OLDaily

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

Don’t look back in anger (or anything else)
Martin Weller, The Ed Techie, 2024/03/15

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The highlight of this post is a link to Audrey Watters saying I told you so. But the main point is Martin Weller saying "we should assume that generally tech revolutions in education end in a whimper, not a bang. Set your expectations accordingly." Yeah, there's a lot of "I told you so" going around about the demise of Udacity (though it's easy to forget that Coursera is chugging along) and to be sure there's nothing about the Udacity business model that is particularly attractive. If I had a main message to offer, it would be something like "most edtech revolutions aren't edtech revolutions at all". They're inventions of a fickle press that likes to fawn on elite university stars. No. Real edtech is the tens of thousands of people creating and posing new learning content everyday, not only on institutional platforms but also on blogs, video sites, social media, podcasting platforms, and wherever. Mostly nobody's writing about them nothing real in this field happens without them.

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Hashnode Creates Scalable Feed Architecture on AWS with Step Functions, EventBridge and Redis
Rafal Gancarz, InfoQ, 2024/03/15

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Hashnode is a social network and blogging platform for developers (though of course it could be used for other functions as well). This article describes how Hashnode developers built a scalable event-driven architecture (EDA) for composing feed data for thousands of users. What I found interesting was not only how they composed the feed, but how the feed is actually built ahead of time so it's ready for the users when they login. That makes a lot of sense, actually, though it means your feed is being rebuilt over and over even you don't login. By contrast, it feels (though I couldn't say either way) as though Mastodon only builds the feeds when users login. Less overhead. Slower responses.

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What I learned from looking at 900 most popular open source AI tools
Chip Huyen, 2024/03/15

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This is a great high-level overview of what's out there in the world of open source AI tools. Even though it covers a lot of ground, it's a quick read. No doubt there's so much more that could be said. Most useful is the introductory description of the 'AI stack' - "4 layers: infrastructure, model development, application development, and applications." We see the most open source projects at the application layer, and the further down the stack the harder it is for individuals to make contributions. Still, there's a ton of room here for individual innovators. Also from the same author: Machine Learning Developments and Operations (MLOps) Guide. See also: collection of open source and/or local AI tools and solutions.

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Sketchplanations - A weekly explanation in a sketch
Sketchplanations, 2024/03/15

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Alan Levine shared this link today. At first I was just going to look and move on, but after spending fifteen minutes reading these one-panel cartoon explanations I feel I have to link to it here. Most of the explanations are of phenomena I'm already familiar with, but they could be quite educational for someone with less experience, and they have the virtue of being accurate and illustrative. Recommended; have a look, at least.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Should you order learning content by relevance or create structured pathways?
Chris Littlewood, Filtered, 2024/03/15

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This is advertorial content, so read it with a grain of salt. Still, it raises an interesting question, quoting a LinkedIn post from Nick Shackleton-Jones on why we shouldn't organize content using pathways, and offering a counter in the form of another LinkedIn comment and a study the author (putatively) conducted on his own. For my own part, I don't see why you couldn't do both. A lot of the time (such as when I was trying to use public and private keys yesterday) there's a logical order of things. I follow pathways a lot when I'm learning about tech. What I don't want, though, is to be locked into pathways. Make them a suggestion, not a requirement.

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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