OLDaily

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

Introducing WikiVault: A new chapter in Wikipedia contributions with AI
Ykhwong, Diff, 2025/07/15

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I haven't tried this (it doesn't appear to be available, at least not to me) but it's similar in concept to tools I have worked on and seen in other contexts. "WikiVault offers two core features: AI translation: provides high-quality translations optimized for Wikipedia style;  AI writing: drafts articles based on reliable sources." I'm sure the purists would object, but I think the author has a convincing case here.

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Historical Tech Tree
2025/07/15

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This distracted me for a good half hour, so how could I not pass it along? "The tech tree is an interactive visualization of technological history from 3 million years ago to today. A work in progress, it currently contains 1919 technologies and 2239 connections between them." In my youth I created a similar (but now long lost) map of philosophers and their ideas. I also had (and probably still have) the venerable Timeline of World History fold-out book (that seems to have disappeared entirely from the internet) mapping all the important people, events and empires from Creation to modern times. Via Kottke.

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Google Discover adds AI summaries, threatening publishers with further traffic declines
Sarah Perez, TechCrunch, 2025/07/15

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I've moved on from Google search - I now pay for Kagi. Not because I'm afraid of Google's AI in its search results, but because I know that sooner or later Google is going to mix its AI content with advertising messages, and I won't even be able to detect when I'm being misled. Google search was bad enough when almost all the results were sponsored results, and in truth I was probably bound to move on once an alternative became viable (DuckDuckGo was never viable, in my view). As for the worries about traffic declines - well, this may be a problem for commercial media, but for someone like me, who pays for his own server, it doesn't really matter. What's important for me is to see the ideas spread, not for the readers to all visit my website.

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A first-party data reality check
Graham Mudd, Mozilla Blog, 2025/07/15

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Just over a year ago, Mozilla acquired Anonym, a privacy-preserving digital advertising company. Today they're filling out their vision a bit. It concerns me. They say "advertising literally funds the internet" but it's just not true. It funds the commercial content, sure, but the vast bulk of content is non-commercial - it consists of the blog posts, shared photos, email messages, discussion board posts and social media bits we exchange back and forth every day. And we pay for that - we buy our own computers, and pay for our own bandwidth. The claim is like saying 'advertisers pay for the highways' because they take advantage of them to put up billboards. Or that 'advertisers pay for sports' because advertising pollutes the pro version, as though we would never play sports otherwise. All I want from the internet is to not have to look at ads. I'm perfectly happy without commercial content, if that's what it takes (though of course we know we could have commercial content without advertising).

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Study finds AI tools made open source software developers 19 percent slower
Kyle Orland, Ars Technica, 2025/07/15

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In the news today: horse runs faster than train.

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Canada should build public cloud infrastructure rather than relying on U.S. tech giants
Jon Milton, CCPA -, 2025/07/15

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According to the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA), "the government should invest in the expansion of a public cloud—built and run by a Crown corporation with public financing to serve government needs, but potentially to expand beyond that too." I don't necessarily disagree with this, but building a cloud infrastructure is a lot more than just assembling a bunch of servers together. It could require billions of dollars of software development and years of ramp-up to create an alternative to the U.S. platforms, unless we're prepared to cut corners and license their software.

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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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