OLDaily

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

Start with the Heart: Building Compassionate Connections From Day One
Mindith Rahmat, Faculty Focus, 2024/10/21

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I have mixed feelings about this. I am of course in favour of compassion; who isn't? But course instruction isn't the same as psychological counseling. And some of the suggestions feel positively intrusive, for example, "regularly check in with students about their well-being. This could be as simple as sending regular emails, asking how their day is going." And "taking short breaks during class or work sessions to practice self-compassion" seem like overkill. Maybe I'm just not compassionate enough to teach? Or maybe compassion needs to be balanced with other traits.

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Helping to build the open social web
Ben Werdmuller, Werd I/O, 2024/10/21

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Ben Werdmuller offers some ideas for building the Fediverse. I'm interested in the support for communities, better tools for moderators, and respect for users. I don't really care about what publishers need, especially their perceived "need to prove that there's return on investment." This usually means tracking, and I'm just not interested. I'm sort of OK with third party services, but we need to build a way to prevent things like the Automattic - WP Engine meltdown, which to me means ensuring commercial entities that take from open source find a way to give back. An ActivityPub API seems interesting (to that end I have my eye on this Deno project). This is pretty daunting. I'm not at all interested in "Fediverse VIP". 

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I Wish I Didn't Miss the '90s-00s Internet
rohan ganapavarapu, 2024/10/21

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This is an 18-year old waxing nostalgic about a web never experienced. "When social media caught on, the people running these companies were tasked to make it profitable. In doing this, social media got completely ruined. Our data got commodified, our attention got commodified, and a substantive part of who we say we are got commodified. This, in general, has led to a degradation in the quality of the internet."

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Research in Open Distance Learning in Complex, Changing Times
Paul Prinsloo, opendistanceteachingandlearning, 2024/10/21

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Paul Prinsloo attended the 37th Conference of the Asian Association of Open Universities (AAOU) hosted at Allama Iqbal Open University and reflected on the prsentations from people who were just discovering the topic. "I often had a feeling that we may suffer from scholarly amnesia," he writes, "reporting on issues as if there has not been any research on a particular topic. This may be how some members of the audience may have felt listening to me in 2002!" But also, after ther talks referencing Bloom's Taxonomy, or the the Community of Inquiry Framework, he wonders "whether there had not been any fresh theoretical and methodological lenses with which to engage with in researching open distance learning." Well, that's the problem of searching for a 'theoretical lens' rather than, say, causal principles. Normally, stability would indicate success. but here it indicates stagnation.

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Are Brains and AI Converging?—an excerpt from ‘ChatGPT and the Future of AI: The Deep Language Revolution’
Terrence Sejnowski, The Transmitter, 2024/10/21

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This post mirrors part of a new book by Terrence Sejnowski on debates about AI's capacity to mirror cognitive processes. I'm not sure where the book eventually lands on this subject, but this post describes how AI and neuroscience have been feeding into each other and how an AI may eventually simulate actual brain processes, citing an example using escape behavior from anoxia in zebrafish larvae and walking behavior in flies where this has already been accomplished. This post was originally published in Brains and AI, with extraneous material. I've subscribed to this newsletter so you may see more from this source.

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Google warns uBlock Origin and other extensions may be disabled soon
Lawrence Abrams, BleepingComputer, 2024/10/21

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If you use Google Chrome and are one of the 30 million using UBlock Origin to block web advertising, you are probably within hours of losing that protection as Google begins to disable the extension. The 'official' reason given by Google is 'security considerations' but the real reason, so far as I can see, is that Google is an advertising company that is losing too much revenue to ad blockers. Brave, a Chrome-based browser, is developing its own ad blocker. But your best bet is to switch today to Firefox (which is the browser I use every day). 

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Reddit is now blocking major search engines and AI bots - except the ones that pay
Emma Roth, The Verge, 2024/10/21

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Reddit, whuch is a very popular online discussion platform, has started blocking search engines from scraping user content unless they pay for the right to use their content. As a result, "Google is now the only mainstream search engine that yields recent Reddit results." It's hard not to see this as an instance of commercial media companies carving up the web into proprietary domains. These may be free for now but this won't last; as soon as the open web can be extinguished the commercial web will get very expensive to use.

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Penguin Random House, AI, and writers' rights
Cory Doctorow, Pluralistic, 2024/10/21

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Cory Doctorow offers some good advice for creators who think they are allied with publishers against AI companies: they're not. A publisher may manage to stop an AI company from using their work to train a language model, but they will not grant the same right to a creator when the company decides to sell the AI rights directly. We've already seen this play out at Reddit and Wiley. 

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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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