OLDaily

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

Did tracking-based advertising just get blown up in Europe?
Doc Searls, Doc Searls Weblog, 2025/06/17

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There are two items of note in this article. The first is a brief reaction, and eleven links to coverage, about the Market Court ruling in the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) Europe case effectively blocking tracking-based advertising (or so interpreted here). The ruling itself is a long and comprehensive read; there are numerous claims and judgements, but you can find the overall conclusion on page 69. The send in Searls's reference to an earlier column on the merits of MyTerms, whereby you (the web user) defines what you will allow the website to do with your data, and the website is required to comply. "What you both agree to is a contract that you proffer as the first party, choosing one published at Customer Commons or the equivalent, on the Creative Commons model."

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AI chatbots need more books to learn from. These libraries are opening their stacks
Matt O'Brien, AP, 2025/06/17

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Well this should add another dimension to AI models. "Harvard's newly released dataset, Institutional Books 1.0, contains more than 394 million scanned pages of paper. One of the earlier works is from the 1400s — a Korean painter's handwritten thoughts about cultivating flowers and trees." I think it will turn out that the musings of internet users on Reddit and Twitter aren't so valuable after all.

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"They want people who are not me": low socioeconomic status students' WIL experiences
Lisa Williams, Kathy Jordan, Tricia McLaughlin, Higher Education, 2025/06/17

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Despite my parents' best efforts to civilize me, I did not easily blend into higher-class expectations when I attended university. There was always a divide between how I dressed, appeared, spoke and thought and the behaviours expected in (what might be called) professional environments. I especially felt this when I sat on university boards and committees. This paper speaks to the difficulties lower socio-economic status (SES) students face in work-integrated learning (WIL) placements, and it resonates (though I'm not a fan of the use of terms like 'identity capital' and 'cultural capital' throughout). "The paper highlights substantial employability gains achieved by low SES students through WIL placements, notably improved confidence, navigation of unwritten workplace norms, and resilience in overcoming challenges. However, their social and cultural contexts often hinder their ability to mobilize key forms of capital, delaying their capacity to decode professional expectations and norms." 

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The Tragedy of AI (and what to do about it)
Paul Stacey, paulstacey.global, 2025/06/17

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Paul Stacey has written a comprehensive description of, on the one hand, the tragedy that is AI, and on the other hand, how we might come out of this with a "catharsis". I disagree with a lot of it, but that's not the point, since what he writes could be seen as echoing a lot of what a lot of other people have said, in order to set a stage. Ultimately, the article gets to its point, which is point five in part to (the last point), which is Martin Dougiamas's proposed OER Dataset for AI project. "There are opportunities to create not just Large Language Models but smaller more customized openly licensed data sets for various academic domains using open science and open education sources." The rest, to my mind, is preamble. Supporting an open dataset for open and publicly accessible AI should be the goal.

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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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