OLDaily

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

Stephen Downes talks about his experiences with the cloud
Jim Groom, Taylor Jadin, Stephen Downes, 2024/06/24

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I'm a bit overdue in posting this - I've been behind in posting archives. This is a conversation I had a couple weeks ago with Jim Groom and Taylor Jadin of Reclaim Hosting. The purpose was to talk about my experiences moving my website from the CPanel site to Reclaim's cloud hosting, though we covered a wide range of related topics.

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Conversation #9: Add and Subtract – The Ed non-Tech (EnT) Podcast
Matt Stranach, Stephen Downes, The Ed non-Tech (EnT) Podcast, 2024/06/24

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This is the recording of a conversation I had with Matt Stranach on a wide range of topics related to educational technology and learning theory. We looked at (to paraphrase) some of my ongoing contributions to the practice, research, and outreach of e-learning along with the concepts or associated practices going into connectivism.

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Internet Archive forced to remove 500,000 books after publishers’ court win
Ashley Belanger, Ars Technica, 2024/06/24

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It has been often said that if somebody tried to create a library today, publishers would stop them. This case is proof of that. The Internet Archive established a virtual library - they would buy a book, then loan it out to one person at a time (I've made use of it and on occasion have had to wait until the copy was available). During the pandemic they loaned out more copies, to make up for those copies locked in inaccessible physical libraries. Publishers sued, fearful that they weren't able to gain maximum profits from people during the worldwide crisis. This is the result of that case. " In an open letter to publishers signed by nearly 19,000 supporters, IA fans begged publishers to reconsider forcing takedowns and quickly restore access to the lost books."

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What’s the Difference Between Mastodon, Bluesky, and Threads?
Rory Mir and Ross Schulman, Electronic Frontier Foundation, 2024/06/24

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This is an in-depth look at the three major contenders in the fediverse: the ActivityPub protocol used by Mastodon and others; Bluesky, founded by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey; and Threads, Facebook's alternative. The article looks not only at the technical details but also at how the three networks handle moderation and censorship. It's a good overview written from an open perspective.

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Do smartphones really cause mental illness among adolescents? Ten problems with Jonathan Haidt’s book
Michaela Lebedíková, Michal Tkaczyk, Vojtěch Mýlek, David Smahel, Parenting for a Digital Future, 2024/06/24

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This is a textbook case of applying good critical thinking technique to show the fhe flaws in a causal study. The target in question is Jonathan Haidt's The Anxious Generation which tells us "how the great rewiring of childhood Is causing an epidemic of mental illness." Given the recent wave of mobile phone bans in classrooms, a sober rethink is sorely needed. According to the authors, Haidt cherry-picks research, infers cause from correlation, dismisses alternative explanations, generalized above the data, and more. It's as though Haidt's book was blended with a critical thinking textbook as a case study.

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Whiteboard Advisors Acquires Popular EdTech Newsletter, Investor Database
Julia Pasette, Whiteboard Advisors, 2024/06/24

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I've been enjoying Matt Tower's ETCH newsletter for the last year or so (the domain was registered in 2022). It offered a business focus on edtech, tracking mergers and acquisitions and such, things I don't normally cover here. Anyhow, it was acquired by Whiteboard Media group this week. "The EdSheet will join a growing roster of Whiteboard Media publications." I mention it here to reassure readers that there's no possibility of OLDaily being acquired - the data is open, the list of email subscribers is never shared, and most of the readership (via social media, RSS and web) can't even be counted, let alone tracked.

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AI took their jobs. Now they get paid to make it sound human
Thomas Germain, BBC News, 2024/06/24

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Interesting look at a copy editor whose job changed from editing the work of 60 human writers to editing the work of the AI that replaced them. "Mostly, it was just about cleaning things up and making the writing sound less awkward, cutting out weirdly formal or over-enthusiastic language," Miller says. "The real problem was it was just so repetitive and boring. It started to feel like I was the robot." This, of course, is just a temporary stage, and the editor was soon replaced by another AI. In this particular case the articles were park of the pink slime internet. But, eventually, they will be good.

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From Phoenix to ArriveCAN: How to fix federal information technology procurement
George Melika-Abusefien, Thomas Goyer, Sarah Homsi, Sally Twin, Kokul Sathiyapalan, Policy Options, 2024/06/24

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The problems discussed have in common the need to serve hundreds of thousands of clients. This introduces numerous sources of error, as the one-in-a-million event is an even bet to happen. The recommendations in this article are woefully inadequate to the task. Two of them are focused on deputy ministers, the people least likely to have the necessary skills to address the issues. Another recommends training procurement staff in IT - though it would be far easier to train IT staff in procurement. The last offers the most hope, focusing on a minim viable product (MVP) methodology. But how do you test incremental development with hundreds of thousands of people? I would personally lean on more open source development, using already hardened components, and offering incentives directly to developers to create improvements.

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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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