#oldaily — Public Fediverse posts

A National Priority for Open Education: Building a National Courseware Ecosystem #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/79753 Personally I don't see the benefit of a "national" open ecosystem when the problems we face are global, and at a global scale I would certainly not support the idea of a single centralized system based in the nation in question.

Canada’s Digital Sovereignty Gaps and What I Think We Should Do About Them #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/79752 When I worked for the government I proposed on a number of occasions that we provide national technology support services for various educational functions - everything from collaborative authoring platforms to discussion forms to videoconferencing.

Time for a Cool Change #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/79751 I'm sympathetic with what Todd Conaway is saying here but don't really have a solution. Basically, the lament is that a community dedicated to the open web has essentially dissolved - it never grew, and the old members drifted off. This used to happen to mailing lists too. The same thing happens to topics of discussion. Something gets hot for a while, communities coalesce, and then the world moves on.

The State of Postsecondary Education in Canada 2026 #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/79750 Higher Education Strategy Associates and its many advertisers have released this year's State of Postsecondary Education in Canada report (144 page PDF).

Vietnamese firm targets Canadians with fake AI news for profit, CBC/Rad-Can investigation reveal #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/79749 This isnèt online learning technology per se but rather what online learning has to work against. "The model was relatively simple: The company mass-produced AI-generated content... posted it on one of the Facebook pages they ran and included a hyperlink.

The ID Toolbox: free tools for instructional designers #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/79748 "Every instructional designer I know keeps a folder of half-broken spreadsheets built to cope with work that should have been automated a decade ago," writes Curt Zilbersher, "so I'm building them properly and giving them away. After twenty-eight years in this field, this is the part I want to give back." According to the site, these are all "free, single-purpose tools for instructional designers.

PISA 2025: Students’ reading and mathematics performance declined sharply across the OECD #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/79747 I'm sure the media will be full of explanations for the decline, all to some degree partially true and partially false. This article mentions socio-economic factors, digital distraction and use of AI but not (interestingly) Covid.