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Overland GPS Tracker
Overland, 2026/10/29

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I'm not sure how I would use this but I can certainly imagine some ways. Overland "logs your location in the background and sends it to a server of your choosing." Sadly it's only available for iPhone, which makes it useless to me. It's available on Github, though, so migrations to other platforms can't be far behind. It's from the venerable aaronpk. Via Alan Levine.

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Step into the spotlight at #OEBfashion!
OEB Insights, 2026/10/29

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I'm going way out of my wheelhouse with this link because it caught my imagination. One of the really interesting things about international conferences is that people arrive from all over the world and bring their culture with them. This is reflected in their fashion choices, and the people at OEB have cleverly caught on to this with this post. What I like is that the fashion is far more than suits and ties (finally!) and features both men and women in bright, unique and colourful apparel. Now I had this same sense of internationalism in a Zoom meeting yesterday, but of course fashion addresses the physical presence specifically, something in-person conferences depend on. If I had my way, everybody would be able to enjoy an international experience first-hand. Not sure how that would work, though.

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Shadow Libraries | Search Books, ISBNs, and Shadow Library Links
Shadow Libraries, 2026/10/29

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'Shadow Libraries' are very unoffocial repositories of books, articles and other content. They sites like Anna's Archive, Z-Library, Sci-Hub, and Library Genesis (LibGen). This site allows you to "search the Shadow Libraries catalog by title, author, ISBN, or identifier while keeping direct access to mirrors, torrent packs, Telegram bots, and reading portals." Because these sites have a dubious legal status, their resource services and URLs tend to move around a lot. Hence the need for a Shadow Library Uptime Monitor (SLUM), discussion of which in the last couple of days on Mastodon motivated this post.

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Pinakes — Rhetoric & Composition
Pinakes, 2026/10/29

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According to the website, "Pinakes is a free, searchable index of scholarship in rhetoric, composition, writing studies, and technical communication: 66,976 articles from 68 journals, plus about 800 scholarly books from seven publishers." Most useful is the display of "what's new" right on the front page. Unfortunately, there's no indication of whether an article listed is open access or paywall, so someone like me (no institutional access) gets a lot of false leads. It's a project of ther Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) Clearinghouse.

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Our First Edtech Top 40 for Higher Education
Mary Styers, Instructure, 2026/10/29

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The title for this post was a paragraph, so in a rare move, I shortened it for this newsletter. This post introduces the presentation of the top 40 with some summarizing observations (note I had to reduce it to 80% size to fit it in my screen - in Firefox, just hit ctl/- a few times). There's also a link to an 'Evidence Report' behind a spamwall (spoiler: evidence is based on research, accessibility, and data compliance and interoperability). Anyhow, after all that, the list is a motley crew of publishers, communications tools, and integrations (including everything from H5P to Microsoft to Proctorio to Zoom). 

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Discord servers are set to become more public for web searches
Liam Squires-Hand, GamingOnLinux, 2026/10/29

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Discord is a conversation and interaction platforms. It is based on individual 'servers' (not really servers; known as 'guilds' in the docs) and each server can have several channels where people talk by text or voice. It's really popular for online gaming. It has a tightly controlled API where only server admin can approve 'bots' that interoperate with external services. So it is viewed, not inaccurately, as a walled garden. That's why this story is significant. Though still under the control of server admin, some Discord servers will now be open to web search. "They may also show summaries of discussions going on in public channels, and some messages may end up appearing outside Discord." Liam Squires-Hand also writes, "Want an alternative to Discord? We have a Fluxer server that has over 800 people in it now. It's basically an open source Discord." Via matdevdug.

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OpenLearn at 20
Andrew Lane, Open University, 2026/10/29

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Andy Lane offers his reflections on 20 years of the Open University's OpenLearn project, from its beginnings as a Hewlett-funded initiative influenced by things like Creative Commons and MIT OpenCourseWare through to its current status as a fixture of the university. What stands out to me is how much OpenLearn depended on continued funding and support from the University, and how other initiatives with less consistent and stable support were not able to achieve the same success. That said, what also emerges is the long-term impact sharing learning resources has had on the wider community. I would also like to see him expand on his comment that "the report on OER policies I linked to earlier proposed that the MOOC movement severely hindered the OER movement."

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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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