erhapsthe most important historical lesson is thatvirtually all the visions cherished by partici-pants were abandoned or transformed.

And how could itbe regulated? Regulators take years to makedecisions, yet the Internet was still like achild, growing and changing rapidly.

Anumber of other options were considered atthe 1990 Harvard workshop. For example,NSF could have turned over backbone opera-tions to a nonprofit operator. Wolff even sug-gested ‘‘privatization by function,’’ in whichcommercially viable services such as mailand news would be blocked from the NSFbackbone, while more specialized researchapplications would continue to use it.

foregorapid growth.63 However, the Merit partners’rhetoric stressing the threat of congestionand the need for gigabit speeds framed thisoption as undesirable or even impossible.

Noting that US First Amendmentprotections do not apply to the private sec-tor, they contended, ‘‘What hasn’t been dis-cussed is the public’s right to free speech incyberspace

no provisionhad been made to keep Internet traffic statis-tics publicly available

First, because NSF did not imposeperformance requirements on the NAP oper-ators, the NAPs became congested andimpeded backbone traffic flow. 57 Second, inthe absence of a regulatory requirement fornondiscriminatory interconnection amongISPs, large backbone providers or privateNAPs were able to exclude smaller playersand thus undermine competition, increaseconcentration, and drive up prices. The lackof rules specifying universal unmetered inter-connection led to an unequal two-tier back-bone peering system, in which large ISPsagreed to exchange traffic for free butcharged smaller ISPs for the same service. 58Third, the lack of regulation means that un-like phone companies, backbone providerscan, and sometimes do, harm subscribers bycutting off their connectivity on short no-tice. 59 Fourth, NSF did not require neededupgrades to network service, such asimproved security. Other commentatorsraised a host of concerns ranging from tech-nical to social and political.

Thebackbone’s communications links had al-ways been leased from commercial providers,the regional and local networks that made upthe bulk of the Internet did not change own-ership, the TCP/IP protocols had been andremained nonproprietary, and control overrouting and technical development stayedwith nonprofit groups. Privatization was lessa change in ownership than a change inwho could serve NSF’s users, how thoseusers were subsidized (directly throughgrants, rather than through a subsidizedinfrastructure), and who made policy forthe backbone.

Internet connections were tobe commercially provided, with governmentefforts focused on developing applicationssuch as educational software, subsidizing ac-cess for libraries and schools, providing train-ing for librarians and educators, and makinggovernment information available over thenetwork.

TheGore Bill, as it was known, stressed the threatof foreign competition as its political ratio-nale and reflected three beliefs: that high-speed (gigabit) networks were essential toresearch and as an economic driver, thatindustry would not provide such networksbecause the market and technology werenot yet proven, and that government over-sight was needed to ensure equitable accessand proper network use.

Merit informed NSFthat it planned to create a nonprofit corpora-tion called Advanced Network & Services, forwhich IBM and MCI would provide severalmillion dollars in funding as well as person-nel and equipment.

restricted fromusing the NSFnet backbone due to the NSF’sAcceptable Use Policy

ome saw the networkas a public trust, others as an opportunityfor profit; some wanted a testbed for high-performance technology, while others hopedfor an economic driver and an edge in inter-national competition.

he 1982 consent decree(effective 1984) that broke up AT&T

The resulting 1987 report raised anew political issue: the threat of competitionfrom Europe and Japan.

NSFnet’s technicaldesign created a monopoly at the backbonelevel—an arrangement that would sooncause strife within the community.

Merit, a consortium of Michi-gan universities founded in 1966 to promotecampus and state-wide networking. Meritserved as project manager, provided engi-neering support, and ran the Network Oper-ations Center. Merit’s partners were the Stateof Michigan Strategic Fund (which offered$5 million), IBM (which supplied the packetswitches), and MCI (which provided the cir-cuits).

Therefore, NSF didnot address the issue of commercial use of thenetwork by the awardee in the solicitation orthe Cooperative Agreement. Similarly, noneof the offerors addressed commercial use inits proposal.1

For scientists who cared littleabout networking per se and simply wantedto get on with their research, applicationswith consistent, user-friendly interfaceswere as important as the network itself:

a model of complementarity. SRSs andTRSs features can be combined to support both structured activities and enablespontaneous adaptation

interpret evolving classroom cues and adapt in real time in the context of the currentclass

widescale deployment of the technology required ap-proval from institutional IT Support departments, which proved difficult to secure

The five states of the ELF confusion cue

ools that both minimize teacher burden and support real-time,flexible responsiveness

pre-scripted interactions can limit pedagogical agility

neg-ative impact on lesson planning [7], tension between technological engagement andlesson flow [8], and a demand for greater technical competence [9].

