OLDaily

High-Quality Open Online Courses
Jaime Caldwell, BCcampus, 2020/09/23

Deeply buried is the lede in this article announcing that "the Open Online Course new collection website is now available, featuring two courses that you can start tomorrow and more working their way through the approval and review process." As the article notes, "the Open Online Courses Project from BCcampus is designed to help you assemble high-quality, peer-reviewed, post-secondary courses." These are the first two courses from that project. How useful is this? Go to the Business Communications course and look at the list of 21 courses across 19 institutions in British Columbia that this online course applies to. The course packages include documents, recordings, slides, H5P activities, and more (now I'm wondering what it would take to automatically import one of these into gRSShopper - but one step at a time). Note that the courses are OER licensed as CC By-NC-SA.

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Microsoft teams up with OpenAI to exclusively license GPT-3 language model
Kevin Scott, Official Microsoft Blog, 2020/09/23

More than a year ago we talked about "a non-profit that leveraged good will whilst silently giving out equity for years prepping a shift to for-profit" and I had to remind people that this wasn't just fear-mongering. Today we read that OpenAI, which had previously shifted to a for-profit enterprise, announced exclusive licensing of GPT-3 technology to Microsoft. I suppose it was inevitable, but it ratchets the cynicism to see projects misuse the word 'open' to mean 'commercial'. More from Technology Review.

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Online Courses the New Norm in College
Dian Schaffhauser, Campus Technology, 2020/09/23

This article discusses "a recent study by Educause, developed to examine the 'general trends' taking shape as institutions have made plans and preparations for fall education." It reports that "whereas in fall 2019 most institutions were offering one in five or fewer classes online, a year later that was flipped: A majority of schools were offering four in five or more courses online this fall." Additionally, classes in general have been 'hybridized' through the use of technology for video communication, lecture capture, and more. Some areas that could use more support include labs and co-curricular activities.

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Reflecting on Teaching CT/CS to Grad Students
Gerald Ardito, Inventing Learning, 2020/09/23

This article demonstrates the use of Turtle Blocks, a successor to LOGO, to teach core computing concepts (diagrammed) to graduate students. The four key concepts, which define 'computational thinking', are decomposition, pattern recognition, algorithmic design, and abstraction. It'sd interesting that Gerald Ardito was "a little discouraged that some of them found the tasks as challenging as they did." He blames himself, but there really is a gap between more traditional learning and newer forms of learning based on these and similar concepts.

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The Twitch Hive-Mind Barrel Rolled a 747 in ‘Flight Simulator’ without Crashing
Josh Hendrickson, Review Geek, 2020/09/23

The idea here is that the users in a Twitch channel are allowed to take control of an online game; any commend entered into the channel is executed by the game, whatever it is. You'd think it would be a disaster, but ever since Twitch Plays Pokemon the concept - called 'crowdplay' - has been played out numerous times. In this particular sequence the crowd successfully does a barrel roll with a 747 on Microsoft's newest edition of flight simulator. To be fair, they almost crashed the airplane. That they didn't, though, is to me an interesting outcome.

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Trust and its significance in social epistemology
J. Adam Carter, Oxford Handbook of Social Epistemology, 2020/09/23

This is the draft version of a very nice paper (24 page PDF) on the role of trust in knowledge. It's the sort of paper that would reward the time taken to tease apart and diagram the concepts covered (but download it now; this version likely won't last long). The question is this: can you rely on someone who tells you something is true? Two things could go wrong: either the speaker is simply mistaken ('pollution') or the speaker is deliberately misleading you ('deception'). The extent to which we can trust people depends on our ability to detect pollution or deception in their messages? And this is what the paper explores at greater length. The applications to education and learning I think should be clear: to the extend that we can no longer depend on authority, learners need to develop their own capacity to evaluate trust. Our inability to do so is the cause of many of the great social ills of our time. Image: phylogeny figures, Ekins, et.al., via Handfield, Social Epistemology. Related: Spot the Troll.

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The brain's memory abilities inspire AI experts in making neural networks less 'forgetful'
University of Massachusetts Amherst, TechXplore, 2020/09/23

My way of understanding this is that they're teaching neural networks to dream. This post summarizes work by Gido M. van de Ven et al, Brain-inspired replay for continual learning with artificial neural networks. In sum: "Deep neural networks are the main drivers behind recent AI advances, but progress is held back by this forgetting. They write, 'One solution would be to store previously encountered examples and revisit them when learning something new.'" But this is really slow, so "the team's major insight is in 'recognizing that replay in the brain does not store data.' Rather, 'the brain generates representations of memories at a high, more abstract level with no need to generate detailed memories.'"

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