OLDaily

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

Not Your Default Chatbot: Five Teaching Applications of Custom AI Bots
Derek Bruff, Agile Learning, 2025/10/01

---

Derek Bruff speculates about possible uses of AI bots in teaching, specifically: course assistant, assignment coach, tutor bot, feedback bot, and conversation simulator. While he depicts himself as "drafting a set of categories to help make sense of these applications" what I'm seeing maps directly to current teaching functions, without recognition that AI might change what learning looks like entirely.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post][Share]

Why I am Here Instead of on Substack
Doc Searls Weblog, 2025/10/01

---

As wiuth Doc Searles, so with me: "This blog is mine... I publish it on my own, and syndicate it through RSS. This puts me in a publishing ecosystem that is wide open and full of interop. If you want to know more about how the blogging ecosystem works, read Dave." Substack, by contrast, "is a social media app... My instant response was a mix of Huh? and Yuck." While social media (properly so-called) attracts many more people, nothing gives me the freedom and flexibility that hosting my own website does.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post][Share]

Introducing the ASML ActivityPub Fuzzer: Improving Testing in the Fediverse
Darius Kazemi, Applied Social Media Lab at Harvard University, 2025/10/01

---

As the author says, "if ActivityPub is a language, then every social media service in the Fediverse speaks its own dialect of the language." And "The Fediverse Schema Observatory has observed 70 software projects out there in the Fediverse." So the need for developers is a way to test their implementation on all of them . That's what the Activity Pub Fuzzer does; it "lets you emulate software that you are likely to encounter in the wild. And you can do it without having to connect to public servers." Via Ben Werdmuller.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post][Share]

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.

There are many ways to read OLDaily; pick whatever works best for you:

• Read in your web browser on this web page, updated weekdays
• Receive a daily or weekly email newsletter by subscribing here
• Subscribe to the RSS feed using your favourite feed reader
• Follow @OLDaily@mastodon.social on Mastodon or elsewhere in the fediverse
• Follow @OLDaily on Bluesky
• Read OLDaily as a LinkedIn Newsletter
• Integrate the open API using the JSON feed