OLDaily

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

The Four Horsemen of the Tech Recession
Ben Thompson, Stratechery, 2023/02/08

---

In a lengthy and well-thought-out post on Stratechery Ben Thompson describes the The Four Horsemen of the Tech Recession. Following Thompson's lead Maria Anderson offers a corresponding Four Horsemen of the Higher Ed Crisis. But I found the latter a pale shadow of the former, so I decided to work through the idea for myself in an article I titled The Four Horsemen of the Edocalypse.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

The case for a new data-driven approach to student support
Edward Peck, JISC, 2023/02/08

---

Just because it's 'data' doesn't mean you have good grounds for anything. "Higher education student support champion" Edward Peck argues that "there is a relatively small number of data points required to deliver insights into student engagement and wellbeing, and that these are likely being collected by HEPs already." I have my doubts that a "small number" is sufficient, and I guess it depends a lot on what is meant by "insights". I think that we've learned over the last few years is that you need massive data sets to draw meaningful conclusions, and even then, there's still a lot of bias and error built in. When dealing with complex systems like humans and education, a small number of data points will almost invariably leads to error and misrepresentation.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Defining social trust is a first step toward nurturing it
Kevin Vallier, Psyche, 2023/02/08

---

Writers in our field make all sorts of pithy statements about trust (eg., "it's not whether I trust my students, it's whether my students trust me" but a proper understanding of the role of trust in learning requires a deeper analysis of what is meant by trust. This article offers the beginnings of such an inquiry. "Researchers agree that social trust causes many positive social outcomes. But they differ on its definition and causes... Social trust (for example) requires a belief that people ordinarily have adequate moral motivation to follow moral rules. They ignore this motivation only as a moral fault."

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

AI and learning is about to get a massive boost
Donald Clark, Donald Clark Plan B, 2023/02/08

---

"While ChatGPT has become a global meme," writes Donald Clark, "it actually distracts from the many other uses of AI for learning." In  particular, he says, we should be paying attention to semantic search. "At the moment search is keyword driven and often misfires," he says. "Traditional search matches exact targets, not a range of similar or related targets, so you get lots of misfires (but) when you turn language into mathematical vectors in a transformer, you capture a word or sentence's relationship to other word." Semantic search, in other words, is based on the meaning of the search term, and not the physical characteristics of the search term. Perplexity.ai offers an example of how AI may be redefining search; instead of looking for words, you ask it a question, and it consults a wealth of internet resources to find you an answer. But there's still a long way to go, as Barry Dahl discovers when he tries a few such systems to describe the history of D2L, and mayhem ensues.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Who Owns the Generative AI Platform? | Andreessen Horowitz
Matt Bornstein, Guido Appenzeller, Martin Casado, Andreessen Horowitz, 2023/02/08

---

Andreessen Horowitz is of course more focused on things like business value, but their discussions of the emerging AI stack (illustrated), and what that might look like as a marketplace, is insightful. "The key thing to understand is which parts of the stack are truly differentiated and defensible," write the authors. "This will have a major impact on market structure (i.e. horizontal vs. vertical company development) and the drivers of long-term value (e.g. margins and retention). So far, we've had a hard time finding structural defensibility anywhere in the stack, outside of traditional moats for incumbents."

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

2022 Review: What's the state of the VLE market in UK higher education?
Neil Mosley, 2023/02/08

---

This report focuses on UK trends but reflects wider global trends. In particular, "the stone keeps rolling down the hill for Blackboard." Also, Neil Mosley argues that momentum has shifted from Canvas to Brightspace; although each gained one percentage point of the market over the last year, Brightspace signed two UK universities. Also, interestingly, "whilst there are a couple of small HEIs who use Teams and the Google Suite as de facto VLEs there's no significant evidence of any universities making major moves to replace their VLE with Teams."

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.

There are many ways to read OLDaily; pick whatever works best for you:

• Read in your web browser on this web page, updated weekdays
• Receive a daily or weekly email newsletter by subscribing here
• Subscribe to the RSS feed using your favourite feed reader
• Follow @OLDaily@mastodon.social on Mastodon or elsewhere in the fediverse
• Follow @OLDaily on Twitter
• Integrate the open API using the JSON feed