Theanonymous format leads to a higher level of inclusivity since students feel free to par-ticipate without the fear of judgement from peers [5].

a sort of Teacher Response System (TRS)—designed to support decision-making,reduce friction, and enhance teacher-student responsiveness in real time

When a tool fails to adapt to a teacher’ssituated needs, it risks undermining both instructor agency and the student empower-ment it exists to support.

The slow uptake of such a seemingly promising tool may lie in its fundamental asym-metry

because the dream of AGI is overarching capitalist dream: a world without workers

the voices of people most likely to hew to a hegemonic viewpoint

This is not a new critique. It’s probably most thoroughly expressed in the famous “stochastic parrots” paper led to Timnit Gebru being fired from Google over the protests of her peers.

difficult to modify, even for ideologically motivated tech billionaires

a civilization’s worth of texts

a new paper

Or is that the rainbow?

I asked our friend Dr. Oblivion, Why is it better to refer to AI hallucinations and AI mirages? His response.

Hallucinations are not always wrong, per se. It is sometimes that AI is sharing "true" but it is "wrong" in a particular context. Experts know the difference, but our students do not.

Does anybody know who came up with the term “hallucinations” in the first place? Was it Sutskever?

Joshua Pearson examines the history of the term “hallucination” in the development and promotion of AI technology: “Why ‘Hallucination’? Examining the History, and Stakes, of How We Label AI’s Undesirable Output” (2024).

Too often, college isn’t worth it, economically speaking.

The people I know who are most disenchanted

I have been following the social media of this giant group that seemed to come out of nowhere, Mothers Against College Antisemitism.

It’s not the universities’ fault, but they have certainly played their part in creating and perpetuating these inequalities.

The incident encapsulated the entitlement, the arrogance and the unbearably petty grievances of a generation who seemed to find their voice and power in the taking of offense.

He said presidents and professors had taken too many things for granted — they thought they’d always be seen as a “public good” benefiting society, but came to be seen as elitist and condescending toward regular Americans. And Americans hate a lot of things, but they really hate elites condescending to them. Now we are seeing a big reckoning for higher education — ideological, cultural, financial — driven by Donald Trump and the right.

Nate Angell

student voices, perspectives, and agency should be more prominently featured in OER decision making

Better data collection mechanisms

While there is no one size fits all model for running and growing OER initiatives, certain elements of institutionalization could prove beneficial. For instance, a succession plan would ensure that when an OER leader leaves their role, whether on campus or at the state level, the initiative could continue. OER efforts also require the professionalization of roles that manage content development, dissemination, and support. Alternatively, responsibilities for OER implementation could be dispersed across multiple individuals or coordinated through a centralized office, possibly at the state level, to ensure long-term success and accessibility.

DFW

The fact that we have saved our students more than half a million dollars now with our products gives me great joy, because we are at an institution where our population, a lot of our students, have very little means. Most of our students are under some sort of financial help. So many of them are first generation, so many of them have jobs and families.

the departure of key stakeholders could disrupt ongoing efforts and threaten the continuity of OER initiatives

the affordability message is still the most effective one to communicate to legislators

OER initiatives flourish when they benefit from multiple-framings, such as advancing equity goals, instructional design innovation, or student success outcomes, in addition to cost-savings benefits.

there is clearly no one size fits all model for the OER initiatives

most initiatives have been funded through federal and/or state grants

the equity and accessibility of OERs

most financial models described in the literature come from the corporate world, putting the need to maximize revenue in tension with higher education’s mission-based goals that are harder to quantify

If OERs save students money, while also acting as catalysts for faculty to make improvements to their teaching, it is no wonder that colleges and universities are trying to expand them on their campuses.

OERs

OpenAlex and Semantic Scholar

Here are a few of mythoughts on what could be done.

—

A Stronger Name

ChatGPT

Transitioning to structured HTML earlier in the workflow would have transformativeeffect

In an era where trust in science and concerns about misinformation areparamount, publishers could leverage anxieties about the risks of sharing "non-peer-reviewed" material to cast doubt on the reliability and credibility of preprints.

allows authors to declare a VOR should they wish to, treating it as a ‘state’ within acontinuous process rather than a definitive endpoin

allows

Version of Record (VOR)

This monetization strategy highlights a potential risk of the PRC model being co-opted by commercial publishers to prioritize profit over the principles of openness andaccessibility. By charging for submissions, even those that do not proceed to full curationor publication, journals could exploit the publish-first ethos of PRC for financial gain,further complicating the already high cost of academic publishing for researchers andcausing even more inequities.

an open, decentralized ecosystem where innovation flourishes,traditional hierarchies are dismantled, and the community takes control of its ownnarrative and processes

curation emerging in many forms as anecessary outcome of this shift

ransparency and accountability in the review process

dynamic post-publication evaluation

a simple, non-threatening tool

By using termslike “deposit” instead of “submit,” “distribute” rather than “publish,” “preprint” instead of“article,” and “server” instead of “publisher.” These terms signaled that the preprintprocess was no challenge to the journal system, presenting itself merely as a mechanicalprocess akin to hosting files on an FTP server—“not really publishing.”

