received this issue from a friend and would like a free subscription of your own, you can join our mailing list. Click here to subscribe.
Copyright 2026 Stephen Downes Contact: stephen@downes.ca
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.