OLDaily

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

Firefox is dead to me
Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, The Register, 2025/06/20

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I'm still using Firefox. It works fine for me, and I'm still enjoying an ad-free browsing experience, which isn't something Chrome or Edge users can claim. I had stopped using Pocket a while ago, never used Fakespot, and I simply do not experience the problems reported on various discussion boards (and I really wonder what's up when they say they're not able to access LinkedIn, which has always worked fine for me). Am I worried about the future of Firefox? Of course I am. But as I've said before, if I have to switch browsers I may never leave my RSS readers, because I will not stand for advertising (the original fake news) in my browsing experience. 

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The PEARL of Edtech: A New Vision for Personalized AI Learning Models
Alex Sarlin, 2025/06/20

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I wrote a thing a while back that because Contact North's Your AI Tutor Gets You (still love that title) and so you could say I agree with the idea of personal AI tutors. But this article's Portable, Evidence-Based, Adaptive Representation of a Learner (PEARL) misses the mark on so many levels (I guess it would say that it's just cringe). The authors' point is that "LLMs are highly capable of changing their tone and style in response to what they know about the asker. So what can we do with that?" But pretty much nobody wants that. And you can't just define the approach that does work with just a few simple rules, as represented here. We can all tell when corporations are trying too hard to be rizz and it just doesn't work.

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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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