The parallels between these two models and scholarly publishing are striking.

allowing

Publish-Review-Curate (PRC

I like having as few opportunities as possible for would-be enshittifiers to mess around with what I'm trying to do

the celebrated figures Henry Kissinge

David Hume’s (2011) formulation of the is–ought problem.

Beyond simpleassociations it acquires high-level abstractions like expressive structure, ideology or beliefsystems, since these are all embodied in the corpora that make up its training sets.

externalize

Page Builder

The Pretty Wiki

The compiled dataset is made available on Zenodo.

It means that everything AI makes would immediately enter the public domain and be available to every other creator to use, as they wish, in perpetuity and without permission.

Some technological common ground could emerge,such as the widespread adoption of technical metadata standards that could flag creator’swish not to have their works used in training.

a commercial entity would probably find itself at the end ofsuccessful litigation if it used such images without authorisation

but these should be proportional and excessive

a relative short time

The EU adopted its own TDM exceptions in 2019 as part ofthe Digital Single Market (DSM) Directive.

text and data mining was seen as something that would benefit scientific researchin general

It could be argued that the training of an AI model does not fulfil all of these requirements,but it is likely to be something that will be argued in court by future defendants incopyright litigation. It is clear that making a temporary copy for training is transient, butit could be said that it is not incidental. The copy is also part of a technological process,but it may not be considered a lawful use. Similarly, one could argue that the resultingmodel does have economic significance, but specific copies do not, a model such as StableDiffusion can be trained with billions of images, each individual copy used in training maynot count as having “independent economic significance”.

a mice and a squirrel on their mobile phones

josepha hayden chomposi

Egyptian cat mummies

IMMIGRATION

PEACE, AMITY, AND COMMERCE

Burning Man Evaporative Cooler

We believe that policymaking is also worldbuilding. We are therefore targeting our advocacy on European policymakers.

We will contribute to this new vision of Open through sensemaking work and creating new narratives.

TagTeam is an open-source tagging platform and feed aggregator developed for the Harvard Open Access Project (HOAP) at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society under the direction of Peter Suber.

Mexican pizza

Mexican pizza

Innovation is opening up educational policies and practices.

I defy any of my colleagues to argue persuasively that defunding campus police is a good idea, even at idyllic Princeton.

evil

a small local terrorist organization

“Establish a core distribution requirement focused on the history and legacy of racism in the country and on the campus.” There would be wisdom in this time of disunity in suggesting (not, in my view, requiring) that students take courses in American history and constitutionalism, both of which almost inevitably consider slavery and race, but that is not the same thing. Not incidentally, if you believe anti-blackness to be foundational, it is not a stretch to imagine that you will teach the 1619 Project as dogma.

reason other than their pigmentation

civil war on campus

No one is in the middle.

In 1776 there were “united States” but there was not yet the “United States”; in these past two months, by contrast, at a time when we are increasingly un-united, “black” has become “Black” while “white” remains “white.”

whose first words every American child knows, or used to

just a few minutes ago

Subsidiarity, which uses “data cooperatives, collaboratives, and trusts with privacy-preserving and -enhancing techniques for data processing, such as federated learning and secure multiparty computation.”

In general, I would say that I think there are only a few circumstances in which markets produce good incentives and distributions, and that these depend heavily on publicly accountable governance that set up their rules.

“Courseware” as a tool for enabling classroom knowledge workers

One of those factors is globalization which has helped lift hundreds and millions out of poverty, most notably in China and India, but which, along with automation has also ended entire economies, accelerated global inequality, and left millions of others feeling betrayed and angry at existing political institutions.

increased mobility and urbanization of modern life, which further shakes up societies, including existing family structures and gender roles

chronic political dysfunction, here in the U.S. and in Europe

What social media platforms have done, though, thanks to their increasing market dominance and their emphasis on speed, is accelerate the decline of newspapers and other traditional news sources.

the veil of anonymity that platforms provide their users

very specific choices made by the companies that have come to dominate the internet generally and social media platforms in particular

You don’t even have to look up. And it’s made all of us more prone to what psychologists call confirmation bias

it did fortify a sense of shared culture and it came to the news, at least, citizens across the political spectrum tended to operate using a shared set of facts

the sheer proliferation of content and the splintering of information and audiences

We’ll have to come up with new models for a more inclusive, equitable capitalism. We’ll have to reform our political institutions in ways that allow people to be heard and give them real agency. We’ll have to tell better stories about ourselves and how we can live together, despite our differences.

as once marginalized groups demand a seat at the table, politicians have found a new audience for old-fashioned appeals to racial and ethnic, religious or national solidarity

the near collapse of the global financial system in 2008

the rise of China

At the end of the day, tools don’t control us.

