OLDaily

Welcome to Online Learning Daily, your best source for news and commentary about learning technology, new media, and related topics.

How Twitter misleads us about how many people have left - and what to do about it | by J. Nathan Matias | Jan, 2023 | Medium
J. Nathan Matias, Medium, 2023/01/05

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During the exodus, I lost about 150 Twitter followers (from 9700, where it has been for a decade, to 9550) and went up to about 800 followers on Mastodon. They're probably the people who actually saw anything I posted on Twitter; to the rest I'm a ghost. So they wouldn't notice that I'm gone. That's how the system is designed; you don't notice people have left because you weren't ever seeing them in the first place. "Social media feeds are designed to mislead us about the average opinions and behaviors of the people in our lives." Twitter looks full because the algorithm feeds us a steady diet of promoted tweets, and a few tweets from our friends. Dan Gillmor, meanwhile, says that journalists and others should leave Twitter immediately; the risks of staying are too great, risks that are "endemic to the mega-corporate, scalable-or-nothing, highly centralized version of the Internet that has emerged in recent years."

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The media trends that will define 2023, in 5 charts
Damian Radcliffe, What's New in Publishing, 2023/01/05

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Media trends are often reflected in online learning trends, so there is something to watch here. The article is a bit of a mixed bag, though. There are some genuine predictions, specifically, that advertising revenue and subscription growth will continue at about five percent this year. Then we get a hope expressed as a prediction: "(re)building trust will be vital". I happen to agree, but a prediction would say whether can rebuild that trust. I'd look at the charts showing that trust is falling. Next: "publishers have long have to compete with a myriad of other ways in which audiences can spend their time." That's not a prediction, but this is: young people increasingly spend their time with non-traditional media. That's a trend I would expect to continue. Finally: "internet users around the world 2 hours 9 mins a day" on what's called "press media", which is either wildly wrong, or employs a very broad definition of "press media". Why are these predictions so convoluted? Well, if they're stated explicitly, it's hard to imagine them all being true at once. Is traditional media growing, or is it shrinking?

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GitHub is Sued, and We May Learn Something About Creative Commons Licensing
Roy Kaufman, The Scholarly Kitchen, 2023/01/05

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As with so much of the content in Scholarly Kitchen, the author has an axe to grind (in this case, he is a managing director of the Copyright Clearance Center). But the case raised is an important one, as GitHub and Microsoft are being sued for using open source software (through a process of text and data mining, machine learning, and AI training (TDM)) to train its commercial software authoring AI called Copilot, allegedly in violation of the licenses governing the original code uploaded to GitHub. The issue is presented as a dispute about attribution ("I have long wondered, however, about the interplay between the attribution requirement (i.e., the 'BY' in CC BY) and TDM," Kaufman writes) but it doesn't really, and indeed, doesn't related to Creative Commons at all, since the Creative Commons website "recommends and uses free and open source software licenses for software." I would rank this troll of an article as: not helpful.

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Convert PowerPoint Presentation Into an eLearning Module
Swift Elearning Services, 2023/01/05

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The audience for an article like this is a corporate or commercial e-learning provider working either for a company or freelance looking to quickly produce content that is "a digital educational resource that is typically delivered online and is accessed via a computer or mobile device (that) can be self-paced or instructor-led and is designed to provide learners with the knowledge and skills they need to succeed in a particular subject or job (and) can be interactive and may include activities, quizzes, videos, and other multimedia elements to enhance the learning experience." The tools they recommend to do the job are expensive, but if you can develop a market (or corporate budget) they probably pay for themselves. The courses I'm subjected to at NRC were probably produced this way. I found this article to be a decent overview, though be sure to follow up on websites like iSpring Suite or Elucidat.

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Playing Whack-a-Mole With Technology
Tim Stahmer, Assorted Stuff, 2023/01/05

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I wonder what message schools are sending to students when they respond to a challenge simply by banning technology. I know that similar efforts to ban calculators when I was young was met with a very sceptical roll of the eye. Did they think calculators were a danger to society? Did they expect time would simply roll back? We have New York schools banning chatGPT (more) and various states banning TikTok (more) (a move Wired says hurts higher education). Art-Reddit won't allow submissions that look similar to AI-art (whatever that means). Conferences won't allow papers authored by AI. Sheesh. If you're going to ban anything known to be dangerous, ban guns! Anyhow, as this article argues, "None of these measures will accomplish anything more than generating a few headlines... More sophisticated and less obvious tools will be coming very soon." (p.s. the article also had me side-tracked looking at carnival games).

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An investigation of self‑regulated learning in a novel MOOC platform
Daniel F. O. Onah, Elaine L. L. Pang, Jane E. Sinclair, Journal of Computing in Higher Education, Paperity, 2023/01/05

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This item relates to other recent work on the same topic mentioned in OLDaily, for example Jensen, et al., or Gafaro, or Handoko, et al., all of which look at self-regulated learning in MOOCs. This article (27 page PDF) looks at self-regulated learning (SRL) in the context of the eLDa MOOC platform (which, frankly, is not that new), which was "developed with the first-stage objectives of (a) supporting two modes of engagement (self-directed and instructor-led) and (b) collecting user data, in particular on SRL skills, learner preferences and chosen learning paths." The idea is that "Learners can decide whether they wish to tackle that lesson with their current knowledge of prerequisites or whether they would prefer to review the suggested earlier lesson(s) first." The study is small, and so any results should be considered preliminary, and the main value of the paper is the description of the eLDa MOOC platform design.

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(Im)permissibility is overrated
Richard Y Chappell, Good Thoughts, 2023/01/05

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In my ethics course I found the idea expressed in this paper important enough to be started right up front in a section called the Joy of Ethics, and that is to challenge the idea that "delineating the boundary between 'permissible' and 'impermissible' actions (i.e., providing a criterion of rightness)" is "the central question of ethics." It's not, and it shouldn't be. While Richard Chappell uses this as an argument in favour of consequentialist ethics, I think we can take the wider stance and say that ethics creates the possibility of doing good in the world, whatever that may happen to be. And just so with AI: while so many people are focused on how AI can go wrong, with good reasons for such caution, I think a more fulsome approach will consider the global good AI may be able to produce, especially when it comes to the advancement of education around the world.

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Technology Acceptance and Adoption in Education
Andrina Granic, Handbook of Open, Distance and Digital Education, 2023/01/05

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This is an article from the Handbook of Open, Distance and Digital Education, the final version of which just came out today. I found it to be a concise and useful overview of technology acceptance and adoption models in education, first outlining a list of the major models, with a focus on Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) and Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT), then describing their application in education, and finally considering recent and future work. It's a survey, so it doesn't go deep into any of the models or topics, but it is ideal as an introduction to the field. Image: Lazar, et al., from a study to develop, validate and test an extended TAM.

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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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