Stephen Downes

All I can say is, what did you expect? "Authors claim they have not been told about the AI deal, were not given the opportunity to opt out and are receiving no extra payment." I think it's good that academic papers are being used to train AI - it's far better than using Twitter posts. But deals like this are characteristic of what we will get if we continue to support a closed-access publication system. If we want open access to AI, we have to offer open access to our publications. If you don't like the idea of corporate AI running everything, then you have to be willing to contribute to training the alternative. Simply saying "there should be no AI" is not an alternative. Via Robin DeRosa.

According to this story, "Andrej Karpathy, former head of AI at Tesla and researcher at OpenAI, is launching Eureka Labs, an 'AI native' education platform." While most pundits will criticize the AI component (including the three-handed student in the 'school of the future' image) my own concern is that while the vision of AI may be futuristic, the vision of education doesn't step at all beyond the traditional collegiate model. Why oh why if we had AI in our pockets would we build a cathedral-sized learning institution out of glass?

According to this item, "the Decentralized Identity Foundation (DIF) today announced the availability of the Decentralized Web Node (DWN) Community Instance... personal data stores that eliminate the need for individuals to trust apps to responsibly use and protect their data." Now I haven't tried using this yet and don't know exactly how it works. But it does relate to a use case I'm working on - creating a web application that lives entirely in the browser using nothing but local storage. DWN would allow me to use the same credentials on different computers - at least, I think that's how it would work. (Why a browser-based application? Because, as someone once said, "the fediverse lives in the client". More on this in the fall.

A librarian describes the institution of the library in an overtly political frame that is, well, not wrong. "When library workers open the door in the morning, they give the public access to public space. When library workers check out a book or check it back in, they circulate public resources... Library workers understand that we are on the front lines of the movement for public ownership of the public good." Via Robin DeRosa.

The short story is that a faulty security update brought down a wide range of services around the world, most notably those dependent on Microsoft products. The technology responsible, the CloudStrike Falcon platform, "converges security and IT to protect all key areas of risk." As many have noted, the widespread nature of the outage offers a good argument for decentralization.

This is an update on the tech stack the OER Foundation's Dave Lane has been managing, as well as an update of sorts on the turmoil in New Zealand's polytech and vocational higher education sector. For content: WordPress, Drupal and SilverStripe (which is new to me); for video gosting, PeerTube.  Events using Mobilizon, fediverse tools including Mastodon, PieFed and PixelFed. Streaming: Owncast. Single Sign-On - Authentik.And many more things. I've worked with a lot of these systems, with and without guidance from Lane, and maintaining this software is not trivial - but essential, especially if you want to work in an open source world.