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Do you sometimes feel like you're just being played? A communications app called Beeper came out of beta today, meaning anyone can use it, no invitation needed. And it also launched an Android app! It was enough to make Alan Levine say "This is cool!" But before we could even send our first message, Beeper was acquired by Automattic. And the fun ended that quickly. The people I feel for are those who helped in the beta testing. The Beeper home page still says "Beeper is an entirely independent software product, with no relationship to, or endorsement by, Apple, Google, Facebook, or any other supported chat networks." I guess they should remove that. Now we'll have to watch as the application is slowly depreciated in order to pay the debt created by the acquisition. Now Automattic isn't the worst place they could land. But when (not if) the company goes public, everything changes. (Having said all that, I still signed up for an account. Part of the job. My username on Beeper: @downes).

In my email today: "The International Science Council's CODATA Working Group on Data Ethics has been developing policy briefings responding to the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science." Three such briefings are available for review and comment: Data Ethics and Research Integrity (provide feedback here); Data Ethics and Privacy (and feedback); and Data Ethics and Structural Inequities in Science (feedback).

So I would definitely have approached the subject matter differently, but the core thrust of the paper is sound, in my view. The main argument is found at the mid point of the paper in the section on reclaiming, recentring, and rehabilitating voices attributed to Felicitas Macgilchrist, who cites the "the 'shambles' of learning theory". She writes, "the EdTech industry makes all-encompassing promises, yet imagines students as versions of Pavlov's dogs... The equivalent would be something like '[App Name]: Behaviourist drills, but kind of fun for a few minutes'."  Reviewer number two (the reviews are helpfully appended to the paper) sums it best: " By embracing emotions, personal narratives, and the concept of practicescapes, the article advocates for a more holistic, heart-centre approach to learning design."

I think this is a popular but ineffective argument. The authors argue (46 page PDF) that "Human cognition—in important instances—is better conceptualized as a form of theorizing rather than data processing, prediction, or even Bayesian updating." I don't exactly agree with this, but it is certainly the most widely-held view. They explain, "Theories provide a mechanism for identifying new data and evidence, a way of "intervening" in the world, experimenting, and problem solving." Theories are, according to the authors, the difference between recognizing critical new evidence, such as the verification of Kepler's elliptical orbits, rather than simply the majority vie. "The LLM can only represent and mirror the predominant and existing conceptions—in this case, support for the geocentric view of the universe—it finds in the statistical association of words in its training data." All this sounds great - until your LLMs start producing theories. Which, in my view, they can. Via Luiza Jarovsky.

These days this feels a bit like a blast from the past, though in some circles (especially corporate learning circles) these are still very current. For readers who are relatively new to OLDaily (which used to cover such things a lot more closely) SCORM and AICC are learning resource packaging formats, while xAPI is a specification for recording learning activities. Craig Weiss discusses these and more in this interview.

What I like about the InfoQ trends reports is that they begin by considering what they wrote last year, being clear about where they've changed terminology (for example, "the topic of 'privacy engineering' is more precise than 'design for security')." This results in an analysis that is consistent year over year; trends don't suddenly appear, disappear and appear again. Having said that, what counts as a 'trend' depends very much on your point of view. This list identifies trends from a technology and development perspective.

Lorna Campbell summarizes the open educational resources conference from last week in Ireland. If I can be a curmudgeon for a moment, let me say I can remember when it was about open learning and open resources, not a grab-bag of all the social justice and ethics issues there are in the world. Don't get me wrong; I actually support a progressive stance on most of these matters (I'm not that much of a curmudgeon). But the internet is not dead, there is still some justice out there, and for many in the world things are getting better, not worse. We are doing some good. Let's not forget that. We need empowerment, not direction. We need resources, not tenets. We don't need to be told what's right and what's good. We already know, each of us. The hard work of discovery, creativity, industry and cooperation is what lies ahead. Let's put aside the pulpits and put down our pamphlets and pick up our tools, and build the world we want to see.

I'm always pretty sceptical of the practitioner notes 'what is already known about this topic' segment. For example, here we read that "No study has explored the influential factors in peer upvoting within social annotation-based learning." A quick look at Google Scholar says otherwise. And anyways, how could this be true when the previous 'what is already known' states, "receiving upvotes from peers is not only a type of feedback but also a form of motivation, social interaction and social validation." How could we know this if there were no studies? We also read, "This study was the first to examine social annotations through the lens of the community of inquiry framework." But again, Google Scholar provides the counterexamples. Instead of journals forcing these stilted and often wrong 'practitioner notes' they should just let the authors write their papers and allow them to be taken at face value. The real question being studied here is "Are there any differences in cognitive and social presence between students receiving a high and low number of upvotes?" We don't need to artificially frame it. It's interesting enough on its own. 14 page PDF.

As used here, 'shadow education' "usually indicates academic fee-paid tutoring administered outside schools." This paper (18 page PDF) overviews major sources and evolving themes in shadow educ ation research. "Theoretically," write the authors, with emphasis, "probably due to our selection criteria, influential articles along the major evolution path of the citation network mainly regard shadow education as a supplement to mainstream education." On the other hand, "shadow education may replace its mainstream counterpart because some students regard the former as more effective." This missing too much relevant literature (the authors even admit "the knowledge dissemination network of SER is likely to form a network closure").

