OLDaily

Welcome to Online Learning Daily, your best source for news and commentary about learning technology, new media, and related topics. 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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A year of new avenues
Robin Sloan, 2022/12/09

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Does it feel yet like everything is changing. "It's 2003 again," says Robin Sloan (who maybe doesn't remember what it was like in 1994). Things are happening so fast I have to collapse numerous items into a single item (on, say Mastodon, or on the latest AI, or on the turmoil in the blockchain market). Anyhow, this article is a perhaps overly florid but useful exposition of the sort of future we should expect. "For people who care about creating worlds together, rather than getting rich, the web is the past and the web is the future. What incredible luck, that this open, decentralized "way of relating" claimed a position at the heart of the internet, and stuck fast." There's a reference to a new browser called Arc (I'm on the waitlist). There's a discussion of the limitatons of web addressing. And there's a reference to a lesson from making olive oil - particularly relevant since I've spent the last couple of weeks working in southern Europe.

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Back-to-office order for public servants expected soon
Policy Options, 2022/12/09

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"The much-anticipated announcement of a new blanket policy has been rumoured for days, sparking speculation, fury, frustration and avowals of resistance on social media among public servants who want to continue working from home." I'm not sure whether the proposed Treasury Board regulations will impact NRC, but I've been clear that in my own case if I'm required to return to the office I'll just retire. I'm told I could make just as much, if not more, as an independent contractor, though I remain unconvinced. The main point, though, is the flexibility to work, not just at home, but anywhere I can plug in a computer. The elimination of the pointless commute, the crowded and noisy office, the idea that I must be watched to be considered productive - all of these are over for me.

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IPFS Media Support for Mastodon
Fission, Open Collective, 2022/12/09

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Just what I was hoping to see. "While ActivityPub federates messages and accounts, media attachments of images, audio, video, and other file attachments don't move in the same way. This will initially focus on adding IPFS storage of media to the Mastodon / Hometown codebase, so that the fediverse all the way down to individuals can help share hosting of files as well as messages." Awesome. It's just a funding proposal for now, but this is where the technology needs to move. (P.S. Fission itself is an interesting initiative.)

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Visualizing Our Understanding: Graphic Organizers
Miguel Guhlin, technotes, 2022/12/09

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My graphic organizer is PowerPoint. Not the 'smart objects' but the shapes drawing tool. Why don't I use any of the pre-selected organizers (e.g. Problem-Solution, Fishbone, Time Order, etc.) in the tool outlined by Miguel Guhlin in this article? I like not using a form that has been used before. Forcing myself to imagine the organization is a key part of representing an idea, to me at least. If I had the skills, I do all my graphics freehand, but I'll allow the tool to at least draw nice boxes and arrows. And yes, eventually the AIs will draw images to represent concepts and ideas, and the challenge for us humans will be to see these concepts and ideas in new ways.

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Will ChatGPT Kill the Student Essay?
Stephen Marche, The Atlantic, 2022/12/09

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Nobody is prepared for how AI will transform academia, writes Stephen Marche. I wouldn't exactly say nobody, as people have been writing about this for a long time. But the system as a whole has no idea what's coming. Conversely, he writes, the technologists creating the software have no understanding of society or academia, the environments they're reshaping. It's a bad mix. Still, he writes, "natural-language processing is going to force engineers and humanists together. They are going to need each other despite everything."

Geoff Cain also weighs in: "If a student is turning to places like Course Hero or bots for homework, it means that they feel like they do not have ownership of their own education." Also, this is a teriffic discussion about chatGPT, the AI that has been creating all the buzz this week. Following Maha Bali's lead, Alan Levine poses the AI this question: "Create a workshop for educators on how to promote academic integrity that discourages students from using AI for writing." Hilarity and much grist for discussion ensues. See also this article (AI-translated from Dutch) by Wilfred Rubens, and this collection of quotes on the topic (also auto-translated) at Surf.

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