15 years in Higher Ed working at the nexus of tech and learning. Now the Manager of Online Learning Design at the University of Adelaide. Background in graphic design and multimedia. Still make stuff on the web. CSS magician.
@bobmonsour nicely worded and glad you shared this - often how we deal with these kinds of issues.
universities in the 1980s: writing the majority of internet standard RFCs and their implementations
universities now: moving away from Microsoft cloud is really hard okay? 🥺
@actualham Awesome news! They are lucky to have you!
RE: https://mastodon.social/@zachsimone/116076357947730869
Love this app. Now more people can enjoy!
Australia - 2nd biggest natural gas producer in the world and yet its beer drinkers who pay more in taxes (to the tune of $1.2 Billion). Pocock is right - what the fuck is going on in parliament?
"AI is built on the collective knowledge of humankind."
No. Nononononono. It is not built on _knowledge_, it it built on _data_. And not everyone's experiences are available as data, many communities are excluded. Also: "Collective" implies some sort of collaboration and shared activity. But "AI" is just accumulation by a few powerful.
So No. It's not collective but extractive, not knowledge but data, not humankind but the hegemonic western view. Everything in that statement is wrong.
Last year's shutdown of @glitchdotcom was a blow to my pedagogy. Glitch was ideal for creative coding classes and workshops. I looked around for alternatives. But there was nothing that was open, decentralized, and not at the mercy of VCs or Big Tech.
So I built my own. Here's Glitchlet.
Glitchlet runs on any shared hosting service (e.g., Reclaim Hosting). If you can run WordPress, you can run Glitchlet. Projects-in-progress are stored in the browser's local storage, but you can also one-click publish to make them public and remixable. Glitchlet is designed with educators in mind.
There's no single, primary Glitchlet that everyone uses. The idea is that every instructor installs their own Glitchlet and manages their own classes/workshops/projects. You can seed your instance with template files, or Glitchlet can easily import projects (including archived Glitch .tgz files).
Making something so easy to install and host has trade-offs, of course. No fancy pants Node or React projects, but Glitchlet works beautifully with HTML/JavaScript/CSS. No live collaboration, but you can still remix published projects.
Best of all—you're in control and not subject to the whims of some startup that suddenly decides to "sunset" a key pedagogical tool.
Glitchlet is alpha now, but its code will available to all very soon!
Libs are so useless they can’t even do a proper #LibSpill
@blamb Scary and sad.
@rspfau Not satire but full Murdoch Media. They are real professors - and brave/stupid enough to put their names to their quotes. I mean they're old white guys who are very disconnected from the reality of the university system and student population.
Sharing this one for those outside of Australia as its a doozy.
How Australia’s university students are using to AI to cheat their way to a degree
Students are graduating with degrees they never earned as AI tools write their assignments, sit their exams and secure High Distinctions. Why aren’t our universities doing anything about it?
How does "knowing" this information improve the outcome? Especially when it comes to travel, when the point is to experience something new. All this "knowing" just reimagines the past. It's just loop after loop, feeding back on itself, normalising based on the past.
Sounds like a great holiday!
I see this kind of take a lot in posts on AI – "The agent knows the person’s budget limits, travel history, preferences, sensitivities, and what 'best value' actually means to them."
Oh yeah. How?
Does it surveil me?
Tap what others have accumulated?
Stalk my data?
Infer from my histories?
Grok has been manufacturing torrents of CSAM for a month, and Australia’s eSafety Commission has barely even mentioned it. Not a peep out of the AFP either.
Starting to think that Australia’s online content regulation frameworks are just legal scaffolding to support pearl-clutching moralizing scolds launching moral panic campaigns, and aren’t actually fit for any kind of socially valuable purpose.
Imagine that.
Exactly 14 years ago , Satoshi Nakamoto designed the most pathetic / inefficient system ever invented by humankind : the blockchain.
Today, it weights 60 000 tons, wastes constantly 10 gigawatts (more than Belgium or Chile) to process less than 7 transactions per second :
Less than a 33 bps modem from 1990.
This could be a joke if it didn't have such gigantic environmental impact, wasn't enabling billion dollars ransomware industry and was not crushing thousands of lives in the process.
Delighted to be joining the 2026 Ascilite Conference as a keynote speaker. The theme of the conference is: The Future is Connection: Collaboration, Creativity and Compassion in a Digital Society - Save the date: 29 Nov – 2 Dec 2026 in Brisbane, AUS https://2026conference.ascilite.org/
Watching the US at the moment and reflecting on the past few years and this is where I am at too:
“They don't do things like we do. They don't believe in the same things that we do. This really is an us and a them situation, and we've been kidding ourselves for the last 80 years that they're like us.”
I live in a small town in Sweden. This morning I went out to my car (realising that I'd once again forgotten to lock the front door last night), drove along empty, wide roads to the nearest largeish town and parked in the brand new multistorey carpark by the railway station, where the first two hours' parking is free and the remainder of the time is very cheap.
I got out of the car without checking my surroundings, and as I leaned back in to get my bag out, I thought "In large parts of the world, I'd be asking to get mugged, or worse".
Then I walked along the clean, well-kept streets to the hospital, where I waited for less than 2 minutes for my mammography, which was completely free of charge.
This is Sweden. This is Europe. Why the FUCK are we trying to emulate, listening to, investing in or in any way having anything whatsoever to do with the utter insanity coming out of the USA?
And I don't just mean under the current, obviously barking, incumbent. I mean ever? They don't do things like we do. They don't believe in the same things that we do. This really is an us and a them situation, and we've been kidding ourselves for the last 80 years that they're like us.