OLDaily

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

A free and open internet shouldn’t come at the expense of privacy | The Mozilla Blog
dist://ed, 2024/10/03

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This is an introduction from Mozilla president Mark Surman and comes with a companion piece, Improving online advertising through product and infrastructure, by Mozilla CEO Laura Chambers. Surman writes, "Mozilla can play a key role in creating better online advertising options not just by advocating for them, but also by building them." And Chambers writes, "Mozilla is going to be more active in digital advertising." As I read this, Mozilla is looking at a potential future where Google doesn't account for 80% of its revenue, and competing - instead of collaborating - with Google seems to be in the cards. But is privacy the key issue here? For me, it's being free from advertising. For me, being able to turn off unwanted messaging.

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The human touch
Terry Freedman, ICT & Computing in Education, 2024/10/03

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Terry Freedman reports that "I've been experimenting a lot with using AI, especially for summarising long documents," but complains that "the summaries lacked the human touch." In other words, "what they lacked was the depth and insight that a human expert can bring to the table." For example, a human might have "extracted the bits that were relevant to ICT teachers" where the AI might not. That sort of makes sense - the human summarizer (like me) is bringing background and context to the summary, which informs its creation and makes it more relevant. I'm not sure that's a 'human' touch so much as it is the result of years of education that allows us a privileged perspective.

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The Flow State: Definition, Benefits, And How To Achieve It
Clearer Thinking, 2024/10/03

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So this is a fairly comprehensive discussion of the nature and conditions around the 'flow state', which could be described as a sort of complete immersion in your learning. Except that I think it attributes far too much to external factors - things like 'picking the right task' and 'the right environment'. I mean, one of the lessons of Buddhism ("wash the bowl") is that with the right approach anything can be a flow state. And this awareness is important, because our capacity to get ourselves (unaided) into a flow state is often essential for success. The secret, for example, to public speaking is to stop thinking about what the audience is thinking about you and focus instead on doing the most you can for your audience (encapsulated in the advice, "love your audience"). We are responsible for our own state of flow. That's one of the first lessons of learning.

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Ok hear me out iPhones should have a sense of shame
Matt Webb, Interconnected, a blog by Matt Webb, 2024/10/03

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Yes, this is a neat idea: having a way to signal social disapproval to a phone being used nearby in an inappropriate way. But what amused me more about this post was Matt Webb's confident assumption that his ideas about social norms is what prevails. I mean, putting phones on airplane mode? Nobody  does that (if phones actually were dangerous, planes would be falling out of the sky every day). And from what I can see, everybody in the VIP section is making full-length concert recordings. And it just goes to show - if we could signal social disapproval to our phones, ti would be just one more source of conflict in society. As though we don't have enough. So beware - when you start talking about 'social norms' remember that not everyone shares the same sense of society.

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Announcing the launch of Social Web Foundation
Mallory Knodel, Association for Progressive Communications, 2024/10/03

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Slashdot summarizes: "Evan Prodromou, co-author of the ActivityPub protocol, has launched The Social Web Foundation (SWF) to address the challenges of the ActivityPub ecosystem and foster the growth of the Fediverse." Here's the SWF blog (no RSS, boo hiss) though you can follow it in the fediverse at @swf@socialwebfoundation.org or on Threads or (heh) LinkedIn and (heh) Facebook. There's a Twitter link but it blocks me. Automattic (WordPress) reports, "companies like Mastodon, Flipboard, Ghost, and Meta have expressed their support for the Foundation's mission." Also Vivaldi, NodeBB, IFTAS. Here's Tom Coates's post with the announcement. Here's the Reddit r/fediverse discussion. Here's Ben Werdmuller: here and here.

So this happened three days ago and already there's controversy, and specifically, whether the Social Web Foundation is focused on ActivityPub alone or whether it applies to the broader set of standards defining different versions of the fediverse (such as, say, Bluesky's AT). Prodromou says ActivityPub only. Part of this controversity was set off by Ghost, which is adapting its sofwtare to use ActivityPub, and which declared this week that it required 10 servers for "around 5,000 followers and a decent chunk of replies." Mastodon's Eugen Rochko comments, "it's really easy to make mistakes in computing that make a massive difference in performance... I would not make any assumptions about the protocol itself based on Ghost's work in progress implementation."

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The Website League newsletter
The Website League, 2024/10/03

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Alan Levine links to the Website League (and his attempt to link to his Pinboard feed shows why we need something like this). The League is "a bunch of smallish websites that talk to each other. You can go on the one you've chosen and post, and see posts by the people you follow." How does it work? It's similar to services like Mastodon, where there are separate websites, but these are focused on smaller user groups writing blog posts (by contrast, being in Mastodon is like 'living in an apartment building'). And while in the Mastodon fediverse servers block sites they don't want to connect to (aka 'denylist mode'), in the Website League, services explicitly declare what sites they do want to connect to (aka 'allowlist mode').

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Pluralistic: Prime’s enshittified advertising (03 Oct 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Cory Doctorow, Pluralistic, 2024/10/03

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Good argument from Cory Doctorow describing how companies are abusing copyright legislation to prevent you from doing things that are legal - such as fast-forwarding through ads on a video stream. Tools that allow you to do such things are examples of 'adversarial interoperability', and are used for "shifting the equilibrium between producers, intermediaries and buyers." But once you apply DRM to something - such as a video stream - you can no longer use such tools. And that's what's happening to the web. "The W3C... caved to pressure from the entertainment industry and the largest browser companies and created 'Encrypted Media Extensions' (EME), a 'standard' for video DRM that blocks all adversarial interoperability." And "this had the almost immediate effect of making it impossible to create an independent browser without licensing proprietary tech from Google." Eventually we won't be able to save any content from the web, or view any content without viewing ads. And that will be by design.

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Is "Workflow Learning" a myth?
Clark Quinn, Learnlets, 2024/10/03

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So here's the argument. 'Workflow learning' is essentially learning that happens within the flow of work. It's not microlearning, which happens during otherwise idle gaps, it's direct performance support. Performance support is really useful, but is it learning? Learning requires reflection, and it's not clear that performance support provides this opportunity. So the idea of 'workflow learning' might be a chimera. It may be "leading us into the mistaken belief that we can learn while we do without breaking up our actions."

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The Power of Routines: Building a Strong Foundation for Success
Eric Sheninger, A Principal's Reflections, 2024/10/03

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I'm going to back up Eric Sheninger's argument here with evidence from my own experience. I never know what's going to be new in my world; the domain in which I am supposed to be expert is constantly changing. To cope with all this uncertainty I depend on routines. I get up at the same time every day, do the same set of things, eat the same thing for breakfast, the same thing for lunch, and so on. This newsletter is part of my routine. Even when I travel, I take the same stuff, packed the same way, do everything the same way at the airport. It's all so I don't have to think about any of that, so I can be fully occupied thinking about other things (or, when I'm traveling, jet-lagged and not thinking at all). I'm not sure the benefits are exactly as described, but the suggestions are good.

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Beyond the link tax: journalism and the changing nature of the internet
Philip Moscovitch, Halifax Examiner, 2024/10/03

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The dispute pitting digital platforms like Google and Facebook against news providers may appear to have little to do with online learning, but the same sort of issues surface in education, with some of the same inherent risks. And as this column points out, one major risk is that these companies are all in rough agreement that the hyperlink to external sources should be abolished, or at the very least, downgraded. It's not hard to imagine educational institutions being happier in a non-hyperlinked walled garden - they're almost there already. But we need to be able to link and network with each other; otherwise we as a society cannot learn. And that truly would be the end. Via Kottke.

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