OLDaily

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

DIF announces DWN Community Node
Decentralized Identity Foundation - Blog, 2024/07/19

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According to this item, "the Decentralized Identity Foundation (DIF) today announced the availability of the Decentralized Web Node (DWN) Community Instance... personal data stores that eliminate the need for individuals to trust apps to responsibly use and protect their data." Now I haven't tried using this yet and don't know exactly how it works. But it does relate to a use case I'm working on - creating a web application that lives entirely in the browser using nothing but local storage. DWN would allow me to use the same credentials on different computers - at least, I think that's how it would work. (Why a browser-based application? Because, as someone once said, "the fediverse lives in the client". More on this in the fall.

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The Library Is a Commons
Emily Drabinski, In These Times, 2024/07/19

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A librarian describes the institution of the library in an overtly political frame that is, well, not wrong. "When library workers open the door in the morning, they give the public access to public space. When library workers check out a book or check it back in, they circulate public resources... Library workers understand that we are on the front lines of the movement for public ownership of the public good." Via Robin DeRosa.

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Global cyber outage grounds flights, hits banks, telecoms, media
Reuters, 2024/07/19

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The short story is that a faulty security update brought down a wide range of services around the world, most notably those dependent on Microsoft products. The technology responsible, the CloudStrike Falcon platform, "converges security and IT to protect all key areas of risk." As many have noted, the widespread nature of the outage offers a good argument for decentralization.

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Updating OER Foundation Web Services for July 2024 | OERu Technology Blog
Dave Lane, OERu Technology, 2024/07/19

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This is an update on the tech stack the OER Foundation's Dave Lane has been managing, as well as an update of sorts on the turmoil in New Zealand's polytech and vocational higher education sector. For content: WordPress, Drupal and SilverStripe (which is new to me); for video gosting, PeerTube.  Events using Mobilizon, fediverse tools including Mastodon, PieFed and PixelFed. Streaming: Owncast. Single Sign-On - Authentik.And many more things. I've worked with a lot of these systems, with and without guidance from Lane, and maintaining this software is not trivial - but essential, especially if you want to work in an open source world.

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Active reading: how to become a better reader
Anne-Laure Le Cunff, Ness Labs, 2024/07/19

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This is all pretty basic stuff, but if you're the sort of person who reads by starting with the first sentence and continuing until you get to the last sentence, hoping against hope that you remember some of the content in between, then this guide is for you. This article calls it 'active reading' - I think of it as 'reading analytically'. When you understand that text isn't just 'stories', that it's a complex multi-dimensional artifact, you begin to understand what's actually going on in writing, and (perhaps) in the mind of the person who wrote the text. It's how I regard just about any text I encounter (OLDaily exists because of my practice of paraphrasing anything I read).

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The Model Isn't the Territory, Either
Douglas Rushkoff, Medium, 2024/07/19

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In 1985 I filled more than 300 page of my Masters thesis Models and Modality arguing much the same point as is raised here: the model isn't the reality. It got tricky because back then (and still, I think) modal semantics were based in possible world semantical models, and these possible worlds were (according to some philosophers) real. Anyhow, Douglas Rushkoff is making the same case here, first with respect to fractals, and then with respect to AI, in about 1/100th of the space. And he takes it a step further: perhaps these new models can help remind us that the models we create in society - everything from money to traffic to property - are not real. They're things we create, arbitrarily. And "we can't fight over these created models and histories anymore. They cannot be resolved. They are not real. They are models. Games. Rhetoric. Approximations. They are figures, and never ground." P.S. I learned later that Laozi made much the same case about power, culture and virtue; and if we want, we could add Nietzsche to the mix.

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Academic journals are a lucrative scam – and we’re determined to change that
Arash Abizadeh, The Guardian, 2024/07/19

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Matthew Cheney calls this a "fierce" article, and the title alone makes it hard to disagree. " The commercial stranglehold on academic publishing is doing considerable damage to our intellectual and scientific culture. As disinformation and propaganda spread freely online, genuine research and scholarship remains gated and prohibitively expensive." Or as I say (a lot): democracy dies behind a paywall.

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The Case for Diamond Open Access
Justin Weinberg, Daily Nous, 2024/07/19

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"In Diamond OA, there are no costs to either the author or the reader. Diamond OA journals are usually published by academic institutions, academic societies or funding organisations. The costs associated with publishing and peer-reviewing articles are typically covered by the institutions or organisations themselves rather than requiring authors to pay article processing charges (APCs). " Justin Weinberg writes, "As editors of one of our field's leading journals, we feel a strong responsibility to help build collective momentum towards a better arrangement: a publishing model that no longer wastes massive amounts of public resources feeding profits to private corporations, secures editorial independence against the pressures of profit-making and makes research available to everyone, free..." However, "Academics still face a massive collective action problem: we want a new arrangement but each of us, individually, is strongly incentivised to stick with the status quo."

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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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