OLDaily

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

Mentoring meets the Metaverse
Betty Dannewitz, Britney Cole, Dallas Purisima, Doug Glener, Lara Dollens, Melanie Chin, Minami Sakakibara, Chief Learning Officer, 2023/04/19

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The argument is this: "Trust is the foundation of any mentor-mentee relationship. The Metaverse is an ideal safe space to build trust - to form emotional bonds, develop a sense of belonging, share and be vulnerable." But I have questions. We want to get beyond 'can be used' and ask whether it 'should be used'. Is the metaverse necessary to support mentorship? No, in-person methods work as well. But if in-person is not an option? Would alternatives like videoconferencing work as well, and more inexpensively? Also: is the metaverse sufficient to support mentorship? I suppose it could be; I'd need to see a case where it isn't. (p.s. I preserved the full authors list because I think the ratio of 7 authors:15 paragraphs might be a new record for OLDaily).

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The 10-Question Micro-Credential Checklist
Contact North, 2023/04/19

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This is a nice little tool. "Before commissioning, developing, or delivering a micro-credential, check it meets these 10 requirements," suggests the author. We are assured " These ten checkpoints are derived from a comprehensive review of the available literature. See, in particular, the resources at the Micro-credential Observatory and Making Sense of Micro-Credentials."

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What's Happening to Twitter Could Never Happen to Mastodon
Max Eddy, PCMAG, 2023/04/19

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I have long touted the advantages of decentralized networks over the centralized variety (and you will no doubt hear me doing it again in the future). This article is a nice statement of many of those advantages, compiled as a list of things that Twitter has done (to the detriment of users and wider society) that could not be done by Mastodon. The list includes simple things like charging for blue check marks and changing the site's identity into a 2011-era joke to more serious things like pushing advertising content into user's feeds and destabilizing democracy. Related: What was Twitter Anyway? via Grant Potter, who does the linking thing correctly.

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Reddit Doesn't Want Free Content to Train Chatbots, Will Charge AI Companies for API Use
Stephen Cruise, TechGoing, 2023/04/19

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To be clear, what Reddit is saying is that "You cannot use any Reddit developer tools and services for commercial purposes without first getting our permission. We consider commercial purposes to include any use of our services by a business or on behalf of a business or as part of a monetized product or service." However, "Use for research purposes is OK provided you use it exclusively for academic (i.e. non-commercial) purposes, don't redistribute our data or any derivative products based on our data (e.g. models trained using Reddit data), credit Reddit and anonymize information in published results." I think we'll see more and more institutions adopting similar policies, especially those that produce a lot of data. For my own part my use of the Creative Commons Non-Commercial license creates exactly this limitation (the need for which, if I may say, I anticipated years ago and have spent a lot of time explaining to people). More: The Register, Silicon Angle, SocialMediaToday.

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AWS Enters the Generative AI Race With Bedrock and Titan Foundation Models
Daniel Dominguez, InfoQ, 2023/04/19

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AWS has launched their own generative AI services, the Bedrock and Titan foundation models, in order to (they say) "democratize access to generative AI technology, catering to customers across various industries and use cases." Related: Databricks has released Dolly 2.0, trained "without the use of ChatGPT (through) a process that incentivized workers to submit examples of dialogue and tweak those of their peers in a 'gamified' manner." More. Also, InfoQ reports that "Microsoft Research recently open-sourced Visual ChatGPT, a chatbot system that can generate and manipulate images in response to human textual prompts."

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Mapping Open Science resources from around the world by discipline and principles
Jo Havemann, Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe, Access 2 Perspectives, 2023/04/19

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This short article describes an open science mapping project. "To attempt to counter the misperception that Open Science only fits a few, I decided to start mapping the resources," write the authors. "The map now contains more than 200 resources and supplementary data nodes across the spectrum of available tools, guidelines, events, and services by research discipline." This sort of work - open scientific research and data - will ultimately form the basis for both AI in general and (open) learning resources in particular. Related: the Open Science Framework (OSF): website, support. Via the Scholarly Kitchen.

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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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