What's Good In Higher Education?
Friday, October 23, 2026
Stephen Downes , Oct 22, 2026 Things like classes and assignments and credentials are the least valuable things about higher education. They're all relatively recent inventions and were developed in order to accommodate mass education. Rather than re-litigate that argument, however, I want to foc... .. read more..
Principles and Practice of Deep Representation Learning
Friday, October 23, 2026
Sam Buchanan , Druv Pai , Peng Wang , Yi Ma , GitHub , Oct 22, 2026 This is "a modern fully open-source textbook exploring why and how deep neural networks learn compact and information-dense representations of high-dimensional real-world data." It's a daunting read - and to be honest, I gave the... .. read more..
Beyond Issuance: Who Is Responsible for Making Digital Credentials Useful?
Friday, October 23, 2026
Wendy Palmer , Lifelong Learning Edge , Oct 22, 2026 Wendy Palmer comments on Accredible's State of Credentialing report which argues, among other things, that "Credentialing programs have entered an accountability era. As expectations rise, organizations are increasingly expected to demonstrate ... .. read more..
PHP2Shell: PHP Patches Two Critical RCE Vulnerabilities, Urges Immediate Updates
Friday, October 23, 2026
Saeed Abbasi , Qualys , Oct 22, 2026 Services around the world that depend on PHP (that would include things like WordPress and Pixelfed) are either offline or being repaired today as a result of a new and critical PHP vulnerability. Here's the official announcement . I have one website running o... .. read more..
A Successful Incubation
Friday, October 23, 2026
DIF , Oct 22, 2026 The Decentralized Identity Foundation (DIF) universal distributed ID (DID) resolver has been shot down, with users now being directed to a second tier of providers, including especially GoDiddy , who created the DIF's reference implementation , and thisDID , by GoPlausible. "Bo... .. read more..
The 'scenius' of open doctoral knowledge
Friday, October 23, 2026
Doug Belshaw , Substrate , Oct 22, 2026 Doug Belshaw links to and discusses the idea to the ' scenius '. The linked article notes, "Culture isn't created by outliers. Most new movements and leaps forward in culture usually come from groups of creatives encouraging each other; competing with and a... .. read more..
A generation of non-thinkers
Friday, October 23, 2026
Mia Travers-Hayward , CCPA , Oct 22, 2026 "If personal AI tutors seem too good to be true," writes Mia Travers-Hayward, "that's because they are. This vision is built on a lie. Tech won't save our school systems. AI tutors can't substitute the care of a human teacher." I have two things I n... .. read more..
The Real Kevin Bacon
Friday, October 23, 2026
Owen Lacey , The Pudding , Oct 22, 2026 This is a great visualization of some basic principles of graph theory using the 'six degrees of Kevin Bacon' as an example. This is "a game where players try to connect any actor to Kevin Bacon in fewer than six steps, where each step links two actors who ... .. read more..
AI can weaken relationships between people - and teams suffer as a result.
Friday, October 23, 2026
Ben Werdmuller , Oct 22, 2026 Ben Werdmiller writes, "When people see AI as a more competent, trustworthy, and preferable source of input than a colleague, they replace human interactions that otherwise would have built or maintained trust." My response , only partly in jest, was that "Maybe the ... .. read more..
The Value of Process and Artefact
Friday, October 23, 2026
Tim Klapdor , Heart Soul Machine , Oct 22, 2026 Tim Klapdor uses the example of a hamburger to illustrate the difference between process and product, but I think a better example might be the shirt on your back. My grandfather used to manufacture those shits on a farm in rural Quebec. Today, they... .. read more..
The End of ISTE (Sorta)
Friday, October 23, 2026
Tim Stahmer , Assorted Stuff , Oct 22, 2026 As Tim Stahmer reports, ISTE has changed its name from the International Society for Technology in Education to the International Society for Transforming Education. Its new focus "says that while technology 'remains central to the organization's work',... .. read more..
The Compliance Trap: Rescuing Learning Targets from Administrative Wallpaper
Friday, October 23, 2026
Eric Sheniger , A Principal's Reflections , Oct 22, 2026 "For years," writes Eric Sheniger, "learning targets have devolved into a performative administrative ritual. They have become just another box to tick on a weekly walkthrough rubric. Target written in student-friendly language? Check. Visi... .. read more..
Rote is back. Or at least something very like it
Tuesday, October 20, 2026
Melissa Haley , EduResearch Matters , Oct 20, 2026 This article offers a response to what is described as a growing trend toward rote teaching, "a form of teaching organised around tightly controlled sequences, pre-determined lessons, fixed pacing, and limited space to adapt, respond or pursue em... .. read more..
Tri-Agency Open Access Policy on Publications (2026)
Tuesday, October 20, 2026
ISED , Government of Canada , Oct 20, 2026 Canada's 'tri-council'* funding agencies have announced a revised open access requirement for publications. "Each postsecondary institution and research hospital eligible to administer CIHR, NSERC or SSHRC funds is required to develop and publicly share ... .. read more..
Pedagogical Weight
Tuesday, October 20, 2026
Ann , All Things Pedagogical , Oct 20, 2026 According to Ann (no last name), "there is a weight of expectations that we all carry in eduspace, and sometimes those expectations are things we put on ourselves and not necessarily things folk have put on us realistically." the term, as the title sugg... .. read more..