K-Monitor

News Literacy Project

MIT Center for Constructive Communication

National School of Journalism and Public Discourse

the U.S. Constitution as software

ways to give young people and the rest of us the chance to build up civic muscles

reinvigorate quality journalism, including local journalism

online media literacy

An interesting study came out recently

these companies need to have some other North Star other than just making money and increasing market share

Platform Accountability and Transparency Act

European Union’s Digital Services Act

tech companies need to be more transparent about how they operate

regulation has to be part of the answer

we need to consider reforms to Section 230 to account for those changes, including whether platforms should be required to have a higher standard of care, when it comes to advertising on their site

Section 230 of the United States code

More importantly, these companies are still way too guarded about how exactly their standards operate, or how their engagement ranking systems influence what goes viral and what doesn’t.

the need for some democratic oversight

The problem is, we often don’t know what principles govern those decisions. And on an issue of enormous public interest, there has been little public debate and practically no democratic oversight.

the First Amendment is a check on the power of the state. It doesn’t apply to private companies like Facebook or Twitter

I believe that in most instances the answer to bad speech is good speech.

There are some bugs in the software.

the transformative power and promise of the open internet

New technologies are already challenging the way we regulate currency

Russians could study and manipulate patterns in the engagement ranking system on a Facebook or YouTube.

the very design of these platforms seems to be tilting us in the wrong direction

sophisticated actors from political consultants to commercial interests, to intelligence arms of foreign powers can game platform algorithms

Obama's Stanford University speech this Thursday

The issue that had roiled the grown-ups in his life seemed to have had no effect on him at all.

That pragmatic genius for which Americans used to be known and admired, which included a talent for educating our young—how did it desert us?

an idea of education based on real meri

festooned with all the authoritarian excess of the new progressivism

The teaching of civics has dwindled since the 1960s—a casualty of political polarization

Our goal shouldn’t be to tell children what to think. The point is to teach them how to think so they can grow up to find their own answers.

identity alone should neither uphold nor invalidate an idea

the universal principles of equality, dignity, and freedom

It was a quiet plea to be left alone.

Q also used the boys’ bathroom, which led to problems with other boys.

A 95 percent opt-out rate was a resounding success. It rivaled election results in Turkmenistan.

An extensive survey of American political opinion published last year by a nonprofit called More in Common found that a large majority of every group, including black Americans, thought “political correctness” was a problem.

in part out of disillusionment with the early promise of his presidency—out of expectations raised and frustrated

security

On that freezing sidewalk, I felt a shudder of revulsion at the perversions of meritocracy. And yet there I was, cursing myself for being 30th in line.

children into overworked, inauthentic success machines

stay married

True meritocracy came closest to realization with the rise of standardized tests in the 1950s

He had picked this moment to render his very first representational drawing, and our hopes rose.

Liberals are always slow to realize that there can be friendly, idealistic people who have little use for liberal values.

For students, historical habits of mind constitute majorintellectual hurdles. Students see their professors' thoughts asfinished products, tidied up and packaged for publicpresentation in books, articles, and lectures

Infrastructure is a socio-technical system rather than a technical product.

Infrastructure is dynamic.

The general trend is that students who report improved socioemotional outcomes also show suggestions of increased activity in collaborative tools relative to their peers.

In this sample, 1,868 students enrolled in at least one undergraduate class with, and at least one undergraduate class without, some form of collaborative activity (peer review, Piazza, CourseNetworking, etc.), not including discussions.

Similarly, social annotation tools such as Hypothesis provide opportunities for students and instructors to interactively engage in a shared resource of interest wherein problems, challenges, and insights can be discussed.

We estimate that students performed 1.16% points (95% HDI [0.65–1.66]) better in their undergraduate courses with collaborative activities, compared with the same students’ performance in undergraduate courses without collaborative activities.

Students should be directly involved in campus conversations and decision-making about social reading technologies.

Teaching with social reading doesn’t mean peering over students’ shoulders. Rather, teaching with social reading should help students share and connect.

It begins by investing in people

the permanence and agency of their work

boutique file types wither into obsolescence

CHAPTER 9

more in the idea of disorder than in that of order

that which it to be retained in the habit and allowing the rest to be “forgotten”).