Bookmarks: Week of Oct 5 - Oct 11, 2026

User-driven UI (Proximal Development and The Problem)

garden.bradwoods.io

a good overview of proximal development in the context of software design, and a really good description of “The Problem”: Software starts simple, so people who use it develop muscle memory. When new features are added, these people can ignore the emerging complexity. They may not even be aware of it. At some point, though, new users are faced with a complex system of things, and OG users are wondering why people Just Don’t Get It.

(also, see LMS enhancements over, say, the last 13 years after adoption - each enhancement is good! who wouldn’t want that! (or, if you don’t, just ignore it!), and also, new users wonder why there are 9 ways to do each thing, why the New Content Experience is now 7 years old and still isn’t as fully-featured as the Original Content Experience, etc…)

Tags: via:Marcin Wichary, UI, UX, design, person:Brad Woods, software

The Alberta question: How separatists took hold of the province’s governing party | CBC News

cbc.ca

A fifth estate investigation shows that the Oct. 19 referendum is the end result of the efforts of Alberta separatists to change the United Conservative Party to get the secession question on a referendum ballot and break up the country.

The call is coming from inside the house…

Tags: Alberta, CBC, Fifth Estate, politics, UCP

The people holding up the internet | Data Drop

sheets.works

Four billion phones ask one text file what time it is, and a lecturer at UCLA keeps it in his spare time. We counted who writes the software under your phone, from the code itself.

Tags: via:Tyson Kendon, open source

Triple-A Minesweeper

minesweeper.mikelacher.com

Sweep to survive in the action-packed, AAA reboot of the classic puzzle game.

Every major game now starts with the backstory of the universe it’s set in, then walks you through mandatory training steps that make the experience so tedious that I’ve kind of lost interest.

Tags: game

Do Asynchronous Courses Need Synchronous Sessions to Succeed? - Online Learning Consortium

onlinelearningconsortium.org

At OLC Innovate this past March, Dr. Tricia Bertram Gallant raised a provocative idea: fully asynchronous courses need synchronous opportunities to truly support student success.  I’ll be honest—that landed hard.  As someone who has spent years designing and teaching in asynchronous graduate programs, it felt like a bit of a dismissal of what intentional asynchronous […]

Tags: Online Learning Consortium, asynchronous, synchronous, online learning, course design

Mapping More-than-Human Approaches to AI in Education

papers.ssrn.com

Amid deepening systemic disruptions (ecological, political, social, and technological), “more-than-human” perspectives are challenging human-centred thinking in many fields. Recent developments in AI have made human-centred assumptions newly difficult for education to take for granted, unsettling familiar assumptions about intelligence, agency, authorship, and distinctively human capacities. We consider five ways in which this reorientation can intersect with AI in education (AIED), each of which raises distinct educational possibilities and questions for AIED research, pedagogy, and design: (i) AI for learning about more-than-human intelligence; (ii) AI inspired by more-than-human intelligence; (iii) AI as a more-than-human assemblage; (iv) AI as a morethan-human interlocutor; and (v) AI as a provocation to unsettle “the human.” We welcome the possibilities these approaches open while cautioning that a more-than-human turn does not necessarily escape the inherited habits of separability, mastery, hierarchy, and extraction that have shaped both human-centred education and technology. Rather than proposing a settled design direction for more-than-human-centred AIED, we offer this cartography as an invitation to collectively examine the possibilities and tensions these approaches bring into view, including what inherited assumptions and separations they may carry forward. We conclude by posing several questions to deepen and extend this dialogue, rather than try to prematurely resolve it.

Tags: via:Megan De Roover, AI, article, person:Sharon Stein, person:Simon Buckingham Shum

Sapiqo LMS — Learning made clear.

mguhlin.github.io

A self-hosted learning management system for courses, assessments, discussions, and credentials. Sapiqo LMS by Miguel Guhlin.

A focused learning management system for the people who teach—and the people who grow.

Build courses, support learners, and recognize achievement. Keep your content and learner data on infrastructure you control.

Tags: LMS, vibecoding, via:Stephen Downes, person:Miguel Guhlin

OpenWALDO — The First Open-Source AI Project and Community

openwaldo.org

The first open-source AI project and community: training data, tools, models, governance, and provenance working together in public.

Tags: AI, via:Scott Leslie, via:Bruce Sterling, open source