OLDaily

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

Introducing Apple Vision Pro
Apple, YouTube, 2023/06/09

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It would be irresponsible to pass over this 9-minute promotional video without comment. And I have to say, it's an impressive presentation, and though I can't imagine being one of the scuba people at the grocery store (to borrow a phrase) I can imagine wanting for video games and entertainment. Still - there's plenty to criticize. As Rusty Foster says, "Tim Apple introduced the most technologically advanced product ever created for viewing and annotating PDF documents." And as Alex Dobrenko says, "they at Apple R Us fundamentally misunderstand what, idk, being human is?" How? Well, like this: "'Your eyes are a critical indicator of connection and emotion,' Apple said. 'So Vision Pro displays your eyes when someone is nearby.' ... There is no less human way to say 'eye contact is clutch' than (read in robot voice) 'your eyes are a critical indicator of connection and emotion.'" So, maybe Apple Vision Pro is another Google Glass. But sooner or later, someone will get this right.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Mastodon over Mammon - Towards publicly owned scholarly knowledge
Bjö, rn Brembs, Adrian Lenardic, Peter Murray-Rust, Leslie Chan, Dasapta Erwin Irawan, Zenodo, 2023/06/09

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'Mammon' is defined in Google as "wealth regarded as an evil influence or false object of worship and devotion." The word originates as the Hebrew expression for 'money'. In this paper the authors argue that "scholarly organizations, in particular learned societies, are now facing a golden opportunity ... of creating a truly public square for scholarly discourse, impervious to private takeover." Could a federated approach to scholarly publishing succeed, or do we need an entity like CORE to aggregate publications centrally? Back in the eduSource days I argued strenuously for aggregators; today I'm less certain. I will say that in today's debates a lot of old issues surface - for example, how do you support discovery across a decentralized network without overwhelming small instances? How can third party apps add value to these searches? But by contrast: how can you have a centralized network without the commercial interests and advertisers turning the gold into dross? It doesn't seem possible.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Your Favorite Reddit App Is About to Shut Down
Corbin Davenport, How-To Geek, 2023/06/09

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Previously: Reddit announced that it will prevent commercial AI services from accessing its APIs. At that time, "it wasn't clear if third-party clients like Apollo for Reddit, Sync for Reddit, rif is fun, and other apps would be allowed to stay in their current form." Now, it looks like maybe not. And Reddit moderators, like those on Stack Overflow, are fuming. As a result, a number of discussion threads (known as 'subreddits') will be blocked in protest. "Many subreddit moderators depend on tools only available outside the official app to keep their communities on-topic and spam-free (so) On June 12th, many subreddits will be going dark to protest this policy." Some advocated a migration to Lemmy, a federated messaging service similar to Mastodon; Reddit responded by briefly blocking references to Lemmy.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

CORE: A Global Aggregation Service for Open Access Papers
Petr Knoth, et al., Scientific Data, 2023/06/09

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I've mentioned CORE before (most recently, here and here). This is a publication providing a formal presentation of the service. "CORE aggregates open access research papers from thousands of data providers from all over the world including institutional and subject repositories, open access (OA) and hybrid journals," hence making it, according to the article, "the largest collection of OA literature" and "provides a number of ways for accessing its data for both users and machines, including a free API and a complete dump of its data." The paper lists a number of challenges to OA aggregation from so many diverse sources, and offers as it's key innovation "the improvement of the process of aggregating research literature." Code for most of CORE is available but not this ingestion module. The paper goes to great lengths to compare itself to other open content aggregation services, and reads a bit like an investment prospectus, which maybe it is.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

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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