OLDaily

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

As TikTok ban threatens stability in social media ecosystem, some brands settle into the fediverse
Kimeko McCoy, Digiday, 2024/04/24

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The headline is that the United States may soon ban TikTok, a story remarkable in its own right. The underlying thread is that centralized social media services (TikTok, Twitter, Facebook, etc) have become too unstable for individuals and businesses to rely on. Buried deep is the main story: that the only way to reliably access an audience is to give up on platforms trying to control access to it. Hence, "Vox Media's technology news publication The Verge says it also has plans to federate its own site to have more ownership over its content and audience." Via Ben Werdmuller.

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My Dinner With Andreessen
Rick Perlstein, The American Prospect, 2024/04/24

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There are many ways to read this article. I'm here for the way the author criticizes billionaires, but that's not why I'm sharing it, that's just a bonus. No, what I ask readers to consider is what we want the outcome of an education to be by considering the four points of a pyramid: a young Marc Andreesen who as a student at a public university was able to develop the first commercial web browser; the second, the author of the piece, an apparent 'intellectual', familiar with the works of Agnes Martin, Claes Oldenburg, Julius Evola and Corey Robin; the aforementioned billionaire who believes people like him "should get to make decisions to reorder life as we know it without interference from anyone else"; or the people in small towns who value "the ordinary comforts of kinship, friendship, craft, memory, legend, lore, skills passed down across generations." Don't answer too quickly. Via Dan Gillmor.

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How web bloat impacts users with slow devices
Dan Luu, 2024/04/24

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Web bloat is something I take seriously because it impacts both cost and performance. If the reader is using a slower or less powerful device, accessing online services can be difficult or at times impossible (think about how unresponsive some shopping or airline sites are, for no good reason). This article looks not only at page size but also at how much of a load the page imposes on your computer once it has downloaded. For comparison with the web sites on the chart, my own home page comes in at about 140 kilobytes (0.14 mB). There's no Javascript on it and it doesn't have cookies. It should load easily just about everywhere (in my office it loads at 640 ms). The same can't be said of everything I build, though. But I don't stop trying. Via Molly White.

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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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