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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By Craig Weiss2022 Turkey Awards
Craig Weiss, 2022/11/11

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In thought this was a nice bit of fun (and won't spoil it by revealing the winners announced in this post). Though I will say all the awards are thoroughly deserved. The Turkey awards for 2022. Categories are: terms that should be kicked to the curb; functionality that should be shot into the sun; learning system or type which isn't what you think it means; and the learning system Turkey of 2022.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Scaling education: What is the carbon impact?
Paul Bailey, JISC, 2022/11/11

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This is part one of something (not sure what) and raises the important question of reducing existing emissions as a part of any strategy to scale education globally. My main concern is that this presentation, coming as it does from a UK context, makes a lot of assumptions that don't hold elsewhere. For example, electricity use where I live has a much lower impact, because most (97%) of it is generated from non-carbon sources. Similarly, when though I use a PHEV, the energy cost of working from home is a fraction of what it costs to commute. There's a section on 'new buildings' and while I agree that there is a significant environmental cost there, it seems to make much more sense to cyber-commute and repurpose existing facilities. But most of all, I think: these impacts are a fraction of what is produced by much more questionable environmental sources in society: private jets and yachts, pointless invasions and wars, the lack of alternative power generation, continued use of pulp and paper, and more.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

From powerhouse to plummeting: Here’s a timeline of FTX’s collapse
Nat Rubio-Licht, Protocol, 2022/11/11

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The world of blockchain has been roiling this week with the collapse of FTX, a major currency exchange. Here's the timeline. That it happened during the Blockchain and Web3 summit was very bad news for Don Tapscott and company. It would be very premature to dismiss the technology, though - maybe start thinking of it as distributed ledger technology rather than blockchain or Bitcoin. Related: making sense of web 3.0 in education ("Web 3.0 is about decentralization, stripping institutions of their consolidated power and transferring that power to individuals); Google Cloud's new blockchain node engine; the blockchain game Dark Forest that could (according to the article) create a metaverse no one owns.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Inside the Twitter Meltdown
Casey Newton, Zoë Schiffer, Platformer, 2022/11/11

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The Causes of Disaster presentation is almost twenty years old, but some things never change: as illustrated, the cause usually originates with the management and board. The same is true of the walking disaster we call social media, as this Platformer story (and many others) make plain. And to be clear: while there are good criticisms of Mastodon, the exodus from Twitter is just beginning; Black Twitter, for example, is on the move. Elon Mush will go down in history as the first person to have burned $44 billion dollars in something other than a war.

The rise of Mastodon is the people's response to the social media disaster (and therefore, as this Hacker News item makes plain, anathema to FAANG companies, a target to be co-opted and destroyed (look what they did to RSS and podcasting). The more popular you are, the less well Mastodon works for you, making it really hard for advertisers. Centralized search (so useful for spammers and trolls) breaks down in the fediverse. It also means, as Tim Bray suggests, there is no centralized culture.

More: the Midrange popup guide to Mastodon. How-to Geek offers ten fun Mastodon accounts to follow. Jim Groom launches a DS106 Mastodon. Humanities Commons has launched an instance for humanities scholars. Mastodon alternative Misskey, which I tried out yesterday (works nice!). (This post authored over 53 minutes while listening to the 1973 Genesis album Selling England by the Pound).

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How to Live in a Catastrophe
Elizabeth Weil, Intelligencer, 2022/11/11

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Today's social media meltdown news is placed once again in a single post (to prevent it from overwhelming the rest of the newsletter). But let me preface it with this piece from the Intelligencer: "We've made ourselves frantic and useless by assuming we need to transform ideology before we can act....  No, no, you don't. (We) want a beautiful, stable world for the people you love." But "The powerful are putting their desire for profit ahead of your life. The rest of us are getting hurt, killed, robbed, sick, punked, and gaslit." The Twitter saga is but one instance of that wider story, writ large.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]