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

Twitter appears highly bothered by Substack's existence
Laura Hazard Owen, Nieman Lab, 2023/04/07

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It appears Twitter is blocking Substack links. "The changes coincide with Twitter officially shutting down its free API, and also with Twitter inaccurately labeling NPR as 'state-affiliated media'," reports Nieman Lab. Meanwhile, the Verge reports, "Substack's founders say this serves as a reminder of why writers need a platform that 'puts them in charge, that rewards great work with money, and that protects the free press and free speech.'" And, they say, the blocked links "seems to fly in the face of owner Elon Musk's vocal support of free speech on the platform." Well yeah. But you would be misleading yourself if you're a writer and you think Substack is any different. It's also a privately owned centrally managed publishing platform. Relate: TechCrunch, Twitter is dying.

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4E Cognition and the Spectrum of Aesthetic Experience
Mia Burnett, Shaun Gallagher, The Journal for the Philosophy of Language, Mind and the Arts, 2023/04/07

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Fred Glaver references this article (20 page PDF), which addresses 4E (embodied, embedded, extended and enactive) approaches to the analysis of art and aesthetic experience. 4E cognition, for short. But not the sort of cognition we normally think of (where everything is encoded into sentences and propositions). "If we consider cultural practices and embodied sensory-motor processes, not as higher and lower, but as more fundamentally integrated to begin with, we can shift to a framework where these processes are not modular or distinct, but instead influence and permeate one another."

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Quick! Look at these PBL Tips!
Nicholas Provenzano, The Nerdy Teacher, 2023/04/07

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I'm a fan of problem-based learning (PBL), but with one caveat. As this article notes, every instance starts with "a clear driving question or problem statement.... The driving question is the heart of any PBL project." Which is great, however, not every instance of learning starts with a problem. A lot of learning is based on exploration and discovery. Seeing what's there. But PBL gets your hands on learning in a big way. You don't just explore, you wrestle. And that explains the remaining four tips outlined in this short article: create opportunities for collaboration, provide access to resources, focus on the process not the outcome, and celebrate the work.

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Can We Have Moral Status for Robots on the Cheap?
Sebastian Köhler, Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy, 2023/04/07

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What is the relation between responsibility for an act and the tool that was used to perform the act? There's a sort of moral dance people sometimes perform in order to separate the responsibility from themselves by blaming the tool. But can a tool be responsible? In the case of a hammer or a gun, the answer seems obvious, but what about a robot? This paper (22 page PDF) argues that "our intuitions about what entities should be afforded moral status tend to go hand in hand with our intuitions about whether an entity has a mind." No mind, nor moral status, hence, no responsibility. But then, I ask, where does the responsibility lie? It depends. It might lie in the person who used the tool. But it also lies in the hands of the person who made the tool, the person who made the tool available to the user, and the person who allowed the use of the tool by the user. Image (and see also): Assessing the Moral Status of Robots: A Shorter Defence of Ethical Behaviourism. Related: Matt Crosslin, turns out that AI is killing people.

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Transduction, calibration, and the penetrability of pain
Colin Klein, Ergo, 2023/04/07

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The concept of 'cognitive penetrability' is the idea that the cognitive states are causally dependent on cognitive states, where it is the mental content of the cognitive state that matters. In the case of pain, this appears to be well-documented. If you believe that you have been injured, there is often a corresponding pain. That's what this paper investigates. The objection (very much abridged) is that what we are seeing in the case is one perception directly impacting another perception; there might be no need for cognitive mediation. Cognitive penetrability depends on a three-stage process: first, transduction, in which a sensation "is transformed into a suitable symbolic representation'; second, systems that "take symbols in, manipulate them, and pass the resulting symbols on," and then third, the intentional steps, where beliefs "are combined with other beliefs in an inferential, truth-preserving way."

Cognitive science is concerned almost entirely with the second step, but this assumes a functioning first step. Not only might this never actually happen, the experience of pain actually seems to be immune from it - we often feel pain despite what we know and believe (consider, for example, the phantom limb syndrome). I personally don't think the notion of cognitive penetrability is coherent, which is one reason why I am sceptical of cognitive science, and cognitive psychology in general. Consider, by contrast, how much of educational theory is based in cognitive psychology, and how fragile that foundation actually is. Anyhow, this is quite a good paper bringing us up to date on this debate.

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Harvard Tells Grad Students to Get Food Stamps to Supplement The Unlivable Wages It Pays Them
Jules Roscoe, Vice, 2023/04/07

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According to this report, Harvard is hosting an event encouraging graduate students to apply for federal food assistance. I've been waiting for a wider take-up of this story, but it hasn't really happened (though here's a thread from Reddit). In my view, what we have here is a fundamental ethical failure, which is why it's so dangerous to allow the graduates of such institutions to hold positions of power and influence in society. How would we change this?  A combination of measures to reduce the accumulation and influence of wealth, as well as public investments in creating the competitive advantages for people and groups currently excluded from them. Which is is a large part of the purpose of this newsletter, and informs much of the coverage here. Via Bryan Alexander.

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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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