Linkblog - 2026-04-19
← All weeksWeek of Apr 13 - Apr 19, 2026
Shop Class as Soulcraft
Matthew B. Crawford makes a case for the manual trades.
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Since manual work has been subject to routinization for over a century, the nonroutinized manual work that remains, outside the confines of the factory, would seem to be resistant to much further routinization. There still appear developments around the margins; for example, in the last twenty years pre-fabricated roof trusses have eliminated some of the more challenging elements from the jobs of framers who work for large tract developers, and pre-hung doors have done the same for finish carpenters generally. But still, the physical circumstances of the jobs performed by carpenters, plumbers, and auto mechanics vary too much for them to be executed by idiots; they require circumspection and adaptability. One feels like a man, not a cog in a machine. The trades are then a natural home for anyone who would live by his own powers, free not only of deadening abstraction, but also of the insidious hopes and rising insecurities that seem to be endemic in our current economic life. This is the stoic ideal.
Tags: via:Alan Levine, work, society, craft, person:Matthew Crawford
Added: 2026-04-19 11:48
Move Slow and Upgrade
For far too long, tech titans peddled promises of disruptive innovation - fabricating benefits and minimizing harms. The promise of quick and easy fixes overpowered a growing chorus of critical voices, driving a sea of private and public investments into increasingly dangerous, misguided, and doomed forms of disruption, with the public paying the price. But what’s the alternative? Upgrades - evidence-based, incremental change. Instead of continuing to invest in untested, high-risk innovations, constantly chasing outsized returns, upgraders seek a more proven path to proportional progress. This book dives deep into some of the most disastrous innovations of recent years - the metaverse, cryptocurrency, home surveillance, and AI, to name a few - while highlighting some of the unsung upgraders pushing real progress each day. Timely and corrective, Move Slow and Upgrade pushes us past the baseless promises of innovation, towards realistic hope.
Selinger, E., & Fox Cahn, A. (2026). Move Slow and Upgrade: The Power of Incremental Innovation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
The digital version of this book is included in our campus license, apparently…
Tags: eBooks, technology, design, via:Mark Hurst, book
Added: 2026-04-17 15:09
Zooming Out: WebinarTV’s Rampant Scraping of Online Meetings | CyberAlberta
CyberAlberta recently discovered that a webinar hosting platform known as WebinarTV is actively scraping and redistributing both public and private Zoom webinars without knowledge or consent of organizers. Initial access is typically gained through third-party browser extensions such as AI-powered transcription or auto-join tools. These extensions are inadvertently provided calendar permissions by their users and, in some cases, users are willfully submitting meeting details to the WebinarTV platform without the knowledge or consent of the organizers.
WebinarTV siphons publicly available webinars (by screen recording the sessions) into their platform to redistribute for profit. Possibly legal, definitely sketchy as hell.
(CyberAlberta doesn’t put dates or authors on their articles, so who knows when this was posted, or by whom… (but their Active Cyber Threats page lists the article with a date of 2025-10-07 so who knows why they don’t also display that on the article itself…))
Tags: Zoom, webinar, copyright, via:Alan Levine, via:Stephen Downes
Added: 2026-04-16 16:08
Ready for Entrepreneurial Thinking | Signature Learning Experiences | University of Calgary
Canada’s first microcredential in entrepreneurial thinking created just for university students.
Produced by UCalgary’s Office of Signature Learning Experiences, with support from our team in the TI.
Tags: UCalgary, OSLE, ETMC, entrepreneurship, microcredentials, project, LTDT
Added: 2026-04-16 14:24
What Makes Edtech Work for Students [Infographic] | EdSurge News
Even the most well-intentioned edtech can fall short if it does not meet students where they are. After several years studying the usability of edtech …
Tags: learning technologies, design, infographic
Added: 2026-04-16 11:17
Don’t Wait for the Clock to Run Out on Digital Accessibility – Campus Technology
Public universities with over 50,000 students face the looming April 24, 2026, deadline to comply with new Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) Title II standards. The urgency many feel is warranted: Implementation timelines are tight and the scope of compliance is extensive.
