OLDaily

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

DWeb
DWeb, 2025/02/19

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Links from today's DWeb event: DWeb Events Code of Conduct, the AT protocol, Running a Full-Network atproto Relay, Social Web Foundation, Free Our Feeds, Free Our Feed Updates, Nos Social (built on Nostr, a decentralized, user-led protocol), Digital Space: How it Should Be Done (+1 from me on this one), Dave Winer on Bluesky, ATprotocol browser, AT protocol tech talks, atprotocol.dev, Frontpage, Roomy, Clones like Pinksky, Can ATProto Scale Down?, CoSocial, Raft Foundation, strfry, Hometown, AT topics of interest, how social protocols compare from brid.gy, DWeb principles, Indigo, Bluesky VC funded, Algorithmic Pluralism, Blacksky, Nathan Schneider, Graze, Composable Moderation, plc-mirror, DID plc-directory ("a self-authenticating Decentralized Identifier (DID) system), Deck.blue, Statusphere, Restrict Replies to Followers Only on Bluesky.

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Reflections on 25 years of Interconnected
Matt Webb, Interconnected, 2025/02/19

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Pretty good commentary on blogging. First there's this: "Everything starts with awareness. So be noisy about the precise things that I'm interested in, and see what happens. That means product design but also means nonsense about weird history or whatever." Then there's this: "blogging has become small-p political again. Slowly, slowly, the web was taken over by platforms. Your feeling of success is based on your platform's algorithm... Writing a blog on your own site is a way to escape all of that." Via Ben Werdmuller, who comments, "sure, blogging might never be mainstream. But it can also be leading edge."

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Facebook is about to mass delete a lot of old live streams
Umar Shakir, The Verge, 2025/02/19

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If you used Facebook to record your live streams, you probably made a mistake. "Facebook will start deleting users' live broadcast recordings after 30 days starting on February 19th. Users who go live after that date must download the videos to save them from getting deleted." You can, at least, download them, but any audience and comments that they generated on Facebook will be gone. Again - don't depend on a proprietary platform for anything important. Via Apostolos K.

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AI Idealism
Tim Klapdor, Heart, Soul, Machine, 2025/02/19

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This post relates a bit to my comments to Clark Quinn (which still haven't appeared on his blog, which is exactly why I take my comments and make them blog posts). Here, Tim Klapdor channels a bit of an apocalyptic vision of AI: "what is the Ideal? I can't spot it. Every proposed ideal future feels like a dystopia." But let me flip it around - why does it feel like a dystopia? "(A)n ideal world free from labour and effort, where AI and robots are capable of doing everything... also a world where human effort is worthless, and we are unmoored from our place in society... a neocolonial state where we the people, become enslaved by the robot masters." But why take this view? In a world where people are valued strictly and only by the work they do, AI is an oppressor. But if we reject the abstractions that define our society, AI becomes a liberator. AI tells us: what we had was never wealth, what we had was never knowledge. We made it all up, then sold it as though it were worth something. Wealth and knowledge are concrete and physical, not the abstractions we created to stand in their place.

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Expanding the Global Collection of Open Assets for Open Education Week 2025
Open Education Week, 2025/02/19

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I've nev er really been able to wrap my head around Open Education Week, partially because it seems so organized (and I am not one who favours central organization) and partially because it seems so chaotic (it just seems to sort of 'arrive' every year with a deluge of events, and then it's gone). I can't even figure out when it is (some sites say February, some say March (it seems to bounce around every year, like Easter), this page doesn't actually give us any dates (except in tiny print at the bottom)). I know that sounds inconsistent on my part, but that's how OEWeek strikes me. Anyhow, here is the link to the main (?) OE Week website. Good luck, and enjoy. Anyhow, I wanted CList to be a part of it, and if I figure out how, I'll see what I can do.

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Amazon’s killing a feature that let you download and backup Kindle books
Andrew Liszewski, The Verge, 2025/02/19

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As this story reports, "Amazon is removing a Kindle feature that allows purchased books to be downloaded to a computer for backup or transfer via USB." This essentially locks readers into the Amazon ecosystem, and means essentially that you aren't buying the books, you're only accessing them on loan. Amazon can take them back whenever they want, as they did George Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm, or change the content, as they did Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. If you bought into the Kindle ecosystem, now is the time to download your eBooks, before they're deleted or censored. I might own one or two Kindle books - as I recall I bought Audrey Watters's book - but did not invest into the ecosystem.

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Fresh blogging inspiration
Maren Deepwell, 2025/02/19

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Thinking of blogging again? Maren Deepwell writes, "It's an exciting time for blogging as Reclaim's newly established Blogging Community of Practice, AKA Bloggers Anonymous, is gathering momentum." She also links to Lorna Campbell's post For those about to blog. It takes me back 20 years ago to my own post on blogging, How to be Heard. 

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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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