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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 Trends in the Field of Emergency Remote Teaching: A Bibliometric Analysis of Open Access Literature
Betül Tonbuloğlu, Burcu Avcı Akbel, Online Learning, 2023/03/03

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With the onset of the pandemic in late 2019 and early 2020, learning institutions discovered online learning anew, immediately rebranding it 'Emergency Remote Teaching', and re-learning the lessons of the previous 20 years in the space of a few months. Shortly thereafter a torrent of academic papers documented the method and outcomes of this new approach to learning (we also saw a flood of images of people, pen and notebook in hand, watching a video of an instructor using a whiteboard). This article (33 page PDF) is a superficial analysis of that literature - I wish the authors had gone deeper, and I really wish the authors had posted the list of papers studied (and not just mixed them into the bibliography), as a reference set others could use without searching would have been especially valuable given that they are open access papers.

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The importance of copyright and shared norms for credit in Open Educational Resources
Meghan E. Norris, Mark Swartz, Valerie A. Kuhlmeier1, Frontiers in Education, 2023/03/03

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One thing about movies that has long intrigued me is the way they credit everyone, even the caterers, who had anything to do with making the movie. In software, if you know where to look, you can often find similar credits. Imagine the same thing in construction, where at the entrance to a building there would be a plaque listing all the workers who took part in its construction. We don't see that in academic papers or learning resources, though, which seems odd for a field so keen on identifying authorship and awarding credit. This paper suggests that we rethink that policy. The people who collected the data, the people who reviewed the publication, the editors, the people who modified learning resources, etc. - all these should be given their proper due. "Given the many ways that OER may be created and modified, there is a need for ensuring transparent credit is given to OER content creators and adaptors, both as a means of engaging in good scholarship, and as an acknowledgement of the publication and citation expectations for faculty and graduate students." Hear hear.

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Ed Sheeran tells students, 'Find the thing you love'
Education Gazette, 2023/03/03

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"If your students don't want to be back at the school," I remarked to someone in passing yesterday, "that should tell you something." And here's the lesson. "The first part is that we want ākonga to want to be here. We see the environment as the first teacher – by environment we mean the physical space and the tone/relationships between people. Students should want to walk into this place and just feel like this is an oasis. This is home. This is where they belong." If your school is a factory, or a surveillance state, or a war zone, well, who would want to be there?

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PedAIgogy- new era of knowledge and learning where AI changes everything
Donald Clark, Donald Clark Plan B, 2023/03/03

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Donald Clark hints - pretty accurately, to my mind - at what generative AI really means for learning. "Most people want a 'working knowledge' of things they want to do, not over-engineered, PPT-led, abstract courses. This new era of PedAIgogy may herald a more dynamic way of formal teaching and learning. It may also swing us quickly toward performance support in the workplace, where the technology responds to needs. A demand driven, not supply-driven model." Just for fun, I think it is interesting to look back at the model of learning proposed by connectivism and to compare it with what Clark is describing here. Related: generative AI as edtech, slides from Shum, Kocaballi & Shibani.

Some more AI updates. Rich Heimann inverts Polanyi: "Polyani is careful to say, "we know more than we can tell," not that we don't know because we cannot tell. However, ChatGPT is Polanyi's paradox in reverse. It can tell, but it doesn't know. " Multimodal LLMs Are Here: "Microsoft revealed Kosmos-1, a large language model "capable of perceiving multimodal input." Or as Ars Technica put it, it can "analyze images for content, solve visual puzzles, perform visual text recognition, pass visual IQ tests, and understand natural language instructions." ChatGPT in More Apps: "we've achieved 90% cost reduction for ChatGPT since December; we're now passing through those savings to API users." Invisible doors in neural networks: "Hey, this is how you should slightly perturb your data to get favorable treatment."

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A Forward-Looking Theory of Content
Cameron Buckner, PhilSci Archive, Ergo, 2023/03/03

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In the 1990s I studied the concept of mental content and especially Dretske's theory, which is discussed in this article. I came to the conclusion that mental content doesn't exist, which put me at odds not only with Dretske and most commentators at the time but also my instructors, colleagues and strangers walking down the street. Since then the theory has gathered some, shall we say, cruft, which requires that proponents find ways to meet some of the objections. This article offers a novel approach, depicting mental content not just in terms of what caused it (whether evolution or experience) but by what it anticipates, "an emphasis not on informational relations chosen from some idealized past or counterfactual present, but rather from the likeliest stable future." Such theories "open up significant space for mis-representation—they can allow for a wide gap between past or current discriminatory abilities and contents—but they constrain that gap with forward-directed epistemic abilities."

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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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