OLDaily

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

Mud Lake
Flickr, 2024/11/18

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It has been a while since I've shared my photos here. I really should do it more often. This is a set of photos from an area called Mud Lake in Ottawa's west end. I have photos of ducks, turkeys and other birds, fungi, trees, trails, sunsets and more. Enjoy!

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Open Movement's Common(s) Causes - Creative Commons
Anonymous Anonymous, Creative Commons, 2024/11/18

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One of the things about Creative Commons is its casting of open content as an advocacy campaign. While I can sort of see the benefit of trying to convince others to do the right thing, I've never seen that to be as powerful a strategy as actually doing the right thing yourself. In other words, I think leading by example is more powerful than leading by argument. The risk of leading by argument becomes clear when you encounter the need to strike 'common cause' with others. The whole idea of mass movements is, to me, an industrial age phenomenon. And it runs counter to openness precisely because everybody has to be doing the same thing and staying 'on message'. Here's the message. Here's the playing field.

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Could collaborative online provision offer benefits to UK universities?
Neil Mosley, Neil Mosley Consulting, 2024/11/18

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This is an idea that comes around from time to time. "Could... universities develop collaborative online electives to help address financial challenges and support growing online learning provision?" They could, of course, but but various reasons over the decades since the idea was first proposed, they haven't. 

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How Open Education Can Support Digital Literacy
Clint Lalonde, EdTech Factotum, 2024/11/18

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Clint Lalonde outlines BCcampus's eight core competencies in its digital literacy framework and then offers two "examples of open education practices and mapped the specific competencies in the framework to the competencies developed using these examples." It's a good example of how the competencies can be applied, though I hesitate to consider 'ethical and legal' part of "literacy". A person can be an unethical criminal and still be literate.

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Bluesky, decentralisation, and the distribution of power
Laurens Hof, fediversereport.com, 2024/11/18

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Laurens Hof makes the very good point that decentralized technology does not in itself result in decentralized power. As Jo Freeman writes, "The truth is, nearly every attempt to design a hierarchy-free, 'flat' control system just moves the central control around until you can't see it anymore." But Hof then seems to wrap up the article by saying Bluesky's decentralization will fix that. "Bluesky comes with a multimillion user social graph that new apps can plug into and build on top of. This makes the ATmosphere much more likely to become decentralised the more the network grows in popularity." I don't think it's that simple. But it's sure a lot better than the networks that are centralized by design.

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What I want from Mozilla
Ben Werdmuller, Werd I/O, 2024/11/18

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I didn't receive the survey, but I agree with Ben Werdmuller: what I want from Mozilla is the free and open web. But more: "If Firefox is the biggest, most impactful software product in Mozilla's arsenal today, how can it bring it back to prominence? One interesting route might be to use it as a way for third parties to explore the future of the browser. Mozilla can ship its own Firefox user experience, but what if it was incredibly simple for other people to also build wildly remixed browsers?" 

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People are fleeing Elon Musk’s X. Here’s a quick guide to the Twitter alternatives
Io Dodds, The Independent, 2024/11/18

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The migration from Twitter has turned into a flood. This articles profiles three destinations: Bluesky, Threads and Mastodon. Most people this time are going to Bluesky. Via Donald Taylor:  "Ed Monk has a useful list of how Blue Sky ensures safety for its users" Also, some starter packs (these are lists of people you can follow on Bluesky by clicking a single button): Facilitation, Learning & Development, Organizational Science, Communities of Practice, Data Science, Library Workers, HigherEd Teaching, Tech Managers, AI in Education, Media Literacy Educators, Educational Development, EdTech x AI and 45,316 more.

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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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