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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ChatGPT taught me something powerful about human collaboration
Evan Selinger, Boston Globe, 2022/12/29

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Interesting article where the author experiments with chatGPT and comes up with this take: "chatGPT has no interest in you whatsoever. It isn't curious about your goals or motivated to help you meet them. It lacks the good faith to tell you when your goals are misplaced. OpenAI can't make a technology that truly cares because that requires consciousness, inner experiences, an independent perspective, and emotions." Well, as I've stated here before, I doubt that 'care' requires any of those things. But more to the point, many humans don't care either. Have you dealt with an airline recently? They don't care. On the job? Your managers don't care. Why else would they lie to you, say one thing then do another? Care is nice, but not as common as you might think. Don't be surprised when machines start showing more care than humans.

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Why applied artificial intelligence needs a major mind-shift
Ben Dickson, TechTalks, 2022/12/29

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The argument in a nutshell is that "The successful adoption of AI requires what the authors of Power and Prediction call the 'system mindset,' which stands in contrast to the 'task mindset.' The task mindset focuses on cost savings. The system mindset focuses on value creation." Leaving aside the use of the term 'mindset', which a marker for pseudo-science, the observation is essentially sound. It could be phrased in many other ways; I characterize it as a shift from thinking about documents to thinking about data. Same sort of thing.

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Did higher ed forge new paths in 2022?
Laura Ascione, eCampus News, 2022/12/29

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It's always fun to look back on the previous year's predictions to see where they went wrong. That said, what I notice here is that many of the predictions covered widespread multi-year trends which are impossible to evaluate in the context of a single year. Were educators focused on "re-energized and refocused on personalized and intentional outcomes for students?" Who knows! Did institutions "continue to be student-centric and make sure every aspect of their experience and support allows learners to persist." Couldn't say! How about "technology that is affordable and easy to use (to) help learning flex to meet students where they are?" No idea. Did states "get serious about re-engaging and incentivizing students with some college credit but no degree?" Haven't a clue. Interesting predictions are really hard to make, which is why so few people actually make them.

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Microsoft Brings Its Cloud Services and AI to the Edge
Steef-Jan Wiggers, InfoQ, 2022/12/29

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This is the story here: "the Azure DeepStream Accelerator provides a simplified developer experience for deploying accelerated computer vision workloads at the edge." By itself, neat, but of narrow interest. But it's a harbinger of a wider trend. Be ready for something called 'Edge AI' (or some such name) to hit the mainstream. This is where you run the AI on your own computer, using your own data, rather than sharing your AI and your data with the world. You'll get a pre-trained model, which you then fine-tune with your own input. Maybe it will be this year, maybe next, but it's definitely on the horizon.

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Soon You'll Be Able to Make Your Own Feature-Length Movie With AI
Lane Brown, Vulture, 2022/12/29

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Lane Brown writes, "Soon, Hollywood could be in direct competition with generative AI tools, which, unlike self-driving cars or other long-promised technologies that never quite arrive, are already here and getting better fast." By 'soon' we should understand a time frame of, say, ten years. At the pace AI is improving, that may seem a bit pessimistic. But once you get used to the pace of change, the future always arrives more slowly than you expect it to. That has been my experience, at least.

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Beaker Browser is now archived
GitHub, 2022/12/29

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For those who don't recall: Beaker browser was an experimental peer-to-peer browser that allowed people to share content using OPFS. Paul Frazee writes as he retires it, "This won't come as a huge shock, but the time has finally come that I archive the Beaker Browser repo. In 2022 I moved on to working at Bluesky, and, while the Beaker project is coming to an official end, the heart of Beaker continues with Bluesky. I hope the work we do will make Beaker's end a little less painful in the long run." Bluesky is an experimental peer-to-peer successor to Twitter.

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