OLDaily

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

Backwards Compatibility in the Web, but Not Its Tools
Jim Nielsen, 2025/04/29

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As I've been building CList I've been religious about not building it on frameworks or libraries. Why? Because in the world of Javascript, everything depreciates almost instantly. "Oh, you used the apollo CLI in 2022? Bam, deprecated, go learn how to use graphql-client or whatever, which has a totally different configuration and doesn't support all the same options... Finally get things running, watch the stream of hundreds of deprecation warnings fly by during the install." It's worth reading the article and HackerNews comments as well. Also this. "The frontend ecosystem is kind of broken right now... People that are learning the current tech ecosystem are absolutely not learning web fundamentals. They are too abstracted away. And when the stack changes again, these folks are going to be at a serious disadvantage when they have to adapt away from what they learned." The same problem exists for AI. ChatGPT constantly wants me to implement a framework in order to insert a button.

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An AI-generated radio host in Australia went unnoticed for months
Emma Roth, The Verge, 2025/04/29

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On the face of it, this is pretty funny. "A popular Australian radio station's experiment with an AI DJ has gone unnoticed for months, as reported by the Australian Financial Review." There are, of course, ethical implications. Lisa Lin, president of the Association of Voice Actors, writes, "Australian listeners deserve honesty and upfront disclosure instead of a lack of transparency leading them to trust a fake person they think is a real on-air person." This is not a new issue in radio, which has always been on the fighting edge of technology, from early 'transcriptions' to automated radio shows.

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Government Actually Threatens Wikipedia’s Editorial Freedom; Self-Proclaimed Free Speech Warriors Suddenly Have Other Plans
Mike Masnick, TechDirt, 2025/04/29

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There's a lot of inside U.S. politics here, but the main story is that "Here we have the top DC prosecutor clearly threatening Wikipedia over editorial decisions - and, not even editorial decisions of its employees, but the site's volunteer editors." What's important to note is that Wikipedia isn't U.S. media, it's international media. Hence the presence of 'foreign actors'. It's probably a good time to make a backup of Wikipedia, and even more, to ensure Wikipedia's servers and institutions are backed up internationally as well, to shield from any threat, and not just the current one.

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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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