OLDaily

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

CrowdBucks is a new payment system for the Fediverse
Sean Tilley, We Distribute, 2025/12/16

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I'm not a fan of this at all, but it doesn't surprise me at all that someone created it. The idea is that you sign up for an account using your Mastodon ID (other services to be supported later) and then ask people for money, which they pay you through CrowdBucks. 

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Women and Leadership in Distance Education in Canada
Cindy Ives, Pamela Walsh, Rebecca E. Heiser, Athabasca University Press, 2025/12/16

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Many of the authors contributing to this book (299 page PDF) are familiar to me, and the story they tell from their perspective is one I know well from mine, the story of the rise to prominence of distance education in Canada especially over the last decade and a half. Their perspective, as the title suggests, is that of women in leadership positions in this field from across the country and from various backgrounds. It reads as a series of personal histories, detailing the issues, challenges, and principles that guided them through that time. It's a good read, and I appreciate that this sort of valuable contribution is openly published so everybody can read it.

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AI-assisted coding: 10 simple rules to maintain scientific rigor
Russell Poldrack, The Transmitter, 2025/12/16

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This article doesn't actually offer 10 simple rules - that's a different document - but it does lay out four themes based on the ten rules (and some personal experience). The themes are reasonable - you still need to know what you are doing, you need to know how to work with coding assistants for things like context management, you need to work within a testing framework, and you need to ensure the code is valid - that it actually does what the AI says it does. The article made me wonder: how would the same rules apply for using AI to write articles (assuming we need more articles in the world, a proposition I am beginning to doubt)? 

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I ported JustHTML from Python to JavaScript with Codex CLI and GPT-5.2 in 4.5 hours
Simon Willison, 2025/12/16

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A couple of weeks ago Emil Stenström wrote How I wrote JustHTML using coding agents. I read it at the time - I thought maybe I had posted it here, but I guess I hadn't (it's one of those niche posts that really interesting to me but maybe less interesting to the broader e-learning readership). It describes using AI to write a fully compliant HTML5 parser in Python (not trivial, because there are so many ways to write HTML incorrectly, and a parser can't choke on them). It was significant to me because it suggests that testing, rather than reading lines of code, will be how we validate software in the future. Anyhow, in this article Simon Willison describes porting the software from Python to Javascript - "It took two initial prompts and a few tiny follow-ups... Time elapsed from project idea to finished library: about 4 hours, during which I also bought and decorated a Christmas tree with family and watched the latest Knives Out movie." So is that what software development is now? "Is it responsible and appropriate to churn out a direct port of a library like this in a few hours while watching a movie? What would it take for code built like this to be trusted in production?" Here's the playground for the new software. Works perfectly.

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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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