OLDaily

Human Development
Kristen Raine, The Human Development Teaching & Learning Group, PressBooks, 2021/10/15

I think it's definitely worth reading this book (take some time and read it over several days - there's a lot of content here to absorb and consider). It covers the topic of 'human development' from early infancy through old age and even death. It considers such topics as genetics, language, self regulation, cognitive development, and more. It's well researched and very clearly presented (a model to emulate, really). Having said that, readers should take the advice in the introduction to heart: follow not only the overt curriculum where you learn everything, but also the hidden curriculum, where you question everything. "Assumptions, of which we are often unaware or which are intentionally hidden from us, nevertheless have a profound impact on developmental research and on the contexts."

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Changing Lanes
Brian Lamb, Abject, 2021/10/15

This post is a mixture of reflections and day-in-the-life, but it also takes the time to recommend "Brenna, Jason and Jon Fulton’s Introductory Podcasting Masterclass that has just completed its first week. Much like the Moodle Orientation I described earlier, this program models the balance of live and anytime, practical and thoughtful elements that we are striving for, and the resource site is taking shape beautifully." Brian Lamb notes, "it is not too late to join — everyone is welcome, join us!"

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Why you should learn the ‘classic style’ of public writing
Roy Peter Clark, Poynter, 2021/10/15

I try very hard to employ the writing style described here as 'classic style'. " In classic style, the motive is truth, the purpose is presentation, the reader and writer are intellectual equals, and the occasion is informal." It's a form that combines clarity and authority. "The idiom of classic style is the voice of conversation. The writer adopts the pose of a speaker of near-perfect efficiency whose sentences are the product of the voice rather than some instrument of writing." That said, I do use the first person more often that (say) a guide or museum label, because it's important to be clear when I'm expressing my opinion, as opposed to stating facts.

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How truthful is GPT-3? A benchmark for language models
Owain Evans, AI Alignment Forum, 2021/10/15

One fairly minimal condition for educational content is that it be true (of course, there are many real-world exceptions to that rule even today, but let's leave that aside). So a major challenge for AI-generated content in the future is that it be true. Will it be? This article studies GPT-3 from the perspective of truthfulness, and the results are not currently encouraging. From the paper (35 page PDF): "The best model was truthful on 58% of questions, while human performance was 94%. Models generated many false answers that mimic popular misconceptions and have the potential to deceive humans. The largest models were generally the least truthful."

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Technology Shift from learning to support in the learning technology stack
Videhi Bhamidi, Kasper Spiro, Chief Learning Officer, 2021/10/15

this article reports on what I think was a key lesson learned when everyone went online: it becomes a lot less about 'delivering learning' and much more about 'supporting learners'. Of course, it has taken a while to reach that conclusion, and it doesn't always look like what we think it does (for example, it doesn't just mean 'coaching'). In my view, at least. This article reads like marketing, and so may not be the best source to cite for anything, but it does point toward the trend in a broad sense.

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What really brought down LinkedIn’s China play
David Wertime, Protocol, 2021/10/15

This analysis seems right (but really, I'm in no position to know): "Ultimately, the demands of the Chinese state, the proliferation of competition and the fast-evolving needs of Chinese web users proved too much for even a power like Microsoft. With LinkedIn gone, the list of major U.S. social networks trying to succeed in China has shrunk to zero. It will likely be years before another one really tries." More: BBC, TechCrunch.

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