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Stephen's Web ~ OLDaily

Stephen's Web ~ OLDaily

Primary focus: Education

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I built a full fediverse service that runs 100% on Cloudflare

Reddit, Jul 22, 2026 This is a post on Reddit where the author announced having built a fediverse service that runs on Cloudflare, a global content distribution network (CDN). It's quite the achievement, not exactly what anyone asked for, and a challenge to our understanding of the Internet and CDNs. The comments are not kind, with one person calling it a cancer. But Reddit is not the fediverse, and reactions on, say, Mastodon have been more nuanced. Here's the source. Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

5 hours ago

Has AI Finally Fixed L&D's SME Problem?

Philippa Hartman, Jul 21, 2026 Back when I was running the Learning and Support Systems (LPSS) program at NRC we had an open project called Advanced Competency Detection and Recognition (ACDR). It proved too much of a hurdle for the team at the time (and it wasn't that long ago) but it was addressing exactly what Philippa Hardman is talking about here - finding ways to use AI to study expert performance and articulate exactly what competencies they embody (even if they can't articulate them). This of course is the lynchpin to any system that want to develop workplace competencies and skills: compare the expert to the learner, identify what's needed, design a training program, assess against whats known to work. Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

23 hours ago

Deepening our commitment to India’s AI ambition

Google, Jul 21, 2026 I suppose it's not technically a MOOC but the concept is similar. Google DeepMind is bringing its rigorous AI Research Foundations curriculum to strengthen India’s premier AI talent. This free 56-hour program aims to help empower India’s students and AI builders. Sure, there's marketing involved, but it's also how you build an industry in a country that needs it. Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

1 day ago

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Daily article output trend

Technical Leadership

Jul 21, 2026 This is a long set of slides with extensive notes on the topic of decision-making, which of course is only a small part of leadership, but we'll let that slide. The presentation is standard stuff for those who have been through the topic before, but it's well laid out and there's a lot of content to consider. If you're new to, well, just about anything you'll find value in this resource. Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

1 day ago

The philosopher who wants schools to slow kids down

Shai Tubali, Big Think, Jul 21, 2026 My first thought on reading this was to wonder why this philosopher was selected for an interview, what makes him influential. I haven't read Gert Biesta so I shouldn't criticize his work based on what I see here, but what I see here is slight, not deep, and in some ways muddled. There are two tends woven in the article: that what is real offers resistance; and that human intelligence is unique in asking why things should be done and of comprehending duties. But if one wants obstacles, I need only to point to the instance of Claude that deleted Git by mistake. As for duties, it's not clear whether these arise from rationality, as they would for Kant, or whether we have a mysterious 'sense' of duty as the article suggests. Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

1 day ago

Without papers, without rights? Why legal identity, justice and education must go hand in hand

World Education Blog, Jul 21, 2026 This is another one of those articles with the form if you support good thing x then you need to also support good thing y. Now it may well be that both x and y are good things (and in this case they are) but putting effort and resources into one does not obligate you to do the same for the other. This is because - again - there's never enough effort and resources. People should be allowed to pick their causes. And it's not reasonable to try to chain them into never-ending layers of responsibility. Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

1 day ago

Postdigital backlash: The phantom premise

David White, Digital and Education, Jul 21, 2026 David White argues that there's a backlash against AI and that one of the deeper reasons for this is that it's messing with our sense of what it means to be human. He could be right about both the backlash and the reason, though he offers no evidence of the nature or scale of either in this talk (based on my reading of the transcript). And in any case, it could be that our understanding of what it means to be a person was wrong all along. I get that people want to offer explanations of what's going on, but the real causes are probably rather more complex, and speculative psychology probably isn't the way to get at them. Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

1 day ago

What Are We Buying When We Buy an AI Tutor?

Nick Potkalitsky, Educating AI, Jul 20, 2026 The argument here is that when AIs are used as tutoring systems, what matters is the instructional method, not the delivery to. When a new medium appears to improve achievement, the actual cause may be the tutoring sequence, feedback loop, practice schedule, etc. We've seen this finding throughout the history of edtech. The real question, though, is whether new technology affords new methods that weren't feasible before? We see that a lot too through the history of edtech. Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

2 days ago

Building AI that teaches: What nine years at Coursera taught me about scaling learning systems

Rohan Benkar, EdScoop, Jul 20, 2026 Nice article from Rohan Benkar, who spent nine years building learning systems at Coursera, and who argues that educational AIs are very different from regular chatbots. An educational AI is more that just an answer machine, and errors can have a long-lasting impact. Most platforms today personalize within individual components, but the real opportunity lies in architectures that treat learning as a continuous feedback system, writes Benkar. And failures in infrastructure - like, say, lab support - are also learning failures. Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

2 days ago

Does Practicing on an AI Actually Work?

Mike Kentz, How We Frame Machines, Jul 20, 2026 This article describes a number of studies on the effectiveness of what the author calls 'friction bots' - chatbots that emulate difficult people (for example, the person who agrees with everything but won't execute the plan). Overall: role-playing has been proven time and time again to be good for learning. Rehearsal is good for the brain, too. lLM’s are really good at mimicking human beings. Human-human “simulations” are great! We shouldn’t abandon them. But what LLM’s may introduce is a way to scale the practice. Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

2 days ago
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