An increasing number of education writers are setting up on Substack - just as Substack is about to tank. "The Wrap details how Substack's decision to implement a new 'follow' feature...  Jeanna Kadlec wrote on Threads. 'Every writer I know is seeing our subscriptions plummet as our 'follower' count rises.'" The problem is that while subscribers sign up to an email list, followers have to stay on the Substack site to read content. Also, a subscriber list is portable, while a Substack follower list is not even visible to authors, let alone portable. It's all about making it difficult for writers to move (in the business world this is called 'lock in'). But once writers can't move, the squeeze begins... Via Dan Gillmor.

It's easy to sometimes forget that there is a person behind the text I'm reading on education and technology. But so much of what we do is just our day-to-day efforts trying to have a life and a career. What I really value about this article (18 page PDF) is that it takes the time and care to present Rose Luckin as a whole person. In this interview I like how detailed she is, I like how open she is, I like how thoughtful she is. Her approach is more institutional than my own, I think (perhaps reflecting a background in banking and computer science) and these days probably more policy-oriented. No matter. The interview as a whole was a pleasure to read, and I wish we had more like this about the very interesting personalities in our field.

I tested this and it does work, though with the caveats expressed by Simon Willison in this post. What he has developed, in a nutshell, is a script that will convert a PDF or image to text (using an optical character recognition (OCR) algorithm called Tesseract) right in your browser - no uploading required! Here it is. This post describes how he created the tool, a process that involved working with Claude 3. This, I think, is becoming a new normal. Even if they do nothing more than save typing time, having an AI coding assistant is becoming a powerful developer tool.

The idea here is that universities and other public institutions should see themselves as more than just another private player in a marketplace. "The argument is that having more democratic intervention within the organization of the local economy is valuable not just in itself but also because it allows collective agency and decision-making that would not be available if you are just relying on the market to do things." The challenge lies in getting institutions to see it that way. "These ideas clearly seem to work in practice, and there was an interesting question about whether they could be made to work in theory as well."

I'm not really going to disagree with any of this, not even the git about the gap between the credentialed class, that focuses on identity issues, and the working class, that focuses on economic issues (though as always a class-based analysis is far too coarse to be useful). "As the 'wealth pump' pushes money to the top of the pyramid, the elite, wealth is pushed from the poor to the rich, accompanied by the disappointment of even middle class aspirants (graduates), who have also become part of the precariat." It's all too easy in this environment to find scapegoats. We need to resist this trend. See also: the Guardian.

Despite the small number of participants interviewed this paper (27 page PDF) offers an interesting if idiosyncratic look at presence in online learning. It's clear that the interviewees, as the authors say, "wrestle with pre-existing ideas of presence inherited from holistic education theories" and demand "two cornerstones of a holistic notion of presence—undivided attention and embodiment." These, obviously, are a challenge in online learning, and we see the teachers laying down rules and conditions to enforce this in a way that, I think, undermines individual autonomy. The interviews are analyzed according to Aimee Whiteside's social presence model (20 page PDF) and hence discusses affective association, community cohesion, instructor involvement, interaction intensity, and knowledge and experience.

"As a basis of connectivist learning, wayfinding has been the focus of access paths of diverse resources," write the authors. But "most learners are exposed to wayfinding difficulties, such as information overload and technical difficulties." So "wayfinding support is necessary." This article (30 page PDF) explores "a case study to develop a personal social knowledge network (PSKN) and facilitate wayfinding in connectivist learning." There's a lot of detail here covering both the mathematics and mechanics of node distribution and wayfinding path detection, including "differences in wayfinding behavioral patterns between high- and low-performing learners." Most interesting to me is the finding that "creating nodes was an essential wayfinding feature in the PSKN." The best way to make connections is to contribute. "As the connection proceeds, the learner becomes like a teacher, and creating nodes becomes a critical wayfinding behavior in connectivist learning."

I'll share Pascal Vallet's new newsletter because it exists, but I'm not a fan of the whole idea of email-only newsletters with subscription plans and no RSS feeds. Anyhow, in this post, he shares the wisdom that "not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted," which is why (I guess?) AI-assisted grading is a bad idea. "Perhaps," he writes, "there is a dimension of grading that is inherently bound to the educator's engagement with student work—an engagement that offers insights into the students' understanding, strengths, and potential areas for growth... grading should be seen as an integral process that enhances the educator's comprehension of student needs, rather than just a means to an end."

I'll just restate the critically important point: "In science, too often, the first demonstration of an idea becomes the lasting one — in both pop culture and academia. But this isn't how science is supposed to work at all!Science is a frustrating, iterative process. When we communicate it, we need to get beyond the idea that a single, stunning study ought to last the test of time. Scientists know this as well, but their institutions have often discouraged them from replicating old work, instead of the pursuit of new and exciting, attention-grabbing studies."

"Are you noticing any patterns here?" What would a gesture-based 'language' of mathematics look like? I still don't know, but this paper is an interesting exploration of the relation between gestures and learning math. "Teachers can select tasks that will elicit gesturing, notice how the gesturing signals the thinking, and respond to the dynamic nature of a process conveyed by the gestures to stay with students' own ideas as they guide their mathematical understandings. To stay with student ideas, means we can use students' own ways of thinking to support their learning rather than trying to channel their thinking into some predefined process."

No, this isn't the Elon Musk grift. It's real work on brain–computer interface (BCI) control published in PNAS (15 page PDF). Specifically, the research shows "that a decoder trained on the data of a single expert is readily transferrable to inexperienced users via domain adaptation techniques allowing calibration-free BCI training." Technology like this has the potential to assist a wide range of people facing difficult physical challenges.