OLDaily

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

A new organisational home for Solid
Tim Berners-Lee, Solid Community Forum, 2024/10/17

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I know this is being presented as a new beginning but to me it feels like the beginning of the end. "As of today, the Open Data Institute 6 (ODI) will take responsibility for the organisation of the Solid Community." I had a lot of hopes for Solid and followed them from the start, but they appeared to focus on engineering first and never did attract an actual user base.

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Beyond technical features: why we need to talk about the values of the Fediverse
Elena Rossini, 2024/10/17

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Two part post (part one, part two) on the values of the fediverse. I'm of two minds on this. First, the values described here are also my values. But second, I don't think you can describe 'the values' of an online community. But having said that, these posts take a different approach: looking at traditional social networks (and citing Jaron Lanier) they observe how the structure of the network creates a set of values and expectations from users. In the case of traditional media, it's "ME ME ME LOOK AT MEEEEEE". The fediverse was designed to embody a different set of values: genuine connection, privacy and consent, accessibility and (in part 2) mindfulness. 

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How to join Mastodon
Stefan Bohacek, 2024/10/17

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This is a great introduction to Mastodon for people who have no idea what it is but who want to learn more - a lot more. It suggests places to start, how to find people to follow, verification, Mastodon culture, and anything else you might need to know.  One highlight: it introduced me to omg.lol, which includes your own website, email service, Mastodon account, and much more, for $20/year. 

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Cultivating (Gen)AI Literacy: Moving Past AI Pedagogy's Hype
Gwen Nguyen, BCcampus, 2024/10/17

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I think people will apprecite this article, especially inasmuch as Gwen Nguyen argues "there is no such thing as AI pedagogy" but I think any article on digital learning that begins "you walk into your classroom and instead of rows of eager (or maybe sleepy) students you're greeted by a sea of screens" is about to seriously miss the point. The argument against the idea of AI pedagogy is by now a familiar one:

• AI "cannot provide the immediate empathy and understanding that a human teacher can";
• AI "lacks the capacity for deep ethical reasoning" and "cannot engage in nuanced discussions about ethics, culture, and human experiences";
• AI cannot "fully appreciate the creativity, original thinking, or emotional experience that students might bring in their work".

While these may be true of contemporary AI, there's no reason to believe they won't be true in the future. But more to the point, it's important to examine what these mean in a pedagogical context. For me, the first princple of digital education is that it is much more difficult to project power over students online. From a certain perspective - and we could talk about that - all three of these arguments are about ways of projecting power (under, of course, the guise of empathy, ethics, and appreciation). The risk here is that AI will be able to do these three things, not that it won't be able to, and hence may be able to circumvent humans' direct influence and power over each other.

 

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Welcome to Caddy
2024/10/17

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Caddy is a candidate for replacing the stalwart Nginx web server. The primary role played by Nginx is (was?) to distribute web requests to various services that may be running on various containers, including the ability to serve as the front end for load-balancing for high-demand websites. Caddy is reported to be easier to set up and includes SSL certification (which has been for years a pain for web developers). I haven't tried it, but will as a future episode of Stephen Follows Instructions.  Note that there is already a Caddy 2 that you should start with, as it is not compatible with the original Caddy. Via Julia Evans.

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ClubsAll Home
2024/10/17

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As Last Week in the Fediverse reports, "ClubsAll is a new fediverse project, a Reddit-alternative similar to Lemmy, PieFed and Mbin. ClubsAll main goal is to provide a clean and easily-accessible UI, and explicitly positions itself as a Reddit alternative." I tried it out and while it definitely looks and feels like Reddit (replacing 'subs' with 'clubs'), I worry about scalability, as it had page load issues even at this early stage of its existence. Still, I think there's a need for a decentralized version of Reddit, as the centralized one is going through its inevitable decline.

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Would restricting access to Russell Group universities and introducing an Oxbridge lottery crack open Britain’s elite?
Nick Hillman, HEPI, 2024/10/17

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The book under review is behind a paywall, naturally, but this review is still an interesting read, not because of the solutions proposed in the book (which are narrow and shortsighted) but because of the discussion of the factors that perpetuate the ascension to rul of an elite. The most salient factor - and we've seen this mentioned before - is that "you're five times more likely to enter the elite if you come from a very rich family and attend Oxbridge than if you come from a more modest background and attend Oxbridge." Elite education is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for passage into the elite. That's why merely addressing the education system will not redress social inequality. 

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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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