Stephen Downes

This has lingered in my in-box for almost two months as I decide whether to give it air or not, so today I'll just post it and be done with it. To begin: Steve Jobs did not invent podcasting. Arguably, Dave Winer and Adam Curry did, though the concept was in the air at the time (as I like to remind people). But I digress. What's interesting in this areticle is that it documents the dominance of video podcasting platforms (like YouTube and Spotify) over video streaming and regular audio-only podcasting. Though what I observe in YouTube is constantly trying to push me to clips from commercial media, even though I far prefer hiking and cycling videos, tech and photography, along with a good dose of history and comedy, pretty much all created by small independents. But this article makes me wonder what the author, Daniel Parris, thinks are podcasts, as he asks, "Why do people want to watch other people sit still and talk?" I mean, that can be the format - I like TWIT and GCN, for example. But I think there has been a failure here to understand that what makes a podcast a podcast isn't the speaking part. It's the independent media part.

I know it's a bit after-the-fact but I don't want this discussion of search in the fediverse to go without comment. It comes in the wake of news that "Holos Social quietly shut down Holos Discover, a fediverse search engine built on ActivityPub." Here's the issue: they tried to build a search engine where people consented to having their content searched. But that would require an opt-in. But "The flag that's supposed to signal 'this person consents to being searchable' frequently signals 'this person's server admin didn't change the default.'" And this creates an unworkable environment for a search engine. Now there are ways to simply search the fediverse without member consent, but people don't really want to go in this direction. There's a governance problem here, writes Laurens Hof, not a technical problem, and it's a long way from being resolved.

I completely disagree with this: "'Learning is not about feeling good,' Kizilcec said, who is the founder of the Future of Learning Lab at Cornell. 'The emotion of learning is frustration. That's the emotion that's most predictive of learning.'" In my view, if students are getting frustrated, then you're doing it wrong. Frustration is what people feel when things fail and they're getting no clue as to why. It's the opposite of that desire to make 'one more attempt' feeling you get from good software or well-structured problems (analagous to Sid Meier's 'one more turn' approach to gaming). Frustrated is what you feel when you think there's no possibility of success; challenged is what you feel; if you think you could do it if you solved 'one more problem'. 

Regular readers might detect a familiar cadence and thought process behind this article, though I'll admit it has gone through some editing before making it to this page. Basically the intent is to offer a reframing exercise, shifting from the mostly fear-based approach we see in traditional media and (sadly) a lot of blogs, and toward a more agency and action-oriented approach that better serves students and instructors. That's just my interpretation, at least.

I found the long 'Findings' section to be the most interesting and useful p[art of the paper (24 page PDF). Here, the authors don't tru to generalize or summarize (that's done in other sections), the just report what they heard from the 42 ODL practitioners surveyed and interviewed. The authors report "effective learner support - comprising online technical assistance, improved Internet accessibility, virtual learning evaluation, and fostering learner communities - is essential for enhancing completion rates" but that's part of a larger picture. Contrast this paper with the one on factors in student retention in a Malaysian Entrepreneurship Education MOOC (29 page PDF) suggesting those with the greatest internal locus of control (ILOC) were most likely to complete the course. If I had to summarize from both papers (and really, I shouldn't) I would say agency was the major factor at work here.

This article from Bluesky's CTO begins with the premise that "the point of decentralization is to guarantee the rights of individuals and communities on the Internet. Pulling that off is a balancing act between practicality and ideology." It is on this basis that he describes Bluesky's hybrid structure. "Atproto isn't federation. It isn't p2p. It isn't blockchains. It's a direct attempt at practical decentralization, tradeoffs and all. We sacrificed properties of the magical mesh to hit the performance needs, and we broke from the history of federation to get the guarantees we wanted." I have a lot of sentimental attachment to Mastodon and ActivityPub, but I also recognize that there's a lot of smart thinking behind Bluesky at the ATmosphere Protocol.