OLDaily

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

They have to be able to talk about us without us
Anil Dash, 2025/12/05

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So I think everything Anil Dash says here is right, but it's wrong. What's right? Like I said, everything: he's describing how to create a message that will reach everyone it needs to reach, with enough fidelity that they can understand it and act on it. This means (among other things) that the people who receive the message will have to be able to talk about you without you. You know - they way I'm talking about Anil Dash right now. He has no input; it's all on me, but it's his message being spread. So where is it wrong? Well - if everybody does this, we'll just drown in clearly communicated messages that everyone can understand. The very idea of sending a message to 'everybody' doesn't scale. Despite what Dash says, if enough people are doing it, it is impossible to spread a message at scale without the resources. That's why even today with a global communications system anyone can use we're still drowning is corporate slop and advertising.

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Creating a Github-Based Webpage with AI
Miguel Guhlin, Another Think Coming, 2025/12/05

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This is an article that is at once practical and that offers food for thought. The practical: describing how AI guided the author though the step-by-step process of setting up a web page with feedback form using GitHub and Google Sheets. The food for thought: some reflections from Carl Hendrick on what this all means: "The lesson here is not that AI has discovered a new kind of learning, but that it has finally begun to exploit the one we already understand... he answer is that teaching and learning are not the same thing, and we've spent too long pretending they are. Learning, the actual cognitive processes by which understanding is built, may indeed follow lawful patterns that can be modelled, optimised, and delivered algorithmically... ut teaching, in its fullest sense, is about more than optimising cognitive mechanisms. It is about what we value, who we hope our students become, what kind of intellectual culture we create."

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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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