OLDaily

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

What was Quartz?
Zach Seward, ZMS, 2025/04/07

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Quartz was great; I linked to a number of its articles over the years. Among other things, it covered tech, media and academia, and so was right in my wheelhouse. Then it added a paywall so I stopped linking to it, then it dropped the paywall but by then it was too late. Quartz the publication didn't fare so well as it went through a number of sales, finally landing in the hands of private equity, which stripped it of value and sold the shell. Ben Werdmuller remarks: "Quartz grew with an enormous amount of venture investment but couldn't realize the scale necessary to make good on it. This is the story of almost all venture-funded media." The same story will be true of educational media.

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Not All Scientific Studies are Useful
Joe Schwarcz, McGill, 2025/04/07

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I clicked on this link shared by Apostolos K because I thought it would add to the body of coverage on this newsletter of scientific method and critical thinking, which it does, a bit. It's pretty short. But when I clicked on it, the CSS didn't render, which provoked my suspicions, and when I found a large block of obfuscated Javascript code my curiosity was piqued. It did keystroke monitoring and stuff like that and I thought it might be experimenting on readers. It turned out to be the top end of an access control and anti-bot system, probably the F5 BIG-IP Access Policy Manager. It works, too: I have a bookmarklet that analyzes pages I want to include in this newsletter (so I don't have to type the title, url, author, etc.) and it came back with an 'access rejected' response. Anyhow, I followed the trail all the way down; here's my thread as I figured out what's going on. That was my entire morning today.

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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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