OLDaily

Welcome to Online Learning Daily, your best source for news and commentary about learning technology, new media, and related topics.

Mastodon Is Doomed
Justin Garrison, 2023/04/27

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As is always the case with a statement like this, a lot depends on what you mean by 'doomed'. Here 'doomed' seems to mean something like 'will not scale' or 'not the poster child of the fediverse' or 'not monetized and widely circulated as a singe user app'. And yeah - I agree with all the criticisms of Mastodon (especially the bit about using Ruby and Postgres). And maybe the majority of people would prefer something that is not Mastodon. It doesn't matter - and I think even Justin Garrison agrees. "Mastodon will continue as a niche community and it will have lots of happy users." That's all most of us wanted. That's all most of us need. Via Reddit.

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The Allure of Mastodon
Jim Groom, bavatuesdays, 2023/04/27

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The allure of Mastodon is that it takes us back to the early days of social media, a time when it was about conversations within a community, and not the algorithm and posturing and poling on. Jim Groom outlines this appeal as only he can, describing his own experiences building and running Mission Mastodon, a sandbox server that will "explode" next month, and by finding examples like "the much grander work Kathleen Fitzpatrick and company are spearheading with hcommons.social to build a full blown scholarly community." He writes, " I'm digging figuring out how to run Mastodon; what's the best storage option; how to map domains; how to integrate Azuracast; some basic tweaks and maintenance; etc. It's that old idea of narrating your work openly, with hopes it could benefit others."

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An Open Companion to Early British Literature
Allegra Villarreal, Open Pedagogy Notebook, 2023/04/27

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This short post links to an open textbook consisting of 86 chapters that "cover 1,000 years of British literature featuring primary source texts commonly assigned for survey courses of British Literature." To be sure, most of the authors' contributions are short introductory texts to the readings from that literature, but still, there's a lot of them. What's most interesting is that the digital textbook "was developed through an 'open pedagogy' approach with over 100 Austin Community College students contributing footnotes, introductory chapters, digital learning objects, and test bank questions with a student audience in mind." It's interesting that the text stops with Samuel Johnson, and not Boswell's Life of Johnson, but I guess that would have been too long a book.

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Classifying constructive comments
Varada Kolhatkar, Nithum Thain, Jeffrey Sorensen, Lucas Dixon, Maite Taboada, First Monday, 2023/04/27

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This article is interesting from the perspective of critical literacies, as it's based on the idea of recognizing different types of constructive and non-constructive online comments. And it's also interesting from a pedagogical perspective, as it provides a framework that could be used to guide people toward how to make more constructive contents (indeed, having a cohort go through such a labeling exercise would be effective, in my view). Finally, it's interesting because we can imagine the corpus of 12,000 annotated news comments could be used to inform or train automated comment moderation systems.

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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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