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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Priorities to Make the Fediverse Sustainable
Alek Tarkowski, Tech Policy Press, 2022/12/12

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The fediverse faces two major limitations, writes Alek Tarkowski in this widely cited article: "One has to do with its sustainability, as the commons-based peer production model on which it is built has clear limits to growth. And the second, and perhaps most crucial, has to do with a lack of participatory governance." He makes three recommendations: a participatory project to define a shared mission for building the digital public space on the basis of the Fediverse; greater involvement of public institutions; and a stronger social and institutional layer. All very fine, so far as it goes.

But let me say this: public institutions had no real interest in the fediverse or Mastodon before it suddenly became popular, and now they want to govern it. They criticize Mastodon creator Eugen Rochko for being a "benevolent dictator" (or worse) and yet leave him to develop 80 percent of Mastodon's code and run the largest Mastodon instance while doing nothing to increase his $36K salary or Mastodon's total $100K budget. And they conveniently forget that ActivityPub is a W3C standard with its own governance process. None of the things in Tarkowski's post are priorities. If he thinks social network growth is an imperative, and if he wants to wants to govern a social network, let him build it.

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What's the Secret to Learning? It's Belonging
Layla Murray, The Learning Scientists, 2022/12/12

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There's a lot of stuff going on in this article that leads directly to the misconception highlighted in the title. The core argument is based on this observation by Myra Laldin: "When students feel as if they do not belong in a school setting, the cognitive energy that should be used on social engagement and learning is being used to scan for group barriers, discrimination and stereotypes." The best I can conclude from these two articles is that 'effective learning in a social classroom setting requires first setting up an environment of belonging', which to me could be as effective as an argument against employing a social classroom setting, because there's all this emotional overhead to consider. Assuming there's such a thing as 'cognitive energy', it doesn't follow that 'belonging' is the answer. It could well be that removing the social setting that's causing so much stress would be equally effective.

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Diversity Is An Old Educator's Problem
Cristian T. Duque, eLearn Magazine, 2022/12/12

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As with so many articles, the part where the issue is identified is quite good, while the proposed solution is pretty weak. Here's the identification of the issue: "For the old powers of education, including those in the now decades-old EdTech, a sobering aspect of learning today is the endless discovery of diversity: People are just too varied!" Quite right. You can't just apply the same 'educational treatment' to people and expect the same result. That's not how people work. But the proposed solution doesn't even come close to addressing the issue. "Add gamification," writes Cristian Duque. "Students are executive leaders in a context of checks and balances." I mean... what? Again, as in so many other cases, it feels like a predetermined solution has simply been stuffed into a problem context.

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To Reimagine Education, We Must Stop 'Scaling Up'
Sam Chaltain, Sam Chaltain's Newsletter, 2022/12/12

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I'm linking to this note because it's deep, well expressed, or even particularly accessible (the Substack email subscription prompts are annoying and probably a precursor to eventual monetization) but because the point being made isn't important: the call to 'scale up' education technology and practices is wrong because scaling is non-linear. Sam Chaltain offers instead an alternative approach to scaling, which is essentially to "go big by getting small (again)." Nature scales by replicating small basic things that combine and recombine in wide-ranging and diverse ways. I don't think his examples are very convincing or even useful (his link to education reimagined smacks of pure product placement) but the concept is sound.

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