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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A Locus of Care
Justin E. H. Smith, Justin E. H. Smith's Hinternet, 2022/11/07

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Justin Smith's reflects on Bruno Latour. A nice read, especially when accompanied by Fiona Apple.  "Constructionism was never a matter of 'œjust saying whatever'," writes Smith, "and science can never be simply a matter of reading the dictates of the natural world off of our instruments, or out of our data, like a new sort of Divine Law. We have a choice as to how read the world, and it's going to take all of our human ability, and perhaps some superhuman luck or grace as well, to read it for our own good." I like the explanation of choice near the start and the reflections on 'thing' near the end.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Making the Move: Shift from Twitter to the Fediverse
Miguel Guhlin, Around the Corner, 2022/11/07

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This is a collection of good advice for educators thinking of making the move from Twitter to Mastodon, including advice on how to sign up and how to connect and even how to form a group (this is the first place I've seen this tip - here's info on the edutooters group). "Connect with other educators moving to Mastodon from Twitter," writes Miguel Guhlin. "Fill out this form or see who's joined."

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'There really is more to life than posting on Instagram' - BBC News
BBC News, 2022/11/07

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If you're thinking of leaving the big social media sites (and who isn't these days?) then you have a few options: jump to the fediverse, or return to traditional media. I think news media are trying really hard to make returning the latter approach a thing.The message in this BBC article is mostly that social media is addictive and unhealthy, that people are overly focused on creating content, and that it's so much better to, say, "read 15 pages of a book every night instead." Or maybe they should be reading their favourite news site? But passive consumption isn't for everybody: "I'd like to create my own world for the next phase of my life and I don't want to be influenced by others," says Helen Blunden

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As Musk takes control are we heading to an 'everything app' or the break-up of academic twitter?
Mark Carrigan, London School of Economics Blog, 2022/11/07

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Mark Carrigan asks whether this time to rethink academic twitter by separating out the knowledge exchange and academic community building functions. I think it's quaint that he thinks there's a thing such as 'academic twitter' (as though there is a Twitter voice of the millions of people in academia), and even more so if he thinks Twitter can be reformed or reorganized along some lines that aren't about paying of a multi-billion dollar acquisition debt. But more to the point, why would you separate those functions, when knowledge building just is the development of academic community (or more accurately, networks of interactions between academics and others). What I'm waiting for is for the other shoe to drop for those many people joining the fediverse - that shoe being that the same mechanisms used for social networks can also be used to support publication networks. It will occur to people eventually, and then someone from MIT will 'invent' it and someone from LSE will tell us it needs to be monetized.

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Open EdTech Launch Paper 2022 v 0.9
Martin Dougiamas, Google Docs, Open EdTech, 2022/11/07

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This paper launches Open EdTech, a organization that "building a global NextGen educational platform. Our platform will be 100% free and open source, based on the principles of open education." "What we clearly need," writes the CEO of Moodle, "is a fresh start, using all the knowledge we have gained to construct a new infrastructure." I'm not going to disagree, and not only because Moodle is based on a 20-year old tech stack (I feel a lot of the same things working with Perl), but also because there's a need for new thinking beyond the idea of a platform for courses and classes. But do we need, I wonder, a completely separate purpose-build stack for education?  We've discussed many of the points raised in this article over the years in this newsletter, so I won't belabour the details, since this should be viewed as a start, not a finished product, though I appreciate the nod to the UN Sustainable Development Goals and the desire for globally accessible education, whatever that amounts to.

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It looks like I'm moving to Mastodon
Simon Willison, 2022/11/07

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The most recent wave of newcomers to Mastodon includes a number of names I recognize from the early days of blogging and social networks, as the takeover of Twitter has finally convinced them (it seems) that the existing social network environment can't be saved. It speaks to how technology can have social or political intent. "Mastodon so far feels much more chilled out than Twitter," writes Simon Willison. "I get the impression this is by design. When there's no profit motive to 'maximize engagement' you can design features to optimize for a different set of goals." This post is a good first look from a technologist's perspective, and also links to the easiest set of instructions to set up your own instance I've seen.

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How AI will change Education: Part I
Alberto Arenaza, Transcend Newsletter, 2022/11/07

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The first part of this article is actually written by an AI, which provides a nice twist to the usual presentation of a story about AI in education. Otherwise, though, it offers a completely standard argument: "AI won't replace humans' creative thinking... it uses others' work to regurgitate new sentences, and that doesn't always make for new or unique angles. That's what humans, as creative brains, are there to do – to find interesting angles never written, represented or thought of before!" This both understates what AI can do (it doesn't just regurgitate) and it overstates what humans can do (we don't create something out of nothing; they're always a starting point).

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