Weblearning

Campus cuts, closures, mergers, and layoffs for winter 2025-2026 Greetings from an unusual winter storm in the Washington, DC area.  I’m writing this after two weeks of some snow, lots of ice, and very low temperatures for the area (circa 10-25 °F).  Fortu…

Campus cuts, closures, mergers, and layoffs for winter 2025-2026: I assemble the evidence from the past two months.

bryanalexander.org/horizon-scan...

Wikipedia 25 virtual birthday party YouTube video by Wikipedia

English Wikipedia is turning 25 and the champions of open knowledge infrastructure are calling the bold editors, the talk page philosophers, typo hunters, and edit warriors to join in a virtual celebration. When? See details on YouTube www.youtube.com/live/C5rPmv2...

An archival image of a medieval dinner scene. On one side, there is a Penelope (from Greek mythology) weaving, but instead of thread, it is a board of binary code. On the other side, there is a a drink spilling and other figures looking distressed/chaotic.

Seizing the means of ontological production: https://thoughtshrapnel.com/2025/11/01/seizing-the-means-of-ontological.html

Translate Inventaire using #Weblate at weblate.framasoft.org/engage/inven...!

Self-Hosting Isn’t Just for Nerds Anymore—Here’s Why You Should Care “Let's face it, we use the internet for just about everything. We even use the internet for sensitive things, be that banking, sending sensitive data, or just

Self-Hosting Isn’t Just for Nerds Anymore—Here’s Why You Should Care

See gadgeteer.co.za/self-hosting...

#selfhosting #technology

George Ingram George Ingram’s professional career—in Congress, the executive branch, and the non-profit sector—has focused on international economic and development policy. He is a senior fellow in the Center for S...

George Ingram www.brookings.edu/people/georg...

Al Sutton (@alsutton@snapp.social) Attached: 1 video This should be on TV every day, possibly multiple times per day…. #AI

I also enjoyed living in that phase before AI video became ubiquitous - snapp.social/@alsutton/11...

What makes LLMs work isn't deep neural networks or attention mechanisms or vector databases or anything like that. 
What makes LLMs work is our tendency to see faces on toast.

Credit to Jason at the good place. mastodon.cloud/@jasongorman...

Gorden Bennet: the big con is on…. bsky.app/profile/iipp...

CPD Webinar Series 2025 - Managing CMALT cohorts: Discover the University of Edinburgh's CMALT programme 4 June at 1PM

Discover the University of Edinburgh's #CMALT programme & how to manage CMALT cohorts at our next CPD Webinar on 4 June 2025. The webinar will take you through their journey from Feb 24 to present day & will highlight key areas, successes & plans for the future. Learn more: buff.ly/oroLGfw #altc

Auto-generated description: A flowchart shows the process of using AI to create, humanize, grade, and record assignments in educational systems.

The Classroom AI Doom Loop: https://thoughtshrapnel.com/2025/05/14/the-classroom-ai-doom-loop.html

If I start and go on and on in a long thread, please remind me about this note to self. The socials are for socializing. For short conversations. Blogs are for a sustaining an idea. Thanks.

How consultancy bleeds Britain dry In The Big Con Mariana Mazzucato and Rosie Collington reveal how management consultants promise to fix governments but end up enfeebling them.

Consultancy firms ruin the planet; as shown in my work on special economic zones & incompetent consultancies spreading super-exploitation
Now they are coming for UK Higher Education; important book by @mazzucatom.bsky.social & @rosiecollington.bsky.social
www.newstatesman.com/culture/book...

OpenAI rolls back update that made ChatGPT 'too sycophant-y' | TechCrunch OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that the company would roll back an update that users complained made ChatGPT 'too sycophant-y.'

Woops. Chat GPT became a sycophant, a spiritual director and has solved the trolley problem.
techcrunch.com/2025/04/29/o...

The Artificial State As American civic life has become increasingly shaped by algorithms, trust in government has plummeted. Is there any turning back?

The information infrastructure on Xitter was one that classified & divided, with algorithms framing our attention. Got a situation where the same peeps are building machines that purport to undo the very damage they have caused. Ms Lapore says it far clearer than me www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

Category:Weblearning - Wikimedia Commons

So if you want to jump ships, make sure that the ship you are moving too is built very differently. Perhaps you can join me… commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/Categor...

We all know the old cliché about the moving around the deck chairs on the Titanic and how futile it is. What we forget is getting off the Titanic and then onto another Titanic is just as futile.

a large ship is sinking in the ocean Alt: a large ship (possibly the titanic) is sinking in the background while life boats in the foreground are filled with passengers, are looking for another large ship to rescue them.

A titanic jumper, escaping a horrible catastrophe on a small lifeboat, and looking for another Massive Outsize Ocean Cruise (MOOC) ship to deliver the liner’s luxury journey, optimistically believing that another iceberg collision is highly unlikely.

YouTube video by rylxyc Monty Python - A Book At Bedtime

Happy World Book Day. youtu.be/_guKhYVr5vA?... Finding the fun in reading.

For Vaniya Agrawal & Ibtehal Abu Saad, a scholarly vindication? Methinks Wikipedians could step up their game here.

Big Tech and the US Digital-Military-Industrial Complex Intereconomics is an academic journal that publishes articles by experts on current economic and social policy issues affecting Europe.

State corporation boundaries are getting more blurry. Interesting read about the "digital-military-industrial complex." A nasty convergence between the power of big corporations, the militarization of digital technologies. www.intereconomics.eu/contents/yea... HT @the_syllabus

Family subscription to Microsoft jumped up in price by 25%. Gulp.

Helpful infographic @Suebecks. My 2c worth. SoMe conversation happen on a range of different channels & so you need to find a common “safe-ish” digital habitat. A collaborative archive (use Wikipedia Commons) of all presentations for every year, is helpful. upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/co...

Keep on wondering whether I should be reading The Shock Doctrine instead of following the news. naomiklein.org/the-shock-do...

I’m going to be chatting about “spectacular vernacular” at the UNISA hosted event entitled Advancing African Digital Humanities ideation hub. Here is my presentation www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/flxhv...

The New Analytics-Industrial Complex in Higher Education: Data, Governance, and Power Private data firms are quietly seizing control of global higher education, creating a power shift more profound than universities realize.

Here's the piece it was based on. HT Ben Williamson ihe.bc.edu/pub/j49thy96...

Really looking forward to this convo tomorrow with my "Are you tripping?" coauthor @annamillsoer.bsky.social stewarded by @edufuturist.bsky.social. Join us to talk about #AI in #EDU and how we can build literacies by taking care how we talk and think about what I now call ✨sparkling intelligence✨

As a self appointed, under-employed COLO (chief online learning officer) (gawd). Who is amazed at the pickle VC's create. This looks like useful advice for campus leaders as before they outsource something else. upcea.edu/wp-content/u...

Rise of data empires signals the end of academic autonomy When companies like Times Higher Education simultaneously control university ranking systems, provide strategic consulting and convene education minis...

So we know that many universities have outsourced their online learning to private companies and their private equity LMS platforms. Some are now beginning to see how universities surrender their autonomy to a handful of private data companies. Seamlessly www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?sto...

A LLM receives a piece of text as input & generates probable text as output. It makes predictions about word sequences using auto regression. Don't ask if LLMs are intelligent. Instead ask - "What problems do LLM's solve"? Do pressures around us influence our responses to the in/out put? (^T McCoy)