OLDaily

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

Advice on building your own ecosystem
Kate Carruthers, Aide Mémoire, 2023/07/27

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This is a short simple post but has advice that's essential to anyone who depends on an internet presence for anything. Specifically (paraphrased):  establish your own brand on your own website that you control, register your own domain yourself, never make platforms like Twitter, TikTok, Instagram, or Facebook your primary platform, export your contact lists and store them securely, and try to make contact with customers on your own platforms. I would also add that it's a good idea to reach beyond the traditional commercial platforms shown in the diagram, if only to be prepared for change when (not if) they suddenly turn toxic and die.

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MastoGizmos -- Exploration and Search Tools for Mastodon
Tara Calishain, Calishat, 2023/07/27

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The thing with an open infrastructure is that people can build services on top of basic services. This is a lot like the way TweetDeck and other applications were built on top of Twitter, but in the case of Mastodon and similar services, the basic services are distributed and open source, which means there's no way an Elon Musk can buy the entire thing and pull the rug out from under all the add-on services. In the Fediverse ecosystem, which si where Mastodon is located, we're seeing a naissance of these add-on services (it feels like 2007-2010 did fo social networks, before the owners clamped down). This is how to build a service infrastructure. Learning technology developers take note. Other possibly interesting things (so the site says): RSSGizmos, SearchGizmos, ResearchBuzz, Nosy Raleigh.

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RSS is Awesome
Tom Hazledine, 2023/07/27

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RSS is to me still the best social network. This is a simple little RSS reader that runs completely in your browser. It saves all the data right in the browser, which means there's no login to remember, so it's great for people who use only one device to read the web (less so for people like me who read their feeds from multiple devices). Read more about it. If you want to try it out, you can use my feed to sample it: https://www.downes.ca/news/OLDaily.xml Via Alan Levine (his RSS feed is https://cogdogblog.com/feed).

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The Anti-Ownership Ebook Economy
Sarah Lamdan, Jason M. Schultz, Michael Weinberg, Claire Woodcock, Engelberg Center on Innovation Law and Policy, 2023/07/27

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The model where you rent something rather than own it outright is not unique to eBooks - we see it everywhere from software to video to music to the turn signal on your BMW. But it's particularly telling when it comes to books, because you could buy one, own it outright, put it on your shelf, sell it if you desired, and never risk losing it unless you dropped it into your bathtub. No more. "Just as platforms control our tweets, our updates, and the images that we upload, platforms can also control the books we buy, keeping tabs on how, when, and where we use them, and at times, modifying or even deleting their content at will." I still consult my textbooks from my university days, many years ago - and because I've kept my own library of digital content, I can go back to a lot of more recent work as well. But I don't buy eBooks - if I can't keep a copy, there's no point reading the content. Anyhow, this article is a long and authoritative documentation of that trend - and if you want to keep it in your library, just download the 57 page PDF. Via Scott Leslie.

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Clarkesworld Magazine - Science Fiction & Fantasy
Clarkesworld Magazine, 2023/07/27

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I could never see getting an extra device just to read books, so I never bought a Kindle and haven't kept up (much) with the eReader space. And of course since it was a proprietary platform I never invested any time publishing on it. Good thing. As this post makes clear, Amazon's decision to discontinue Kindle magazine subscriptions "is a major financial blow to a small publication like us." Amazon's announcement was made earlier this year. Your Kindle won't be a completely useless device; you'll be able to read "a curated selection of digital literature" (presumably made up of copies from Project Gutenberg). As one commenter says, "this is a direct result of big corporations having absolute control over consumers, you can't even reach people when you are providing a service as important as journalism." True - but journalism needs to learn not to buy into the platforms in the first place - a warning we've reiterated many times in these pages.

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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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