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

Magazine Publishes Serious Errors in First AI-Generated Health Article
Jon Christian, Neoscope, 2023/02/09

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I'll just quote Mignon Fogerty in full: "Geez Louise, people! Brainstorming marketing copy: yes. Writing health articles: no. It's not that hard."

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Tootfinder
2023/02/09

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One of the less popular (but to many, important) design decision made by Mastodon was to support only a hashtag search, not a full-text search. There were good reasons for this - doing a full-text search on a federated system can be nightmarish (we had long arguments about this back in the days of eduSource). To make full-text search you really need an aggregator (which is what Google is, essentially) or to house all your content on a single site (which is what Twitter does). But aggregation goes against the spirit of Mastodon, which was created with the intent of creating a space where you're not creating content for the entire world to consume. Enter Tootfinder, "Proof of concept of an opt-in global Mastodon search." Now it's not full aggregation (posts are removed from the index after 14 days, and it uses the API to read posts from accounts it follows, instead of the much lighter RSS). I'm not sure I'm even interested in a full-text search for Mastodon. Via Peter Suber.

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Looking back, looking forward: Edtech's pivotal moment
David Wiley, eCampus News, 2023/02/09

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This article describes the putative 'pivotal moment', which is when David Wiley "predicted in 2012 *the 'year of the MOOC') that organizations that created OER but did not explicitly embrace more multimedia and more interactive forms of learning would be gone by 2017" (like most such MOOC-hype, it misses the mark by several years, as Elluminate and similar multimedia applications were in wide use by then; we were using it in our original 2008 MOOC, and we weren't even early adopters). But his main point is to argue, "access to resources is only part of what our most in-need students require in order to succeed... most students – and particularly those students our current approaches to education are most likely to fail – need more than resources. They need a mentor, a coach, a cheerleader, and a confidant." And as we automate more and more of the teacher's role, he says, "the historic achievement gap between Black, Hispanic, Indigenous, and low-income students and their peers will grow wider." It's hard for me to fathom this as a good argument for keeping the current system, when as we have just heard, the current system reliably produces exactly the achievement gap we're discussing.

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No, Copyediting Is Not "Stuck in the Past"
Editorial Arts Academy, 2023/02/09

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I thought at first that this was a defense of copyediting against the incursions of AI-based editors, but no (I want it to be called 'copy-editing' but the article uses it without a hyphen so I'll defer to that for now). Molly Rookwood is responding to Against Copyediting: Is It Time to Abolish the Department of Corrections?, written by Helen Betya Rubinstein, which "claims that copyediting is stodgy, stuck in the past, and based in white supremacy." I'm more sympathetic with Rubinstein's detailed argument than Rookwood's meagre reply, but then again, I want to correct the use of quotation marks around 'professional' (use single quotes to talk about a word, double quotes to actually quote and use it), and it bothers me that the page metadata lists "Editorial Arts Academy" as the "author", when it should be "Molly Rookwood". But all of this is moot. AIs (note: no apostraphe in a plural; it's not AI's) will soon take over copyediting, and we'll have to invent a symbol that instructs the AI to ignore linguistic convention for a given word or phrase.

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Vermont State University to close libraries, downgrade sports programs
Jeralyn Darling, VTDigger, 2023/02/09

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I saw this on LinkedIn accompanied with the unsurprising lamentations about the loss of a centre of social activity on campus. Libraries were never that for me, not the least reason being that you had to be quiet in libraries, and couldn't even bring in food or drink. I think a better use of the space would be to house actual social activity centres. I never found libraries to be particularly convenient either, especially when I was working at home at night and needed a particular reference. When I was in Moncton, the nearest academic library in English was more than 100 km away. Not useful. And there's no reason why librarians can't provide online reference and research support (as they do at NRC today). And I think people know all this, at least at some level. "According to the FAQ, the decision to close the libraries was "data-driven" and follows "year-over-year declines in circulation of physical materials, a trend that hasn't reversed since a return to pre-pandemic enrollment levels." This should surprise no one.

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ChatGPT is a data privacy nightmare. If you've ever posted online, you ought to be concerned
Uri Gal, The Conversation, 2023/02/09

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Here's the proposition: "ChatGPT is fuelled by our intimate online histories. It's trained on 300 billion words, yet users have no way of knowing which of their data it contains." Well, I've had this conversation with people before. If it has been posted on the public internet, it shouldn't be thought of as private or intimate any more. Never mind what the law says - different laws in different jurisdictions say lots of things. The fact of the matter is that if, say, you posted a comment on Twitter, it is there for everybody to read, including an AI, which (just like a human) will take these words and the other (maybe) 300 billion it has read, just like you, and create something new, building on that. Pretending that these words are 'private' and 'intimate' doesn't make them so.

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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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