OLDaily

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

Inside Elon's "extremely hardcore" Twitter
Alex Heath, The Verge, 2023/01/19

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Teriffic look inside Twitter as it wnt through convulsions after being acquired. The story is a good case study of why individual owners shouldn't have so much power over a company. "Twitter's staff spent years trying to protect the social media site against impulsive billionaires who wanted to use the reach of its platform for their own ends, and then one made himself the CEO... Musk appears unaware of what he's actually broken: the company culture that built Twitter into one of the world's most influential social networks, the policies that attempted to keep that platform safe, and the trust of users who populate it every day with their conversations, breaking news, and weird jokes - Twitter's true value and contributions to the world." More: Publishers lament the removal of Twitter Moments as referral traffic dips.

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CNET Is Reviewing the Accuracy of All Its AI-Written Articles After Multiple Major Corrections
Lauren Leffer, Gizmodo, 2023/01/19

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People shouldn't be using chatGPT for anything serious. Obvious, right? Not to CNet, which has been forced to issues corrections after it's AI-authored articles contained blatant inaccuracies. "For more than two months, CNET has been pumping out posts generated by ChatGPT. The site has published 78 of these articles total." Here's another reason why you shouldn't use it: the use of low-paid labour to make chatGPT content "palatable" (content warning for this link - seriously, be warned, this is really disturbing). These sorts of issues are important because there are real world consequences if AI gets it wrong, for example, when it's deciding who to hire for a job. Some people are drafting AI-use policies for their classrooms, but do these address the wider social issues?

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Has Economic Globalization Been a Failure?
Irving Wladawsky-Berger, 2023/01/19

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Although this article is ostensibly about globalization, there's something meta going on that I'd like to flag. Irving Wladawsky-Berger wites, "whether economic globalization has been successful, unsuccessful, or something in between depends on the stories we tell each other. We don't all tell the same story, and we tend to discount or ignore stories that are different from the ones we subscribe to." One of the 'stories' is 'The Left Wing Populist Narrative': "National economies are rigged to channel the gains from globalization to the privileged few." Another is 'The Establishment Narrative': "Economic globalization is a rising tide that lifts all boats." You see how this effectively reduces any opinion on globalization to the (unreasoning?) selection of one or another 'story'. This is a pernicious rhetorical tactic, and yet I see it deployed all the time. It hides - nay, deliberately obscures - the idea that there may be any fact of the matter. What you call a 'fact' just the "lens of one narrative".

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Educational Engineering Platform CircuitBread.com Launched
CHECK.point eLearning, 2023/01/19

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The hardest course I had in my first year of college was electronics. So I was naturally interested in this press release article, "CircuitBread aims to make electronics, embedded systems, and electrical engineering easily accessible to anyone, from the general interest hobbyist or student to the seasoned expert." I gave CircuitBread.com a thorough review and am pleased to say I like it. A lot. It's all free and open access content with a variety of ways to learn electronics, either from a theoretical or a practical perspective. I should note that I looked carefully for marketing and promotion and such and couldn't find it. Much of the work on the site doesn't require components, but there are numerous hands-on activities and you'll want to connect to OnlineComponents.com - a site run by the same company that runs CircuitBread - to pick up the doodads you'll need (though I note that tutorials feel free to recommend sourcing material from places like Arduino or wherever (there were even instructions showing how to 3D print your own USB power source), and I had to dig to even discover you could buy parts through OnlineComponents.

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Evaluating an Artificial Intelligence Literacy Programme for Developing University Students' Conceptual Understanding, Literacy, Empowerment and Ethical Awareness
Siu-Cheung Kong, William Man-Yin Cheung, Guo Zhang, Educational Technology & Society, 2023/01/19

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To be frank, I am less interested in the evaluation (n=36) of this three-course program than I am in the design. The paper (15 page PDF) begins with a conception of AI as having three major aspects: a cognitive aspect, which involves knowing about machine learning and neural networks; an affective aspect, in which participants gain confidence working with AI applications; and a sociocultural aspect, which includes an awareness of ethical issues in AI. The three courses were: machine learning, deep learning, and developing AI applications. Through analysis of participants' interviews and self-reflective writings, the conceptual structure of the program (illustrated here) was developed. Interesting, useful.

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Exploring the Research Trajectory of Digital Game-based Learning: A Citation Network Analysis
Wiwit Ratnasari, Tzu-Chuan Chou, Chen-Hao Huang, Educational Technology & Society, 2023/01/19

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If you want to comprehend the development of core ideas over a large body of literature, how best to do it? This article offers one compelling method: "From over 30 years of digital game-based learning development, 26 of the most influential studies are identified and visualized using Pajek software." Pajek is "a program package for analysis and visualization of large networks." Read about it here. It was used to conduct a cutation analysis of some 2156 articles and their data from The Web of Science database; the software creates a visual representation of developments in the field (illustrated here) that can be studied to identify trends. "The findings show two development phases for this field: exploring the role of gaming for educational purpose as well as facilitating learning performance." Now of course we might get different results from a broader set of literature, and it would be interesting compare consider different sorts of network analyses. But note how different this is from traditional literature analysis, and how looking at the relations between papers shows something very different than what we see when we just aggregate data.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

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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