OLDaily

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

Government Says There Are No Plans for National Digital ID To Access Services
Michael Geist, 2026/01/29

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This seems surprising to me. "The (Canadian) government has confirmed that it has no plans to create a national identification system." In the response to a question tabled just a couple of days ago, Minister Patty Hajdu said "There are no plans or progress to report on the implementation of a national digital identification system, as one is not being implemented." There are two major services, GC Sign in, with pland to offer "more flexible identity verification options (online, in-person, mail) (and) supporting provincial/territorial digital credentials," and GC Issue and Verify, which includes the platform, the GC Wallet app, and the GC Verifier app, and would see use for license for people like for commercial aviation pilots and air traffic controllers, and for immigration and digital visas. The core assertion here - and it is probably the correct one - is that "access to federal services is not contingent on a digital identity." Still - there are so many services that could really use a digital ID, even if it's just a voluntary one (though I admit, voluntary use over time has a tendency of becoming required).

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What If Sharing Was Training?
Debanshu Bhaumik, Bot Populi, 2026/01/29

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This article raises issues related to AI, training and time. For example: all my opinions are on my website, including the ones I had in 1995. To an AI, they are all weighted equally. But should an AI (or a human!) learn from the 1995 version of me? If AI ingested my views from 1995, should I have the right to retract them? "Self-annotation makes the archive interpretable. Retention makes it durable. Together they produce a new object: the self as a time-series of labeled signals, portable across contexts and reusable by default. That object outlives the moment it was meant to serve. Call it time collapse." This, of course, is not a new problem, as anyone who had to learn from outdated textbooks can attest (I grew up thinking 'French West Africa' was still a thing).

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Generative AI for Instructional Design: Changes, Chances, Challenges
Stefanie Panke, AACE, 2026/01/29

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We know this is happening, but it should be said explicitly: "Generative AI has thoroughly permeated the work of instructional designers. It can be used for a wide variety of tasks such as creating a course map, scripting a case study, drafting handouts, creating visualizations, evaluating alternatives, producing audiovisual media, supporting digital accessibility, checking alignment, creating documentation, preparing slide decks." My own experience is that it can do all of this at more or less the same quality as a human. "If the baseline becomes 'anyone with ChatGPT can design a course,' institutions may deprofessionalize instructional design, treating it as a task rather than a discipline." But if 'anyone with ChatGPT can design a course,' why would we need these institutions at all? Teasing out the answer to this question requires thought and research, and we should not just depend on intuition.

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Phantom Obligation
https://indieweb.social/@tg, Terry Godier, 2026/01/29

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This post argues that designers have borrowed the design of previous communication systems and with that borrowed the appearance of an obligation to read, and maybe even to respond, to the backlog. That obligation may be real in the case of email or answering machines, where senders are (or at least, used to be) real people. But the obligation never actually existed for things like RSS feeds and social media - they became 'phantom obligations'. You might miss someone's important post. You might miss what's happening right now! It's a great post - and it makes us rethink the metaphors we use to describe what's happening on the internet in ways that free us from feeling guilty about not reading everything that exists. Via D'Arcy Norman, who looks at Fever's 'Hot' view of RSS, and made an interface of his own (me, I'm really enjoying my own version, that sorts recent posts according to how frequently the person posts, so I never miss the once-a-month gems in the noise of sites that publish eight items a day (like me, here in OLDaily).

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The Most Valiant Way to Complain Is to Create: William Blake and the Stubborn Courage of the Unexampled
Maria Popova, The Marginalian, 2026/01/29

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I really liked this article and it made me regard William Blake with more appreciation. There are three major things that are important to me: first, that Blake reinvented the technology of publishing to eliminate dependence on a large enterprise. "The new technique gave Blake full creative freedom and full control of production. Suddenly, he could combine text and image on a single page, in a single process." Second, that Blake funded himself. "It was enough for him that a handful of devoted fans became his collectors and commissioned work he was inspired to make." Sure, he died a pauper. But who cares, when he had a life free to create as he wished? And anyhow, third, "Your politics are not what you tell yourself you believe. They are not the set of ideas that you identify with, or look to for personal validation of your goodness as a human being. Your politics are expressed in the choices that you make, the way you treat other people, and the actions you perform." Via Alan Levine.

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Google begins rolling out Chrome's "Auto Browse" AI agent today
Ryan Whitwam, Ars Technica, 2026/01/29

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I've already seem some objections to this, would basically allow your AI to run your browser, open new tabs, "and mark them with a sparkly AI icon so you know where the robot is active." This is just a visualization of 'headless browser' functions that have existed for a while. I used a 'headless' version of Chromium in a Python script to automate posting of my newsletter into LinkedIn. They're useful in cases where APIs are too awkward (or too secure), or where (as with LinkedIn or Twitter) they don't exist. AIs have been able to activate headless browser functions every since they could use Python. So: annoying, but not new.

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Canada is lagging in open access  - University Affairs
Caroline Samii-Esfahani, University Affairs, 2026/01/29

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"A common problem for journalists, community organizations and researchers not associated with an academic institution" (which will shortly include me) is that "a significant portion of (research is) hidden from the public behind a paywall." Why is this? For funded research, "authors are required, in theory, to make articles open access within one year of publication. In practice, there is no way to verify this. There are no concrete penalties for Canadian scholars who fail to comply." And the rise of 'article processing fees' make it less attractive to publish as open access. "Multinational companies have appropriated the popular ideology of open access… in order to control academic publishing." All true. But the solution lies entirely in the hands of academics and their institutions, with no extra money required. Stop buying books and journals. Publish as open access institutionally. Allow the community to review and rank these (verified human-authored) publications for itself. All this would cost a fraction of what the current system costs. As a community, we don't have the money to throw away on this any more. 

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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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