OLDaily

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

How can we achieve sustainable funding for open access books?
OpiTom Grady, Elaine Sykes, Martin Paul Eve, UKSG Insights, 2025/02/13

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"Book processing charges (BPCs) do not scale but they remain a significant method of paying to produce OA monographs for many researchers and libraries," write the authors. "However, in the last few years, we have seen several new initiatives emerge that seek to solve the problem posed by funding via BPCs alone." Why? Especially when "there is a proliferation of collective funding models for OA books, including Opening the Future, Open Book Collective, MIT Press's D2O, JSTOR's Path to Open and others...  how do we move away from relying on big grants or scraps and leftover funds at the end of the year?" I honestly think most of academia's problems in publishing are of their own creation, aided of course by commercial publishers eager to cash in, but caused ultimately by the institutions' inability or unwillingness to change. Via Digital Koans.

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BuzzFeed Looks to Launch Its Own, More Positive Social Media Platform
Andrew Hutchinson, Social Media Today, 2025/02/13

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According to this report, "web publisher BuzzFeed, led by Jonah Peretti, is creating its own social network in order to counter the negative impacts of the current leading social apps, which are largely caused by AI-based algorithms that optimize for engagement above all else." It follows a 3,000 word manifesto from Peretti against the proliferation of Stakes/Novelty/Anger/Retention/Fear (SNARF) content on traditional social media. "We are creating a new social media platform built specifically to spread joy and enable playful creative expression. This social media platform will use AI to give users agency instead of stealing their agency."

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How to Show Up When Your Work Is Under Attack
Felix Schein, SSIR, 2025/02/13

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This is good advice for anyone, but especially for those trying to advance a progressive agenda in difficult times: "Own your work and your success. Intimidation only works if there is a weak link, if folks begin to fold and turn on each other or their ideas, or if you abandon the town square. Work to own the square instead." 

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Diversity, equity, and inclusion is not an illusion
Paul Kunert, The Register, 2025/02/13

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Things have come to this: I spent more than an hour today trying (without success) to get an AI to accept microphone input (on both my phone and computer, and on three separate browsers). Meanwhile, events in the world feel to me like they're overtaking everything else. Like this item on diversity, equity and inclusion. The main story here is that a lot of companies are resisting the anti-DEI trend in the U.S., and for good reason. As I said in my seminar today, if you want to be successful in a distributed and decentralized world, you need DEI. Societies that reject DEI become insular, insecure and fragile. But with this discussion we're getting far away from ed tech and are working on the grounds on which a functioning society is based. How relevant is my work in such a world?

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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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