OLDaily

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

Folks have asked me how to find and build community
Tinker, infosec.exchange, 2025/12/10

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I've lost count of how many educators have asked about how to build community over the years. My advice has always been the same: instead of building a community, find the community that already exists and join that. This post contains information about how to do just that. But a word of caution: doing it this way means changing the focus from yourself and your causes to other people and what they need. And (as the article suggests) it's probably best to look away from charities and look toward networks of mutual support. All this is why I haven't tried to build community around this site (and look suspiciously at pundits who are developing community around theirs).

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52 things I learned in 2025
David Hopkins, Education & Leadership, 2025/12/10

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I have to say, I love this format, though it seems like a lot of work. David Hopkins introduces it as follows: "Inspired by Tom Whitwell's annual collection of things learned, here are my '52 things I learned in 2025'. The list is usually presented under the comment that 'no explanation or context of what it is about the article I learned, just a title and link of something important to me personally or professionally in [year]'."

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The End of Debugging
Tim O'Brien, O'Reilly, 2025/12/10

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OK, this would sound dangerous, right? "I asked Cursor: 'Take this React component, make the rows draggable, persist the order, and generate tests.' It did. I ran the tests, and everything passed; I then shipped the feature without ever opening the code. Not because I couldn't but because I didn't have to." Shipping without even looking at the code? I would say this is a lot less concern for developers than it might seem. After all, for most, the code - the actual code - has always been hidden. Developers who write in Javascript or C or PHP know that these are high-level languages, and that they are automatically compiled into low level code which actually does the work. Testing - not code inspection - catches any problems. AI-generated code is the same thing, just at one level of abstraction higher. 

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Autonomy and Interdependence
Keith Hamon, Learning Complexity, 2025/12/10

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This is a long discussion of something I don't think was an issue to begin with, but I could be wrong about that, so I'm passing it along. It stems from the argument from Robert Dare that states "Complexity, the theory goes, manifests itself in 'complex adaptive systems', which are made up of many independent agents [my emphasis] who interact and adapt to each other." But if you read 'independent' as (say) 'completely immune from any external influence', then entities in a complex system are not 'independent'. I have used the word 'autonomous' to express the idea that they are the locus of decisions about how they react to all this input. Keith Hamon describes them as "partly competing, partly co-operating, or simply mutually ignoring."

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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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