1. Hope this one from The New Yorker works without a subscription (let me know if it doesn’t and I’ll see what I can do): How Much Can Duolingo Teach Us? is an interview with Duolingo’s founder, Luis von Ahn https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/04/24/how-much-can-duolingo-teach-us

“I want the poor person in Guatemala to be able to learn with very high quality,” von Ahn says. “The only way I know how to do that is with A.I. … A human teacher can get better by teaching thirty people … (Duolingo gets) better by teaching tens of millions of people.”

2. Find yourself grappling with – or even writing – over-complicated theories of change? This publication (in English) from the Danish website, Fagligt Fokus, is an excellent introduction and guide, How to navigate towards positive change in complex social settings. An inspirational guide for Development CSOs https://globaltfokus.dk/images/Pulje/Arkiv/Fagligt_Fokus/Fagligt_Fokus_-_Inspirational_Guide_-_Theory_of_Change.pdf

Dip into it where you like, it’s not the kind of document you have to start on page 1 and read through to the end. PDF below.

3. Good piece on the Asia-Pacific Multilingual Education Working Group blog by my erstwhile colleague Radhika Gholkar, Teaching Multilingual Classrooms In India: A Need For Learning From Indigenous Teaching Practices https://asiapacificmle.net/blogs/view?id=167

“India is a diverse and linguistically rich country, home to over 19,500 spoken languages, of which 121 are spoken by 10,000 or more people. Multilingualism is thus at the heart of the Indian existence and experience.”

4. I guess these two should know what they’re talking about: a conversation between Bill Gates of Microsoft (and much else besides) and Sal Kahn of Kahn Academy about AI and education https://youtu.be/X2oF8oZopdA Bill Gates podcast homepage here  https://www.gatesnotes.com/Podcast?20230810100000_Unconfuse-Me-Sal-Khan_BG-EM_&WT.tsrc=BGEM&podcast=s2e0

5. And, finally and macro-economically, see if you can find your national economy in this chart https://www.visualcapitalist.com/visualizing-the-105-trillion-world-economy-in-one-chart/ Surprised me that the UK economy is still three times the size of Saudi Arabia’s.