OLDaily

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

The technology career ladder
Lorcan Dempsey, 2023/03/14

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I don't believe in the idea of a 'career ladder'. Oh, certainly, it would be nice (and preferable) to earn more money based on increased experience and expertise, but that's different. The traditional 'career ladder' inevitably ends up with people in the 'top rungs' of management being paid the most and having the most power. That's the model explicitly endorsed by this post: "Good leaders will be drawn from across the full range of the library." Now, simple math tells me most people will never get to the top rungs. The concept presupposes some sort of hierarchical model of (library) organization, which I also dislike. All this is justified by the 'special' skills leaders must have, over and above their actual expertise. But I don't see any of this as grounds for granting them status, privilege, wealth or power.

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Redesigning higher education in the spirit of donut economics
Bryan Alexander, 2023/03/14

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I've been involved in a discussion thread with Bryan Alexander and others around his proposition that we think of "climate change as the new liberal arts." Well, it's not a bad idea, and the traditional definition does need an upgrade; it's not for educating Princeton upperclassmen any more. But climate is connected with an entire ecosystem of ideas and concepts. That's sort of what's intended by the 'donut economics' referenced in this post. As Uri Kelly and Clare Kelly write "Addressing the climate and biodiversity crisis demands transformative changes in our economies and societies." Quite so. But it's not like nobody has been thinking along these lines, which is why I suggested, "I think we'll find that the UN sustainable development goals (SDG) are the new liberal arts." After all, the SDG are not simply what some professor came up with "in a paper, a book, and a lot of public appearances." They're the result of years of global discussion and consultations on these issues. That, to me, seems a more reasonable basis on which to found a redefinition of liberal arts.

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Speculative Futures on ChatGPT and Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI): A Collective Reflection from the Educational Landscape
Aras Bozkurt, et al., Asian Journal of Distance Education, 2023/03/14

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I'm just going put this out there and let people draw their own conclusions. "Based on the written speculative future narratives by a globally diverse expert group on this subject, this paper identifies two possible future scenarios in which positive and negative directions were explored." Something like 36 authors. Image: Metastellar.

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The learning leapfrog in Liberia, Sierra Leone
Michael B. Horn, Christensen Institute, 2023/03/14

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I have to say that I find articles like this unsettling, though they're a staple in a certain segment of the international education community. Drawing from the Forbes-World Bank mindset they invariably draw on the idea that some sort of private sector 'non-profit' is the ideal vehicle to offer some sort of new (proprietary) technology and back-to-basics (call-and-response) pedagogy to some developing nation. My guess is that the main impact of such interventions is to undermine these nations' efforts to develop their own sustainable public-sector education system the way most nations do it (because "you ultimately need market-creating innovations"). Anyhow, I found the 'research' completely unconvincing, the 'site visits' unconvincing, the gushy rhetoric unconvincing, and the inevitable pictures of young girls in dirty clothes unconvincing. Genuine social progress doesn't require more capitalism; that's what got us to where we are today. It requires social support and social investment - exactly what these organizations are trying to prevent.

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GPT-4
OpenAI, 2023/03/14

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At some point, a new version of GPT will be as remarkable as a new version of a browser is today, but I still remember the days we waited with bated breath for Netscape 4. It feels like that. Anyhow, today is the day they're launching GPT-4. Here's the blog post. Here's the launch video (still 75 minutes in the future as I write).

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WordPress.com owner Automattic acquires an ActivityPub plugin so blogs can join the Fediverse
Sarah Perez, TechCrunch, 2023/03/14

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This story is a bit encouraging and a bit unsettling. It's encouraging because it would be good to see WordPress sites become full-fledged members of the fediverse (by which I mean both sending posts and receiving comments from the fediverse). It would represent a huge uptick in support and use for a distributed social network, and could finally eliminate the need for Facebook and Twitter. But it's unsettling because Automattic has acquired the plugin. Does that mean they're going to monetize it? Take it out of open source (source is currently here)? I don't know. Relkated: Ben Werdmuller comments.

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Version Management in a Distributed Infrastructure for Open Educational Resources
Nadine Schroeder, Distributed Learning Ecosystems, 2023/03/14

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This article is on the right track but doesn't investigate the subject to sufficient depth. Nadine Schroeder correctly identifies a need for version control in open educational resources (OER) and suggests that a mechanism similar to that used in GitHub, a software versioning platform, might be the answer. There are two issues, to my mind. First, it's not easy to learn how to use GitHub; even simple operations (such as uploading a recent version to the platform) require a sequence of steps. Second, the version numbering system in GitHub, which is described in the article, is superficial. What is actually keeping track of updates and versions in Git is a combination of content-based addressing and a directional acyclic graph (DAG). That's what I propose for OERs in my 2019 article. Either way, though, for such a system to be useful to academics, it needs to be as near to one-click submission as possible, with the mechanics hidden behind the interface.

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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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