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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Love on the Rocks
Michael Moe, EIEIO, 2022/12/22

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Daniel Christian shared this post and I can't resist passing it along. It's a newsletter authored by Michael Moe, founder of Global Silicon Valley (GSV), an investment firm. Reading it feels a bit like watching a train wreck in slow motion, from the hackneyed football story to start the item, to reading about "my delight when co-founder of Coursera Daphne Koehler came into my office in 2012 to explain the radical concept behind her new business" to the "despite what the score says, I like the fundamentals of the company and the open ended potential" ("GSV owns shares in Coursera") to the closing bit, "New MacDonald has a Startup.... EIEIO: Entrepreneurship, Innovation, Education, Impact and Opportunity." It really is a glimpse into another world, one not for the likes of you and I.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

How many colleges and universities are blocking TikTok? | Bryan Alexander
2022/12/22

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From my perspective, this is a case of U.S. institutions not wanting a Chinese company doing what Google, Meta, and Apple do all the time - surveil its staff and students and report back to the corporate office, cooperating with government as requested. It should be made clear, too, that the ban doesn't extend to students and staff, as is often suggested in the coverage, but rather applies to institutionally owned hardware. It's this sort of action that builds mistrust between countries at a time when the world really needs people to be working together.

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Mozilla to Explore Healthy Social Media Alternative
Steve Teixeira, dist://ed, 2022/12/22

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"In early 2023," writes Steve Teixeira, "Mozilla will stand up and test a publicly accessible instance in the Fediverse at Mozilla.Social." According to this article, it's part of a broader initiative is "to contribute to the healthy and sustainable growth of a federated social space that doesn't just operate but thrives on its own terms, independent of profit- and control-motivated tech firms."

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Don’t Judge a Book - But What about the Professor Who Assigned the Book?
Randi Shedlosky-Shoemaker, Journal of Interactive Technology & Pedagogy, 2022/12/22

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What do students think of professors who use open educational resources (OER)? "Students may seemingly give some credit to those professors, in that they perceive those professors as willing to make material accessible to students. However, that positivity may not be generalized to other evaluations." Activities such as modifying textbooks may impress students more.

Note that I found this article while following up this post from the Journal of Interactive Technology & Pedagogy announcing that "we have published our newest issue on CUNY's instance of Manifold, as part of our ongoing migration of our archives and future production to the platform." Manifold is an open source 'free to use' application that is "library of projects. A project can be all kinds of things: a monograph, an essay, a primary text, a journal article, a journal issue, or a collection of resources." I like the concept, but it's missing important networking features, such as RSS feeds, or proper page metadata. Here's the docs.

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