This explains all of the consulting calls related to “so how’s the market for accessibility software in higher education” over the last year…
Tags: accessibility, learning technologies
Added: 2026-04-16 11:15
Academics Need to Wake Up on AI, Part III
Most of us do not contribute to human knowledge—AI just made it obvious
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Most “slop” has always been and still is human slop.
This is the uncomfortable truth that AI kind of papers over. Most of anything that is created is slop (or maybe just slop-adjacent), of no real value aside from checking some boxes and making some line go up for whatever reason.
and
That is structurally identical to what LLMs do: recombine patterns and concepts across contexts. Sometimes the result is nonsense. Sometimes it is productive. The same is true of human recombination.
Tags: person:Alexander Kustov, AI, academics, research, academic integrity
Added: 2026-04-16 09:40
Building integrated networks to develop teaching and learning: the critical role of hubs
This paper explores the nature of integrated networks of practice, and in particular, the important role of hubs within networks. Hubs are individuals or groups that energize cross-connections, improve knowledge flow, enhance learning across small clusters of expertise, and play critical roles in building and sustaining robust integrated networks. Three examples illustrate how group-based hubs can facilitate professional learning across naturally occurring significant networks. Drawing on these examples and scholarship in the field, we offer a comprehensive framework for cultivating integrated networks for teaching and learning, and highlight some of the lessons we have learned.
Tags: person:Natasha Kenny, person:Lynn Taylor, person:Ellen Perrault, person:Robin Mueller, article
Added: 2026-04-15 10:32
Khan TED Institute
Explore the Khan TED Institute, an affordable AI degree program by TED, Khan Academy, and ETS. Build real-world skills for the future of work.
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Students gain access to:
- A program developed with input from leading corporates reflecting the future of work
- Live engagement with TED speakers and thought leaders
- A global community of driven, high-achieving peers
- Real-world training in collaboration, communication and critical thinking
So… TED speakers combined with Khan Academy adaptive stuff, designed by Accenture, McKinsey, Microsoft, and Google (with no accredited educational institutions involved) to reimagine higher eduction. Somehow, suddenly… (unaccredited) degrees for $10K…
Finally, someone is thinking about redesigning higher education! All their press release needed was a breathless testimonial from Sebastian Thrun…
3 business consultancies and 3 tech platform companies walk into a bar…
Tags: via:Stephen Downes, TED, Khan, higher education, hype
Added: 2026-04-14 12:36
Digging Up the Roots of Educational Policy: Curriculum Infusion and Aboriginal Student Identity Development
Since 2002, Alberta teachers have been required to infuse Aboriginal perspectives into the K-12 curriculum across all subject areas in order to positively impact Aboriginal children’s identity development. There are several assumptions inherent in the policy of infusion that this study uncovers and examines using Cree knowledge and research methods as the foundation of inquiry. The questions that guided the study were threefold. The first task was to understand what Aboriginal identity is and how it develops and functions. Second was to examine what happened to Aboriginal identity to impact its development in Aboriginal people. The final query was to explicate the roles and impacts of Canadian teachers and schools on Aboriginal identity development. Based on the knowledge and understanding of three Cree knowledge holders, this study presents a model of Aboriginal identity as a living entity that grows and develops within a cultural ecosystem. The model is then used as an analytical framework to evaluate the policy of infusion for its potential efficacy in contributing to the development of Aboriginal identity in schools. The study concludes that Aboriginal identity development requires a cultural ecosystem that includes Aboriginal peoples, ceremonies, histories, knowledges, languages, and lands as inherent elements of identity and its development.
Figure 8 (p. 136). Ecosystem of Identity Development
Tags: person:Christine Martineau, dissertation, indigenous, policy
Added: 2026-04-14 09:21
SafeTutors: Benchmarking Pedagogical Safety in AI Tutoring Systems
Large language models are rapidly being deployed as AI tutors, yet current evaluation paradigms assess problem-solving accuracy and generic safety in isolation, failing to capture whether a model is simultaneously pedagogically effective and safe across student-tutor interaction. We argue that tutoring safety is fundamentally different from conventional LLM safety: the primary risk is not toxic content but the quiet erosion of learning through answer over-disclosure, misconception reinforcement, and the abdication of scaffolding. To systematically study this failure mode, we introduce SafeTutors, a benchmark that jointly evaluates safety and pedagogy across mathematics, physics, and chemistry. SafeTutors is organized around a theoretically grounded risk taxonomy comprising 11 harm dimensions and 48 sub-risks drawn from learning-science literature. We uncover that all models show broad harm; scale doesn’t reliably help; and multi-turn dialogue worsens behavior, with pedagogical failures rising from 17.7% to 77.8%. Harms also vary by subject, so mitigations must be discipline-aware, and single-turn “safe/helpful” results can mask systematic tutor failure over extended interaction.
