OLDaily

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

So long, Twitter API, and thanks for all the fish
Ryan Barrett, 2023/04/04

---

I'm still waiting for the services Twitter says will be cancelled to actually b cancelled, but it does appear it's coming (once the Tesla engineers figure out the code). This article documents the impact on Bridgy, along with a number of other applications using the API to connect to other services. 'What a waste," writes Ryan Barrett. "Plenty of ink has been spilled on all this already, I won't belabor the point, but what an utter waste.' Related; Elon Musk promised to take away the blue ticks – so why hasn't he? Also, Twitter has changed its logo to a dog e-coin logo (something I guess the engineers can do).

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Feedly launches strikebreaking as a service
Molly White, 2023/04/04

---

To be clear, I am not in favour of strikebreaking, I support labour rights, and I don't refer to employees as 'assets' or 'resources'. And so I cn see where Molly White is coming from when she criticizes Feedly's new media campaign designed to appal to corporate and enterprise customers. You have to speak the right language and express the right values to market at this level, and the language and values are anti-worker and anti-human. i really wish Feedly would rethink its rhetoric. But let's not assume that this tech - or any tech - is not going to be used to suppress labour. it's what business does, because it views wages and benefits as a 'cost' rather than 'the only reason for being in business'. The Feedly campaign reflects society, and not anything specific about AI. Via Ton Zijlstra.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Post, a publisher-focused Twitter alternative, launches to public
Sarah Perez, TechCrunch, 2023/04/04

---

According to this article, "Post, a Twitter alternative of sorts that's rethinking how publishers should engage with social media - and how they should monetize their readership - has opened its doors to the public. The startup, like others in this space, gained ground in the wake of Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter as many began to look for a new place." I had early access and don't really recommend it at this point, since it charges you 'points' to read articles from commercial publishers (Reuters, Furtune, USA Today, The Independent). But hey, it's a business model, and if it works, would have an impact on business models for learning resources.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

How do universities achieve learning design maturity?
Neil Mosley, 2023/04/04

---

The idea of a 'maturity scale' is to suggest or recommend a range of best practices, with the implication that individuals or institutions that employ those practices are 'more mature', or in ither words, better. In the current case, Neil Mosley identifies three such practices, the nature of which are defined in the learning design maturity levels and explanations page: "a team of multi-disciplinary professionals (and parity of esteem), means of representing course or programme design that clearly demonstrates the learning journey and progression on the way to achieving learning outcomes, informed by grappling with evidence, research and robust insights." I'm not sure how much of this is measurable (which is what one would expect in a maturity model), I'm not sure how it was validated (ditto), and the whole thing seems to me to be very long, slow and traditional.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

What ChatGPT and Generative AI Could Mean for Learning
Karie Willyerd, Marcia Deemer Site, 2023/04/04

---

Let's do another wrap-up post on the potential influence of AI on learning, starting with this one introducing "what ChatGPT and generative AI are, how they work, and how they will affect the learning and development industry." We're in the early stages of a battle between AI writing tools and tools intended to detect AI writing tools. What won't be detected, though, are the writing aids being deployed like this one in Google Docs and Canva's magic design tools. Here's a brief guide to using AI to do practical stuff. AI is beginning to help people do personal knowledge management (PKM). An example is Dave Winer's Scripting News Bot, trained by Pixelhop on his vast library of posts. Maybe we're entering a post-plagiarism era, writes Sarah Elaine Eaton, where hybrid human-AI writing becomes normal, language barriers disappear, and humans relinguish control to their tools (but not responsibility for the outcome). Learning Designers will have to adapt or die, writes Donald Clark. Maha Bali comments, "Developing a critical AI literacy will become more and more important before we can fully engage with an idea of a postplagiarism era."

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

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.

There are many ways to read OLDaily; pick whatever works best for you:

• Read in your web browser on this web page, updated weekdays
• Receive a daily or weekly email newsletter by subscribing here
• Subscribe to the RSS feed using your favourite feed reader
• Follow @OLDaily@mastodon.social on Mastodon or elsewhere in the fediverse
• Follow @OLDaily on Twitter
• Integrate the open API using the JSON feed