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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The Creator of ActivityPub on What's Next for the Fediverse
Richard MacManus, The New Stack, 2022/12/07

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It has been a few days, so here are some more Mastodon/Twitter updates. "Evan Prodromou talks about creating ActivityPub, his complicated feelings about Mastodon, and opportunities for developers in the fediverse... it gets really interesting when you start talking about web apps that interact with each other." Vivaldi, for example, is a web browser that has an integrated fediverse instance accessed through a side panel. Similarly, link browser extensions are available for Chrome and Firefox. 

Martha Burtis, meanwhile, talks about scuttling away to Mastodon, though I think the concerns about Eugen "Gargron" Rochko ("a 25-year-old German programmer of Russian and Jewish heritage") are misplaced. Related: Doug Belshaw on fediverse governance processes. Also, protection for Mastodon instances, needed because some "have come under cyber-attack recently by state-level actors." Also, "Where listening didn't really happen in Twitter, it does in Mastodon," says Miguel Guhlin. And oh yeah, Twitter is having trouble paying employees on time, reports Ars Technica. Finally, a huffduffed "chat with Matthias Pfefferle and Tim Nolte about the WP, Mastodon, and the Indie Web" (huffduffer is a service that converts YouTube videos to audio; I've used it and can recommend it).

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Microsoft Higher Education Summit | Microsoft EDU
Microsoft, 2022/12/07

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This is a summary of a Microsoft conference held in Australia to summarize and promote its work in education. There's some commentary, but most of the resources are PDF slide presentations (it's interesting that they haven't reached the sophistication of one of my own presentation pages). Topics include security, data analytics (from a "Senior Global Black Belt for Data & AI", whatever that is), digital workspaces (illustrated as a classroom full of people on their computers), and education in the metaverse (here interpreted as mixed reality, and not the full metaverse. If your institution uses Microsoft, you will want to review these presentations to see what's coming.

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Non-academic providers take over credential landscape
Lindsay McKenzie, EdScoop, 2022/12/07

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"Colleges and universities no longer dominate the national credential marketplace, according to a new analysis by the non-profit group Credential Engine." Of course, this is exactly what Credential Engine would like to find; otherwise, there's no real reason for its existence. And of course we would want to count the people receiving the credential, and the degree to which the credential is actually respected, rather than simply count credentials. So let's not declare this landmark moment as having passed just yet. But yeah.... it's coming.

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Art In The Age Of Optimization
Dan Sheehan, Brain Worms, 2022/12/07

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AI is forcing us to ask the question, "what is art?" writes Dan Sheehan. It will soon force us to was 'what is knowledge' and 'what is philosophy', in my opinion. "When you try to automate the artistic process," writes Sheehan, "what happens to artists? Fans love to tout AI art'™s accessibility, saying that now anyone can be an artist. Unsurprisingly, this claim seems more focused on art as a product than it is on art as a practice." But ultimately, the objective, he writes, is to sell product. However, "If we remove all the process, what remains?" Via Renée.

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