#oldaily — Public Fediverse posts

The ID Toolbox: free tools for instructional designers #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/79748 "Every instructional designer I know keeps a folder of half-broken spreadsheets built to cope with work that should have been automated a decade ago," writes Curt Zilbersher, "so I'm building them properly and giving them away. After twenty-eight years in this field, this is the part I want to give back." According to the site, these are all "free, single-purpose tools for instructional designers.

PISA 2025: Students’ reading and mathematics performance declined sharply across the OECD #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/79747 I'm sure the media will be full of explanations for the decline, all to some degree partially true and partially false. This article mentions socio-economic factors, digital distraction and use of AI but not (interestingly) Covid.

We used to log off #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/79746 "Online used to be a place you could leave," writes Wira Indra Kusuma. "We designed the exit out of it because an exit reads as a leak." But without that exit, we can never really log off and the online world becomes just another layer of the real world, one we can never escape. "We used to be able to log off because someone left the door open.

Bespoke: A Programming Language for People Who Say Please #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/79745 This is pretty funny. Nothing to do with learning technology, unless you're very into programming, but I can't resist passing it along. "Bespoke, a statically typed and uncompromisingly civilised programming language for developers who believe that machine execution should never come at the expense of good manners.

Salesforce just put its entire CRM inside Claude - and says you’ll never need its app again #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/79744 It's important to understand that the headline in this post is dramatically overstated, and that it's not nearly true yet that "the future of enterprise software may not involve enterprise software's own screens at all." The possibility, though, is out there, and this item shows what it might look like.

“Next-token predictor” is the wrong mental model for LLMs #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/79743 This is a brief article that argues convincingly that the 'Next-token predictor' picture is the wrong mental model for LLMs. Consider, writes Garrin McGoldrick, a chess-playing LLM. "Given a new position, it predicts the move a grandmaster would most likely play next.

The Institutional AI Readiness Pack #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/79742 This workbook accompanies the Responsible AI in Academic Research framework from last May (and covered in OLDaily here) along with an instruments catalogue and describes a mechanism institutions can use to assess their AI readiness.

Learning Along the Way: Designing Travel for Discovery, Growth, and Becoming #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/79741 True story: when I was in public school, we once went on a field trip to Ottawa's Lower Town so that our teachers could show us how poor people lived. "Look at their laundry on a line," said the teacher (not knowing that this is how we did our laundry at home).