OLDaily

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

Bluesky is getting its own photo-sharing app, Flashes
TechCrunch, 2025/01/15

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According to this report, "An independent developer is building a photo-sharing app for Bluesky called Flashes. The soon-to-launch app is powered by the same technology that underpins Bluesky, the AT Protocol." What's important to note here is that Bluesky still keeps a tight hold on user identification in the AT protocol world. So don't start celebrating just yet.

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The crisis in universities and colleges: 6: too much (useless) research
Tony Bates, Online learning and distance education resources, 2025/01/15

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I'm not sure how many people will agree with Tony Bates here, but it's consistent with the position he's taken over the years. In short, he argues that far fewer professors should be conducting research, and that they should focus on teaching only. But is this a message people want to hear? "Not all can - nor should - strive to be elite research universities." Well, sure, let's let only the elite do research. I agree that there a lot of bad research is published, but that's neither a cause nor a symptom of the problems universities face. And a lot of it comes from these 'elites', so this won't fix that. But even more importantly, people don't study for PhDs because they want to teach. Who are these teaching-only universities going to hire?

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Re-capturing the early 80s
Alex Usher, HESA, 2025/01/15

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The diagram that opens this article is of particular interest to me because it starts almost exactly when I started university - the fall of 1981. As I've described it in later years, there was a thin slice of time in 1980s Alberta where someone like me - with a poor academic record and no money - could get into university, a window that closed soon after. Much of my time as a student journalist and leader in the years that followed were focused on the issue of accessibility. I still consider it the key issue in education today. And now, as we approach a worldwide higher education funding crisis, I wonder what people like me will do in the future.

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Can UK universities avoid repeating past mistakes in online learning?
Neil Mosley, Neil Mosley Consulting, 2025/01/15

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Neil Mosley's argument in a nutshell: "The MOOC period of the 2010s, though fuelled by an unhelpful and misguided level of hype, served as a catalyst for investment in online education by UK universities. However, this investment, in aggregate, did not deliver significant long-term returns and failed to provide a platform from which many institutions could build." In order to avoid repeating this mistake, he argues, "Universities need to think of online learning as a long game, rather than a short-term opportunity, and insulate their efforts against another common source of waste in the sector: the frequent cycle of disruption caused by new leaders abandoning existing projects in favour of their own ideas or visions." But there's no reason why existing long-term projects can't also be a waste of resources. 

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Mary the Colour Scientist
The Philosophical Quarterly, 2025/01/15

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Is consciousness reducible to physical phenomena? Here we have a key argument from Frank Jackson and a number of responses over the years offered (finally) as open access. Jackson writes, "there is a possible world with organisms exactly like us in every physical respect (and remember that includes functional states, physical history, et al.) but which differ from us profoundly in that they have no conscious mental life at all." My own take is that this is not possible; a change in conscious mental life requires a physical change in the person. But how can I prove this? How can I show this? This collection wrestles with the issue, and makes for some enjoyable reading.

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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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