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

Presentation
Training and Educational Data Analytics: An Overview
Stephen Downes, Nov 07, 2025, Internal, Online, via MS Teams

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This is a presentation delivered internally to project partners to provide a background and overview of learning analytics. This doesn't go deeply into any particular subject, nor does it look at recent trends, but is useful as a no-nonsense introduction to the subject.

[Link] [Slides]

The Infrastructure Of Planetary Sapience
NOEMA, 2025/11/07

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This article relates two developments that herald an intriguing prospect. First: "Last month, Google launched its Earth AI platform. As described in an explanatory paper, this approach is built upon foundation models across three key domains - Planet-scale Imagery, Population, and Environment." Second: "In May, Microsoft scientists unveiled Aurora, a large-scale foundation model trained on more than one million hours of diverse geophysical data.. as described in a paper published in Nature." These portend a global perspective: "machine and Earth intelligences might one day merge into what Gilman calls 'planetary sapience'."

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Welcome to Mo-Me
Mo-Me, 2025/11/07

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One thing I meant to add to my fediverse talk this week, but forgot, was that the next few months and (maybe) years will see the development of a proliferation of new fediverse clients (this was to be inserted right after the 'AI built this' slides). Anyhow, here's the latest. To quote Laurens Hof, "UK activist group Media Revolution has launched Mo-Me, a new fediverse client, in collaboration with the Newsmast Foundation... Mo-Me is fundamentally a fediverse client, that has been integrated with Newsmast's channel.org to give users extra feeds (channels) to access. You can log in with your existing Mastodon account, or create an account on the Mo-Me server." Integrations like this sparkle for me.

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Breaking Up With Edtech Is Hard to Do
Ellen Ullman, EdSurge, 2025/11/07

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We all agree, I think, that old student data should be deleted when a contract expires. The problem, though, is how the law has been implemented. "For Wall, the stakes are more than procedural. Florida law requires her to certify proper data disposal within 90 days. That deadline passed months ago with the vendor she has been dealing with, through no fault of her own." Why is the educator legally responsible, when it is only the company that is actually able to delete the data? Also, note this little tidbit near the end: "many districts skip legal review for low-cost or free tools. 'Teachers signing up for free products do not get reviewed.'" So, um, no free products?  

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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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