OLDaily

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

Digital Sovereignty: A Descriptive Analysis and a Critical Evaluation of Existing Models
Samuele Fratini, Emmie Hine, Claudio Novelli, Huw Roberts, Luciano Floridi, Digital Society, 2024/12/19

---

Another item from the backburner that touches on something really important - distributed identification . It's the idea that your own online identity is independent of any particular product or service (needless to say, there's a lot of resistance to that idea from web companies who see identity as a money-making machine (it's probably part of Bluesky's business model, but I digress)). This paper (27 page PDF) reports on a literature analysis conducted "to produce four models: the rights-based model, market-oriented model, centralisation model, and state-based model." This isn't a tech paper - the models are based on an analysis of laws and codes from around the world. 'Digital sovereignty' in this sense how countries govern the internet. But this typology has implications for technology, as it maps out different possibilities for implementation of core social services, such as digital identity. Or at least, I see that connection that can be made from this paper, which is why I'm saving it.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post][Share]

Building Python tools with a one-shot prompt using uv run and Claude Projects
Simon Willison, Simon Willison's Weblog, 2024/12/19

---

This item is from today but it's going straight to the backburner because I want a reference to Simon Willison's  one-shot HTML+JavaScript applications built via Claude Artifacts, such as this link extractor I've had sitting in a browser tab for several weeks. The point here isn't to have functions that perform tasks; the coding world is full of those. Rather, these are functions that start working as web pages right out of the box. That's useful to me. This Python thing might also be useful (I need to learn how to run multiple flask apps from a single server, though, because I can't afford to spin up a new cloud instance every time I want a web service).

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post][Share]

AntennaPod Subscriptions
Ed, AntennaPod, 2024/12/19

---

Another idem from the backburner. These are Ed's Podcast subscriptions (a podcast, recall, is an RSS feed that has an audio enclosure in it; not to be confused with the fake 'podcasting' commercial services like Spotify provide ). The list of feeds is an OPML file, which is styled to render nicely as a web page using an XSL stylesheet (this is becoming a lost art). This particular feed is produced by AntennaPod, an open source app you can use on an Android phone to listen to podcasts. Anyhow, I needed a podcast OPML file for a project I'm working on, so I kept this page handy. It's super-simple to host your own podcast (I have one here) or you can use a hosting service.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post][Share]

The HTML Presentation Framework
Hakim El Hattab, Reveal.js, 2024/12/19

---

More stuff from the backburner. This is a link to reveal.js, an HTML presentation framwork. Why is this important to me? For one, all the code is available on GitHub. That means I can host it myself and make changes if I want. Also, it doesn't appear to use execCommand(), the widely-used Javascript function that has been depreciated due to security reasons. Because of this, creating web-based editors suddenly got a lot more complex and a lot of good projects were abandoned. So it's on my list to see what I can do with it. When I get a chance. If you don't what to do it all yourself, there's slides.com for a hosted solution.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post][Share]

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.

There are many ways to read OLDaily; pick whatever works best for you:

• Read in your web browser on this web page, updated weekdays
• Receive a daily or weekly email newsletter by subscribing here
• Subscribe to the RSS feed using your favourite feed reader
• Follow @OLDaily@mastodon.social on Mastodon or elsewhere in the fediverse
• Follow @OLDaily on Twitter
• Integrate the open API using the JSON feed