OLDaily

Some Thoughts about OER Research
David Wiley, iterating toward openness, 2019/11/12

The best line in this article is from another article wherein it is stated that "even if there is a learning benefit of [increasing access to] OER, standard research methods are unlikely to detect it." Which tells us a lot about both open educational resources (OER) and research methods. This is a good post, but as usual, I have my quibbles. For example, making a resource 'open' is not the same as changing the copyright. Openness isn't licensing; if it were, there would be no commercial open educational resources. And while it's true that you learn by doing, and not merely consuming, it seems wrong to talk about the 'instructional design' of a book (as opposed to, say, the content of a book). But yeah, "it matters far less which materials students are using than what students are doing with them." Or anybody (not just students).

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Massive List of Chinese Language MOOC Providers
Rui Ma, Class Central, 2019/11/12

There are more than 12,500 MOOCs in the Chinese language, according to this article. But, of course, MOOCs are dead, right? And the open education coalition has crumbled. And we're all being forced back into the hands of market-driven subscription-based resource sand experience platforms. /sarcasm Related: China unveils new push for excellence in undergraduate programmes.

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Educators Will Soon Be Able to Sell Their Materials on Amazon
Alyson Klein, Education Week, 2019/11/12

Hm. " The platform will allow teachers to sell lesson plans and curriculum materials by topic, in subjects like math, language arts, social studies, technology, and science." The main impact will be on sites like DonorsChoose or Teachers Pay Teachers. For the rest of us, I would hope that the thought of teachers paying a commission to Amazon in order to share lesson plans would be justification in and of itself for open educational resources (OER).

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How To Launch An Unstoppable Website On IPFS In Under 3 Minutes!
Unstoppable Domains, YouTube, 2019/11/12

This does pretty much exactly what we described in Cagliari, but is an actual real product you can use yourself instead of just some proof-of-concept code. Related services include Unstoppable Domains, Pinata, and Viewblock There's a lot of activity taking place on places like Reddit around IPFS and similar initiatives. I'm not sure people have the first idea of how to regulate something like this - an address is a hash string, and how do you regulate a hash string?

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This chart from Mastodon’s creator shows just how angry some Indian Twitter users are
Manavi Kapur, Mastodon, 2019/11/12

This is a good post describing an impending migration from Twitter into Mastodon by Indian users, and some of the factors motivating the move. It's the usual story for the centralized social network sites: offensive content is not blocked, or blocked only selectively. As Mastodon itself tweeted, "To claim impartiality and non-bias, especially in 2019, is to take the side of the status quo." The article ends with the caution about echo chambers and the warning that "freedom of expression could also mean freedom to spread hate speech." As though this weren't presently the case on sites like Facebook and Twitter. Via Ca_Gi.

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Orbit DB
OrbitDB, 2019/11/12

Something that's bothered me for a long time has been how to have a local database that syncs with an online or cloud database. Orbit addresses this. From the website: " OrbitDB is a serverless, distributed, peer-to-peer database. OrbitDB uses IPFS as its data storage and IPFS Pubsub to automatically sync databases with peers. It’s an eventually consistent database that uses CRDTs for conflict-free database merges making OrbitDB an excellent choice for decentralized apps (dApps), blockchain applications and offline-first web applications." I haven't tried it yet, but it's on my list.

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A Universal “Hostless” Substrate for a Post-Serverless Future
Brooklyn Zelenka, Vimeo, 2019/11/12

This is a smart, detailed and forward-looking presentation delivered at the Scandanavian Developers' Conference this past week. It looks at the concept of 'universal computing' from the perspective of three major innovations: global storage systems (including, for example, IPFS), digital security and self-sovereign identity, portable computing where you provide the data and identity as needed, and the application provider never actually has access to these. A lot of this is related to some of the stuff I've been talking about with respect to content-addressable resource networks and the like. It's hard to imagine the world of Facebook and Twitter being overturned, but Brooklyn Zelenka is talking about a 2-5 year time frame, so be ready. You can also view her slides here in Noti.st

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