OLDaily

Welcome to Online Learning Daily, your best source for news and commentary about learning technology, new media, and related topics. We publish six to eight or so short posts every weekday linking to the best, most interesting and most important pieces of content in the field. Read more about what we cover. We also list papers and articles by Stephen Downes and his presentations from around the world.

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AI is plundering the imagination and replacing it with a slot machine - Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
Annie Dorsen, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 2022/10/31

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Annie Dorsen argues that "plugging prompts into AI models hijacks human curiosity and robs them of a process meant to spur creativity." She writes, "These tools represent the complete corporate capture of the imagination, that most private and unpredictable part of the human mind... When tinkerers and hobbyists, doodlers and scribblers—not to mention kids just starting to perceive and explore the world—have this kind of instant gratification at their disposal, their curiosity is hijacked and extracted." Really? It's not clear to me that this is true. We may be limited by our existing lack of artistic abilities - I know I am - and might be liberated by having the capacity top realizes visually that which we could only tentatively express with a few halting words.

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How to Leave Dying Social Media Platforms | by Cory Doctorow | Oct, 2022 | Medium
Cory Doctorow, Medium, 2022/10/31

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"Anyone in the Fediverse can easily talk to other people in the Fediverse," writes Cory Doctorow, " but they can't talk to the people they leave behind on the big platforms like Facebook and Twitter." And that's how services like Twitter and Facebook hang on to their users, even as they create an increasingly unpleasant environment for them. These services could interact with other social media services, but they won't. Doctorow calls for passage of 'the ACCESS Act,' similar to Europe's Digital Markets Act (DMA), "which promises to impose interoperability on giant social media platforms... eventually." I am less sanguine about the possibility of a legislated solution, since the billionaires who own these companies can but as much legislative influence as they want. But I'm not sure what else would open up social media.

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Adobe Now Charging Extra to Use Pantone Colors
Noor Al-Sibai, The Byte, 2022/10/31

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How bad is it? Images - even very old images - are being changed to black because they used a now-prohibited colour. This arose from a dispute between Pantone and Adobe where the former decided the latter should start paying licensing fees for colours. The inevitable result? "Users will have to pay $21 per month to get access to Pantone's encyclopedic color catalog — and that moreover, this move appears to be retroactive, and would remove any Pantone-trademarked color from any Adobe file you open starting in November, regardless of the age of one's software or the file itself." Tell me again that it's about protecting the creators.

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The Socials
Rob Campbell, robcee.net, 2022/10/31

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In a certain sense the acquisition and potential unraveling of Twitter has education technologists looking like they've just woken from a shared hallucination; they're wiping their eyes and looking around wondering what happened. They're finding places like Mastodon - "just people, responding to something they saw online from someone they didn't know and talking to them like they were people." But not just that. "I am seeing friends dusting off their own blogs," writes Rob Campbell. "Maybe we can make RSS a thing again! I'm all for breaking up the way we use the web, moving away from centralized silos and back to various diverse ways of publishing."

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Welcome to hell, Elon - The Verge
Nilay Patel, The Verge, 2022/10/31

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This article was widely lauded as the best statement about Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter. "The problems with Twitter are not engineering problems," writes Nilay Patel. "They are political problems. Twitter, the company, makes very little interesting technology; the tech stack is not the valuable asset. The asset is the user base: hopelessly addicted politicians, reporters, celebrities, and other people who should know better but keep posting anyway." There's truth to this remark. But you can't put 396 million users in to a single town square and not expect issues to arise. That fact is why Twitter (only the 15th most popular social network in the world) seems outsized, and why its problems magnify to become global problems. That's why politicians, propagandists and broadcast media celebrities are attracted to it. It's a platform for shouting, mass following, and mob behaviour, and that's what we get.

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Untitled4 Twitter features Mastodon is better for not having
Scott Feeney, Scott.mn, 2022/10/31

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I think the upshot of this post is that small changes in design can have big changes in outcome. Scott Feeney lists four such changes in Mastodon as compared to Twitter: it's harder to see post metrics, you aren't notified about likes to replies to you, you can't quote a tweet without replying to the original poster (OP), and you can't do full-text searches. These changes drive Mastodon toward a conversational and interactive experience, rather than a crowd-based and performative experience. And that makes all the difference in the world.

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Sticks and stones (and disinformation)
Doug Belshaw, Open Thinkering, 2022/10/31

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Doug Belshaw addresses disinformation from the perspective of First Draft's 7 Types of Mis- and Disinformation spectrum. And I agree with him when he writes, "there isn't a single way of preventing harms when it comes to the examples on the right-hand side of First Draft's spectrum of mis- and disinformation." We can't just ban fabricated or manipulated content; it's just not feasible. How to deal with it then? Lessen the impact. "That's why," he says, "I think that the future of social interaction is federated... a multi-pronged approach which empowers communities... to deem what they consider problematic."

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ESG’s struggles are Big Tech’s problem
Protocol, 2022/10/31

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One of the problems of technology companies when they go public is that they are suddenly required to optimize profit against all else. This especially impacts companies in social service sectors like education. The solution to this is Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) investing, which adds non-financial metrics to a company's reporting to shareholders. But as this article outlines, there are problems defining the metrics, and there is a move afoot to make the practice illegal. Yes, it's the usual suspects. But unless there is some means of valuing non-financial performance, no private sector company can ever be trusted not to inflict wider social harms in the name of its own self-interest.

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