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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Playing Around With chatGPT
Scott Mcleod, Dangerously Irrelevant, 2022/12/14

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Your chatGPT and AI update for today: like much of the rest of the world, Scott McLeod is playing around with chatGPT (I think he should comment on the output rather than just generating it). InfoQ offers an authoritative summary description of the technology. Alternatively, Richard Byrne's less authoritative but much shorter summary. There's also a Zotero group for articles about chatGPT (most of which has also been linked here). Finally, the gap in copyright law around generative models.

Related: Michael Webb examines GPT and plausible untruths: "when you realise that actually it's 'just' predicting the next word in a sentence, like some supercharged auto-complete tool, some of its weakness make more sense." It's arguable that nobody knows how it works. "Any innovations unique to it are secret. OpenAI could well be trying to build a technical and business moat to keep others out," writes Toby Walsh. Also, Melanie Mitchell channels Nick Bostrom while asking what it means for AI to align with human values: "it's not clear whose values we should have machines try to learn." There's a full-length book (173 page PDF) exploring various views on the issue.

Finally, people dismiss chatGPT and similar products saying things like "it's just statistics and machine learning." Exactly. Wait until real AI takes hold, as described in this article on deep learning and product design. But more to the point, AI is finally good at stuff, and that, writes Rebecca Heilweil, is the problem. "GPT is a stark wakeup call that artificial intelligence is starting to rival human ability, at least for some things." Like writing essays. But as Heilweil points out, students were using aids and ghost-writers before GPT. The issue now is that everyone can do it, not merely the wealthy and well-connected. Image: OpenAI.

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The Desire Path of Empty Classrooms
Karen Costa, Medium, 2022/12/14

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Karen Costa wrote this a couple of weeks ago, observing that "the more I see pictures of empty on-site classrooms, the more I keep thinking about desire paths. Our students are showing us what they want and need." Yesterday's article on the same topic in EdSurge offers a very different take: "Experts have been calling this a nationwide student disengagement crisis... professors... are really struggling with this because it's not just a crisis for disengaged students. It's a crisis for the educators. 'Teaching is a deeply personal thing, and faculty take it very seriously and they take it very personally.'" It's like, maybe they don't remember the pre-internet days when people like me would bring books and newspapers into class. The problem isn't the tech. It's the class.

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ChatGPT, Galactica, and the Progress Trap
Abeba Birhane, Deborah Raji, Wired, 2022/12/14

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What's important here is that negation is the linchpin of modern logic, and also something natural language AIs find difficult to master (as do many students, so I'm not surprised), and that's what this Wired article describes. The article also mentions Galactica, "trained on a large corpus comprising more than 360 millions in-context citations and over 50 millions of unique references normalized across a diverse set of sources. This enables Galactica to suggest citations" as well as (attempt to) summarize scientific concepts.

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Elon Musk's Twitter isn't paying its bills
Dan Primack, Axios, 2022/12/14

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More Mastodon / Twitter news (it's slowing down a bit). Dan Primack informs us Twitter has stopped paying the rent and numerous other bills.  So far as Twitter being a bastion of free speech, well, not so much, as the owner of an account suspended for reporting on Elon Musk's jet found out. The application is also beginning to fray around the edges: "manual RTs appearing for a moment before retweets slowly morph into their standard form, ghostly follower counts that race ahead of the number of people actually following you, or replies that simply refuse to load... even Twitter's rules went offline." It's also killing its newsletter platform Revue.

Mastodon, meanwhile, has registered a 588 percent increase in visits in just one month, mostly without problems. Also, Miguel Guhlin is exploring a new group tool for Mastodon called Chirp Social. "Any post addressed to a Group by a follower gets reposted by the Group, so all followers can see it." Also, people are discussing whether it's appropriate for Mastodon instances to use CloudFlare. Also: register of Mastodon regional instances.

 

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The Social Construction of Facts
David Weinberger, Joho the Blog, 2022/12/14

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I think David Weinberg is right, but we need to be clear about what that means. He writes, "the fact-based disciplines we choose to pursue, the roles they play, who gets to participate, the forms of discourse and of proof, the equipment invented and the ways the materials are handled... all are the result of history, culture, economics, and social forces." Quite right, and extensively documented. But there's a corollary: a 'fact' is a physical object. Typically, the fact is distributed across a large number of physical inscriptions (ie., it may be a distributed representation). But what it is not is a non-physical aethereal entity that can mysteriously enter your brain (as, say, 'information'). If you think of a stereotypical 'fact' as a notation in a book, a lot of the discussion about what facts can and can't be becomes a lot clearer. Image: Crista Flores.

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Innovation Report Card 2021
Darren Gresch, The Conference Board of Canada, 2022/12/14

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This is the 2021 report, but it has been circulating around the office, which means I guess that it's current in public policy circles. I tried to find a 2022 report but it didn't seem to exist, just this sketchy website (look at the source for all the tracking scripts). I felt it deserved a response so I write a quick blog post describing how the Board's four recommendations essentially endorse continuing business-friendly policies that have been failing for the last 20 years.

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Why we're doing this - Flickr Foundation
Ben MacAskill, Flickr Foundation, 2022/12/14

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The reason why I've posted almost 39,000 high-quality open access photos to Flickr over the years is to be able to contribute to the commons preserving our history and geography for the future. It's hard to know what will be relevant and what won't be, and it's also hard to anticipate what will be available to researchers of the future. Being prepared for that future is the purpose of the Flickr Foundation, announced today by SmugMug CEO Ben MacAskill. Now my concern is that this is just a first step to separating open access Flickr from paid hosting. Or it may just be a way of paying for that hosting (because let's face it, hosting ain't free). SmugMug has been a good steward thus far and I choose to hope for the best. Image: Prague Castle, one of my 38,666 photos (as of right now).

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Developing workforce skills for a strong economy
Meg Hillier, et al., UK House of Commons, 2022/12/14

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Asked and answered. "The number of adults participating in government-funded further education and skills training has dropped dramatically, from 3.2 million in 2010/11 to 1.6 million in 2020/21. The fall in participation has been particularly marked in disadvantaged areas," Why? " DfE's approach to skills is employer-led, meaning that employers are intended to have a central role in identifying skills needs and designing qualifications and training." Employer spending is notoriously fickle, and I have yet to see an employer look to society-wide benefits when designing learning programs. The context here is a committee report (25 page PDF) to the British Parliament. Via Seb Schmoller.

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"The incredible shrinking future of college" [Carey] + several other higher-ed related items - Learning Ecosystems
Daniel S. Christian, Learning Ecosystems, 2022/12/14

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Many of the sources for this summary are behind paywalls (though this Government Accountability Office (GAO) reporting on student financing is not, nor is the Bryan Alexander video). No matter; this summary is find and the original articles aren't worth the money people pay for them. The sources - mostly representing a conservative or right wing perspective - argue that demand for higher education is shrinking (with some saying that's a good thing). Some quotes: "The next generation of higher education leaders will take scarcity as a given and "return on investment" as both sales pitch and state of mind." And: "A sectorwide approach is needed because the economics of higher education are not going to hold."

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