OLDaily

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

India's plan to export its wildly successful digital payments system
Nilesh Christopher, Rest of World, 2023/04/11

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This may not seem to be related to learning technology, but if you provide billions of people outside the western world with a means to identify themselves and get paid, the ripple effects will impact every sector, including education. This article describes Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI), "interoperable platforms for digital identity, payments, and data exchange that allow governments to provide essential services to citizens." An example of this is India's the digital ID card Aadhaar, a 12-digit unique number used by 1.3 billion Indians today, that forms the basis for the unified payments interface (UPI), touted as a neutral (ie., non-western based) payment system such as the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) system.

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Jaynes and Weird Minds
Steve Dodson, Languagehat, 2023/04/11

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Steve Dodson ponders a point raised in a review of Julian Jaynes's Bicameral Mind: "the minds of primitive people are pretty weird, and I believe that, but they don't seem quite as weird as Jaynes wants them to be. So the question becomes whether we would notice if some people worked in a pre-bicameral and pre-conscious way." Which seems impossible until we read of a person who never thought in language. "Growing up, I never ever thought with language. Not once did I ever think something in my mind with words like 'What are my friends doing right now?'" P.S. I enjoyed The Dancing Wu Li Masters; I didn't think of it as "crackpottery" when I read it in the 1980s. I don't know what I would think today. Image: Time, What it's like to be mind blind.

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Doing school differently takes a new value network
Thomas Arnett, Christensen Institute, 2023/04/11

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It takes a bit to get to it, but this article is built around recent survey research by a company called Populace using YouGov's "proprietary" panel, to argue that "the general public's top priorities for K–12 schools are: #1 practical skills (e.g., managing personal finances, preparing a meal, making an appointment), #2 thinking critically to problem solve and make decisions, and #3 demonstrating character (e.g., honesty, kindness, integrity, and ethics)." Maybe, maybe not; I have my doubts about both companies. Anyhow, Thomas Arnett argues that because schools today do not respond to these priorities, there's a need to develop an alternative 'value network' to smooth the way. Of course, the usual democratic process is no way to do this ("(our) priorities easily get diluted among all the other myriad priorities put on schools by all the other constituencies in their value networks"). You need an alternative private school system. This line of reasoning is to my mind deeply problematic. But we should pay attention because this is the sort of thinking coming from our elite higher education institutions.

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Losing the imitation game
Jennifer Moore, Jennifer++, 2023/04/11

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This is an extended argument against using generative AI for complex tasks like software programming and worth reading in its own right, but I want to focus on one thing Jennifer Moore wrote in her Mastodon summary: "Humans still need opportunity to learn how to make sense of those systems, and we do that by making them. Giving all the work that's most conducive to learning to a computer is selling out our futures." I think this depends a lot on what we need to learn. We are already almost completely dependent on technology to live and thrive (the recent trend of survival shows makes that very evident). In programming, we have long ago abstracted well beyond the basics of machine language, assembler, and even compiled languages; developers depend on environments, frameworks and APIs. I think that even our understanding of what counts as 'theorizing' and 'understanding' is changing. The age of formal systems - whether algorithmic or conceptual - is ending.

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Trends and Topics in Educational Technology, 2023 Edition
Bohdana Allman, Royce Kimmons, Joshua Rosenberg, Monalisa Dash, TechTrends, 2023/04/11

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This article has a promising title and does deliver to some degree, but it almost completely misses the rise of AI systems in online learning, partially the result of using academic journals as its starting point, and partially because it counts Twitter hashtags - which are dominated by marketing bots - to quantify trends. So we get a list of a lot of vague topics ('edtech', 'e-learning'), research methods ('mixed methods', 'literature review'), and some dated trends ('computational thinking', 'learning environments'). You can learn about what happened in journals, but if you want to know what is happening now, or what will happen, you have to look elsewhere.

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Jack Dorsey explains his new obsession
Ben Schreckinger, Politico, 2023/04/11

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This article interviews Twitter's former CEO, Jack Dorsey, who "has been spending his time on NOSTR, an open-source social media protocol launched in 2020 that has become popular with Bitcoin enthusiasts." NOSTR stands for "Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays" and while a distributed messaging system like Mastodon allows people to have one single permanent ID. Like ActivityPub, NOSTR is a protocol, not an application, and there are different applications (called 'clients') you can use on your phone or computer to access the NOSTR network. Dorsey himself uses a web-based client called Snort and has just launched a an AI-based translator for NOSTR; "Cost is 0.1 satoshi per character." I've set up an account on Snort - you can find it here.  I have no 'handle' (like, say, 'Downes', because you have to buy it in satoshi, which I don't have). But if you want you can follow me on NOSTR using my public key. Strictly experimental at this point (though I expect ActivityPub to eventually adopt many of these features).

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Transferring your Mastodon account to another server
Fedi.Tips, 2023/04/11

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Fedi.tips is a good guide to using Mastodon and the fediverse generally. This post helps people who have followers and want to keep them when they change from one Mastodon server (also called an 'instance') to another. In related Mastodon/Twitter news: Tweetbot's sudden death, open-casket funeral, and reincarnation as a Mastodon app (iPhone only, for now). Also, having been cut off by Twitter, the RSS reader Feedly is working on a new Mastodon integration. As of right now I still have a blue check on Twitter and the API is still working, but these could end any time. Finally, SubStack Notes has launched; here's mine (experimental only).

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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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