OLDaily

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

Weaning Students from the Lecture Into Active Learning
Jeremy Murphy, Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice, 2025/12/26

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I'm not going to disagree with the major premise of this article: it is better overall to learn through hands-on engagement and experience than by sitting in a lecture theatre taking notes. But I think that there's an argument to be made that if you're paying a lot of money for something (either directly through tuition or indirectly through taxation) then you should not be paying for things you can do for yourself. For the most part, we don't actually need a university to learn through hands-on engagement and experience. We can do it for ourselves. But what we can't do for ourselves is cut through the opacity around any discipline, especially in the initial stages of learning, and come to a sharp and focused understanding. That's what the university provides. Sure, maybe if the university provided less of it, and left space for exploration and creativity, the overall learning experience would be improved. But that would require changing university economics entirely, and nobody wants to do that.

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Six Practices to Make Philosophy Part of Your Home
Jeremy Bendik-Keymer, Blog of the APA, 2025/12/26

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There's a point to be made here, but the six practices are nothing I would recommend. The point revolves around "wonder, the background, and wondering, the act". They involve an openness to, and curiosity about, the world. I totally recommend that, and would recommend things like cultivating a diversity of experiences, being open to new ideas and thoughts, learning how to do things, and creating for the sake of creating. There's nothing wrong with the six practices advised here, though they strike me as insular and self-satisfied, as sources of comfort ranther than questioning: a kitchen table meal, a walk around the neighbourhood, a community discussion group, gardening, listening to music, and some bedtime ritual. 

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The year we stop pretending the industry has changed
Delano Massey, Nieman Lab, 2025/12/26

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Trends in education trail those in media, but they also unerringly folow them. That's why this column is a stark warning for educators: "New media emerged in the vacuum left by legacy newsrooms, with creators stepping in where institutions stepped out, creating a streaming-native, culturally fluent broadcast infrastructure... If the advertising market, venture capital, and legacy institutions won't invest in truth-tellers, then communities must invest in - and support - one another." (I still hate Nieman's user-hostile web page design).

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A Few of My Favorite Things
Lance Eaton, AI + Education = Simplified, 2025/12/26

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Lance Eaton shares a few of his favourite reads and video channels to flip to, all on the subject of educational technology where it intersects with AI. "We've moved from a desert of insight, guidance, and provocation to an abundance. In truth, that creates as many problems as we must navigate the paradox of choice - there are so many things to choose from, it's hard to decide which we choose." There's a lot of overlap with my own reading list, of course, and like Eaton the total list is pretty much endless. 

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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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