Hazra, R., Ghuku, B., Marchenko, I., Tokarieva, Y., Layek, S., Banerjee, S., … Pechenizkiy, M. (2026). SafeTutors: Benchmarking Pedagogical Safety in AI Tutoring Systems. arXiv [Cs.CL]. Retrieved from http://arxiv.org/abs/2603.17373
Tags: via:Doug Holton, AI, tutor, article
Added: 2026-04-14 07:13
ISD-Agent-Bench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Evaluating LLM-based Instructional Design Agents
Large Language Model (LLM) agents have shown promising potential in automating Instructional Systems Design (ISD), a systematic approach to developing educational programs. However, evaluating these agents remains challenging due to the lack of standardized benchmarks and the risk of LLM-as-judge bias. We present ISD-Agent-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark comprising 25,795 scenarios generated via a Context Matrix framework that combines 51 contextual variables across 5 categories with 33 ISD sub-steps derived from the ADDIE model. To ensure evaluation reliability, we employ a multi-judge protocol using diverse LLMs from different providers, achieving high inter-judge reliability. We compare existing ISD agents with novel agents grounded in classical ISD theories such as ADDIE, Dick & Carey, and Rapid Prototyping ISD. Experiments on 1,017 test scenarios demonstrate that integrating classical ISD frameworks with modern ReAct-style reasoning achieves the highest performance, outperforming both pure theory-based agents and technique-only approaches. Further analysis reveals that theoretical quality strongly correlates with benchmark performance, with theory-based agents showing significant advantages in problem-centered design and objective-assessment alignment. Our work provides a foundation for systematic LLM-based ISD research
Jeon, Y., Kim, S., Son, H., Lee, S., Jeong, Y., & Lee, U. (2026). ISD-Agent-Bench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Evaluating LLM-based Instructional Design Agents. arXiv [Cs.SE]. Retrieved from http://arxiv.org/abs/2602.10620
Tags: via:Doug Holton, AI, instructional design, course design, ADDIE, article
Added: 2026-04-14 07:07
An illustrated guide to resisting “AI is inevitable” in education
This guide offers strategies to counter the argument that AI in education is inevitable, suggesting questions about cognitive surrender, the lack of empirical research, and student/educator pushback. It also highlights concerns about AI degrading education and points to examples like the PureGenius website and criticisms of Alpha School as reasons to resist its widespread adoption.
Tags: via:Stephen Downes, AI, person:Benjamin Riley
Added: 2026-04-13 10:44
To teach in the time of ChatGPT is to know pain - Ars Technica
LLM use is the most demoralizing problem I’ve faced as a college instructor.
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Even if you find creative and highly structured activities in which the guardrails lead to course-relevant learning occurring during the class period, the question remains: What impact are LLMs having on those students for the other 23 hours of the day?
The reason this feels so different to teachers than the tech panics of the past is that there is no clear solution to how AI is undermining nearly every aspect of education. It’s a strange game trying to get students to do things you think will help their education while they point LLMs at you, and it too often feels like the only winning move is not to play.
Tags: person:Scott Johnson, Ars Technica, AI, GenAI, academic integrity
Added: 2026-04-13 09:16
Using Obsidian with Claude Code to build a knowledge wiki
Not sure if I like the idea of unleashing any AI with write privileges on my Obsidian vault though…
If you’re wiring your entire life into the newest shiny AI systems… what happens when that tool changes? This is my system that allows me to connect any AI platform with my ideaverse, while keeping all of my important data local and future proof. I call it my AI OS.
Tags: Obsidian, Claude, video, via:Hiro
Added: 2026-04-13 09:02