I was introduced to a thing called the 'internet' in a pub in Edmonton after a softball game in 1988 or so. We philosophy students had gathered there after losing another game and some of the others (Ishy and Jeff, to be specific) to me about a 'MUD' they had been playing on.
I took to it like a duck to water. I had already been messing around with online services, having set up a Maximus bulletin board service (BBS) on my own, and the MUD was just like the game 'Adventure', which I had played while working on a mainframe while on training in Austin, Texas, in 1980.
I have no natural programming skills. It has always been a struggle for me; I blame my phonics-oriented education, which somehow managed to bypass the concepts of abstraction and formalization almost entirely. My inability to complete integral calculus doomed my plan to become a physicist, and it wasn't until I took an advanced philosophy of mathematics class with Verena Huber-Dyson that I comprehended entirely how you could replace anything - anything - with a single variable, and then perform functions with it.
I passed my PhD logic requirement, and concurrently, I succeeded in learning how to install and program my own MUD server, an unholy combination of C and something called LPC, object oriented (anything!) and beautiful. And Jeff McLaughlin and Istvan Berkeley and I concocted the notion of the Multiple Academic User Domain (MAUD), which we called The Painted Porch, and my career in educational technology began.
It was Jeff who sent me the advertisement from Assiniboine Community College looking for a 'distance education and new instructional media design specialist'. It was 1994 and I was living in a cabin in northern Alberta, having given up on my PhD and opting for a simpler life. I had been working as a distance education tutor for Athabasca University for seven years, and had continued experimenting with the MAUD, and also with an 'audio-graphics' distance education mode.
There was no way to make living a simpler life work with student load payments, so I applied for the job, and to my surprise, got it, moving to Manitoba and a new life. By 1995 the world wide web had become a thing, and it became my job to move the college from course packages and telephones to web-based delivery. I served my first website off my desktop using a Glaci-HTTPD server that ran on Windows, build the Assiniboine website, and put a proof-of-concept Guide to the Logical Fallacies on it.
I was also active on the internet. I never had any use for UseNet, though I understand it was popular, but I really liked mailing lists, and was active on DEOS and WWWDEV, both of which blended distance education and online learning. As I built a learning management system called OLe for Assiniboine, I described my practice in various posts and websites. This brought me opportunities; Rik Hall in particular drew me out and got me involved in the wider community.
At home during those days, I took OLe and converted it into a website management tool I called gRSShopper. I decided I wanted to keep and post the articles I wrote and especially the comments I added to various discussion boards. A content syndication format called 'RSS' came out in 1998 or so, authored by Dave Winer and Netscape, and I syndicated my personal articles as Netscape Netcenter feed number 31.
This community included Terry Anderson, who was working at the University of Alberta, who invited me there for a short consulting gig and ended up hiring me in 1999 as an information architect to create something called MuniMall, an online learning and resources hub for municipal sector staff and elected officials in Alberta. I adapted gRSShopper to this task, with one important addition: I added a mailing list so people could keep up with the courses and offerings.
As my two year contract with the University of Alberta was ending, an offer came out of the blue from Tim van Gelder, a philosophy professor at the University of Melbourne, to come work for him for three months putting some philosophy applications online. He had seen my Guide to the Logical Fallacies and had somehow decided I was the ideal candidate for this. To Australia I went, not only to work with Tim, but also to meet up again with a bunch of people I had met at Rik Hall's NAWeb conferences.
It was at this office in early of 2001 I came up with the plan to add a newsletter to my website so people could subscribe to my RSS feeds by email as well as by RSS (which, to be honest, almost nobody was using). So I added a 'subscribe' link to my website and set up my email code to send a specific page. I set up my RSS writer to also write in HTML to put content on that page. Before I could even send the first issue, 25 people had subscribed. On May 15, 2001, I sent it.
My approach to RSS was, by then, different from other people's. Instead of linking to my own articles, my focus was on linking to other people's articles. By the time blogs became popular a few years later, I was almost the only one doing this (the other exception was Scott Leslie). The 'title' and 'link' field pointed to the other article, and I wrote a commentary about it in the description. I praised, I criticized, I went off-topic, I philosophized, I went wherever the mood struck me.
That first issue, it turns out, was so typical. None of the links work any more but three of them can be recovered through the Wayback machine (the last, from the National Post, is blocked by Wayback, because you know). One was about tech sceptic David Noble, another was about universities and corporate learning, another was an anti-tech screed from the Chronicle (some things never change), and the last was about Universitas 21.
Most of the rest you know about. My newsletter was an instant success, some of my publications became popular, Rory McGreal - another person I met through NAWeb - pointed me in the direction of a job with the NRC in Moncton (he, meanwhile, would join Terry Anderson at Athabasca University - it's such a small world. I retired from that job on April 8.
And here we are, 25 years after that first issue. As of today, I have 40,876 posts in my database, comprising 6,584 issues of OLDaily, most of them links and commentary about things other people have written, and 1,467 of them my own articles (which reminds me, I have a bunch more articles I have posted elsewhere I need to add to that list). There are also 591 presentations and 186 publications in the archives.
I never stopped building gRSShopper. I've made it do any number of things over the years, most notably functioning as the engine for the world's first Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) in 2008 which I ran with George Siemens. Over the years other MOOCs were added to the list, each supported by gRSShopper, each with their own library of pages, links, posts, presentations and articles.
Though retired, I'm still writing and I'm still building - why would that ever stop? My current project is something I took up in the mid-2010s, a personal learning environment (the badly named CList). I said in my Retirement FAQ that I was looking for 100 paying subscribers to keep OLDaily afloat, and as I write I have only a quarter of that - and zero corporate or institutional support. It's disappointing. But how could I stop, really?
Though nothing I have ever written has been as popular as that first Guide to the Logical Fallacies (I could probably have built a career off it), I think that OLDaily has been my most substantial contribution, not the least because it wasn't about me and my accomplishments, but about the wider community that made everything possible. My story really is our story, my history really is our history.
When I was a kid, I'd camp out in the back yard. My father would come out, and we'd have a fire, and listen to the ball game. He was a telephone pioneer, one of the people who wired up the homes and businesses of eastern Ontario and western Quebec. He gave me my first modem, which I used for my BBS, he told me to study computing, because it was the future. He died in 1998, and never saw any this, but he could see where it was going. He'd go inside after a while, and I'd lie in my tent, head poked out the flap, looking up at the stars.
I still like to get out camping. I have a trip planned for tomorrow. I like to say it's for the adventure, the fresh air, the exercise, but really, it's still about looking up at the stars.
Today: Total: Stephen Downes, 2026/05/15 [Direct Link]
