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

Research-Based Interventions vs. Product Management - PhilOnEdTech
Phil Hill, PhilOnEdTech, 2023/02/06

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This post follows up Phil Hill's criticism of the Gates Foundation as a messaging machine, and the response the foundation's Alison Pendergast (covered in OLDaily here and here). "In my opinion," writes Hill, "the flaw in the foundation's efforts is that they mistake product management for a research-based set of interventions." He argues that while courseware-based interventions sometimes work, often they do not. And "There is a fundamental difference between finding the most effective (i.e., research-based) interventions to achieve a stated goal and doing the best job you can with a pre-selected intervention. The Gates foundation is practicing the latter, which is product management." In particular, he says, "A research-based interventions approach would be open to try different methods and even enabling technologies to achieve their goals, or would focus on pedagogy first rather than technology implementation.

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Journalistic Lessons for the Algorithmic Age
Julia Angwin, The Markup, 2023/02/06

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I don't do investigative data-driven journalism, but I respect and follow those who do. It's a field that pushes me toward a more nuanced view of what counts as good journalism: "striving for vague concepts like 'objectivity' or 'fairness' can lead to false equivalents," writes Julia Angwin. "A better approach," she suggests, "is for journalists to seek a hypothesis and assemble evidence to test it." Now this doesn't takes us as far as it would in the sciences; we're not talking about theory-based or model-driven journalism. "The best accountability stories, data-driven or not, start out with a tip or a hunch." And the best journalism is about more than just data and numbers: you need the human element, to show perspective and impact, and you need to be open about your methods, to lend the work credibility.

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Why VR/AR Gets Farther Away as It Comes Into Focus
Matthew Ball, MatthewBall.vc, 2023/02/06

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This long post offers a realistic analysis of virtual and augmented reality devices. "Thirteen years after XR devices became a big tech obsession, VR/AR devices are not just behind schedule, they still seem far away," writes Matthew Ball. "Absent extraordinary advances in battery technology and wireless power and optics and computer processing, we simply cannot achieve the XR devices that many of us imagine." Put another way, VR/AR just isn't sufficiently better to convince people to make the switch. "Roblox is one of many examples of the sufficiency of 2D interfaces for 3D experiences." So, in my opinion, is No Man's Sky (which I've tried in VR, but which in VR is a notably worse experience).

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ChatGPT and Grimm Realism
Anne-Marie Scott, 2023/02/06

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In all the fuss about chatGPT and other AI there has been a strong undercurrent of vbery negative reaction. But this reaction, to my mind, reals more about what's wrong with society than about what's wrong with AI. As Anne-Marie Scott writes, "That ChatGPT has been able to so easily replicate so many examples of common-place writing says something about how beige that work is. If ChatGPT can write a 'good' course syllabus it's not because it's smart, it's because it's been trained on a large corpus of pretty undifferentiated syllabi written by us." Or to take it further, while Dan McQuillan says it's time to resist chatGPT, the examples of police raids, racism and low-paid labour that he cites are not properties of AI but of society generally. AI reflects society. If we want better AI, we must build better society. Both links via Kate Bowles.

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General availability of Azure OpenAI Service expands access to large, advanced AI models with added enterprise benefits
Eric Boyd, Microsoft, 2023/02/06

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Microsoft's Azure has always felt like an also-ran for cloud services, lagging well behind AWS, Digital Ocean and even Google Cloud. This may change as the company leverages its investment in OpenAI to launch AI-as-a-service in Azure. "Azure OpenAI Service provides businesses and developers with high-performance AI models at production scale with industry-leading uptime. This is the same production service that Microsoft uses to power its own products, including GitHub Copilot, an AI pair programmer that helps developers write better code, Power BI, which leverages GPT-3-powered natural language to automatically generate formulae and expressions, and the recently-announced Microsoft Designer, which helps creators build stunning content with natural language prompts."

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Damus, another decentralized social networking app, arrives to take on Twitter
Sarah Perez, TechCrunch, 2023/02/06

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It has been a busy week or so for Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey. His new app, Damus, which is built on the Nostr rotocol, was released on the iPhone App Store. Two days later, it was banned in China. Nostr is a fully-encrypted messaging protocol. Here's how to use it. Here are some things you can do with it. Here's a list of Nostr clients, including Damus. Here's the Damus source code. Damus messages are distributed via decentralized relays. There is no login, and no information is collected about senders and receivers. It's also integrated with Bitcoin Lightning to support payments. According to this article, "Damus won't be interoperable with Mastodon or Bluesky, but there could be bridges between these protocols in the future." No iPhone? Try Nostr console on the desktop, or run in a Docker container.

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https://graphmetrix.com/trinpod
GraphMatrix, 2023/02/06

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As I've said before, the core technology of the metaverse isn't virtual reality, but persistent digital objects. Blockchain is one way to provide persistence, but another is based on Tim Berners-Lee's SoLiD (Social Linked Data) project. SoLiD is based on interconnected 'pods'. Here's a new example. GraphMatrix is a company producing something called TrinPods, "The TrinPod is the master of all your data, and you grant the apps read and write access to the data... a (patent pending) hypergraph that, together with our event ontology, tracks space time in one graph without complicated layers." TrinPods are connected to what they call "the world's first conceptual AI", Trinity (this, maybe?), which reads and crosslinks documents to create 'IntelligentPDF'.

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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