OLDaily

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

Saying goodbye
paper.li, 2023/03/22

---

No, not me! The title refers to paper.li, which is shutting down. If you never used it (which is probably true for most readers) this won't affect you. But if you did use it, this is yet another lesson in the impermanence of commercial services. Paper.li depended quite a bit on Twitter, so I can imagine recent disruptions there didn't help its business model. Via Doug Peterson.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

The genie escapes: Stanford copies the ChatGPT AI for less than $600
Loz Blain, New Atlas, 2023/03/22

---

While most media is paying attention to commercial AI solutions provided by the likes of Google, Amazon, Baidu, Meta and OpenAI, there is also a thriving open source AI scene that has been making some noise in the last few days. First, we read that OpenAssistant is now live on reddit. Here are some examples of it in action. Next, you can use services like Elicit to conduct and assemble literature reviews. "Elicit can find relevant papers without perfect keyword match, summarize takeaways from the paper specific to your question, and extract key information from the papers." Via Peter Suber. We also have Mozilla's Trustworthy AI project as Mozilla.ai, "a startup — and a community — that will build a trustworthy and independent open-source AI ecosystem." Finally, Alan Levine points to Stanford's Alpaca. It "performs similarly to the astonishing ChatGPT on many tasks – but it's built on an open-source language model and cost less than US$600 to train." Video. Image: Alan Levine.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Aphantasia can be a gift to philosophers and critics like me
Mette Leonard Høeg, Psyche, 2023/03/22

---

According to the website, aphantasia is the inability to visualize, otherwise known as image-free thinking. I don't know whether I'm aphantasic - I mean, how would I know, right? - but I do know my mental imagery is nothing compared to the full audio I listen to in my mind every moment of every day. Mette Leonard Høeg suggests that "aphantasia may come with an increased interest in the visual world," which I think is true. Also, like aphantasics, I have great difficulty remembering faces and would "describe my imagination and memories as conceptual and emotional – consisting of thoughts, feelings and sensations." The article focuses on the advantages of aphantasia for scientists and philosophers, and Derek Parfit (who argues that "personal identity is reducible to physical and psychological continuity of mental states, and that there is no 'further fact', diachronic entity or essence that determines identity"). Is aphantasia permanent and immutable? I have no idea. But from the perspective of learning, no matter what you think of learning styles, I think that aphantasia is a thing that needs to be taken into account.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Nine elements for robust collaborative learning analytics: A constructive collaborative critique
Alyssa Friend Wise, Carolyn Rosé, Sanna Järvelä, International Journal of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning, 2023/03/22

---

This editorial introduces the journal issue but more usefully provides the list promised in the title. Though not all items support this, the authors are evidently most interested in learning support and theory development. Other aspects concern the presentation of data and ethical use of data. The authors write, "Theorization of clicks-to-constructs should be purposeful with respect to operation at the group and/or individual levels as well as relationships between them and often necessarily the dynamics of evolution over time." Translating this, I would interpret the authors as saying that analytics should attempt to provide relevant explanations for data over and above merely descriptions of what's happening. Image: Wise, mapping from clicks to constructs.

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