OLDaily

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

On language, language models and writing
Helen Beetham, imperfect offerings, 2023/04/25

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In her new newsletter Helen Beetham offers an intelligent and in many ways original account of accountability in AI and the role of language in society. Don't miss this article. Beetham argues, "Whatever features of writing are reproduced by the statistical and neural processing work of LLMs, they do not produce a meaningful, accountable relationship between words and world, self and others." It is for this reason the AIs cannot be referenced as authors, but also, for this reason the task of language writing would not be exhausted even if AIs wrote perfectly. With language, we don't just manipulate words and sentences, we do things (as writers as varied a Wittgenstein and J.L. Austin have argued). By contrast, the AI "is unaccountable, with no body to stand behind its utterances, no community to feel the consequences, no needs to negotiate. It has no intentions or values of its own, except those added on to the black box of code by human data workers." See also Beetham's follow-up article where she discusses developing accountable writing assignments. Via Sheila MacNeill.

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EdTech Is Going Crazy For AI
Josh Bersin, 2023/04/25

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Josh Bersin "spent a few days at the ASU/GSV conference and ran into 7,000 educators, entrepreneurs, and corporate training people who had gone CRAZY for AI... the frenzy is unprecedented: this is bigger than the excitement at the launch of the i-Phone." He writes, "AI and ChatGPT are about to revolutionize corporate learning. This $320 billion market is ready for change." For example, "What is going to happen to our jobs when these Generative AI tools start automatically building content, assessments, teaching guides, rubrics, videos, and simulations in seconds? The answer is pretty clear: you're going to get disrupted." Also: these are available on-demand, and the price drops to near zero.

Meanwhile, the major concern for educators seems to be plagiarism. Well, that and capitalism. To wit: Apostolos K. relates the story of a professor who said, "I shared with colleagues that All we have to do is ask 'Did you write this?' and then copy and paste the student work into the (chatGPT) prompt box." Imagine the professor's surprise. "While I was wrestling with the haste of my initial response, I received six frantic student emails, each professing their honesty, fear and dismay. Another student stopped by in tears." Meanwhile, we read in Campus Technology that "Open source learning management system Moodle has formed a partnership with AI content and plagiarism detector Copyleaks." Here's a sample report. Maybe that professor could use it.

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Jean Jacques Rousseau
Bertram, Christopher, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2023/04/25

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"Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains." This stirring quote begins The Social Contract, the publication of which, along with his tract on education, Emile, may have destroyed Jean Jacques Rousseau's career, but cemented his place as one of the most important figures of modern philosophy. This article in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has just been updated, and provides a compelling biography of an admittedly flawed man responsible for so many of the core ideas of modern moral and political philosophy - the idea of a 'general will' of society, the idea of the 'state of nature', the corrupting nature of society, and of course, the social contract. People like Marx, Mill and Rawls are directly in his debt.

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Beyond the Veil of Ignorance
Alan Ryan, Literary Review, 2023/04/25

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This is a review of Daniel Chandler's Free and Equal: What Would a Fair Society Look Like? Unfortunately, distribution of the book itself is neither - you'll have to wait until someone posts a copy on Sci-Hub if you don't have the means to obtain this London School of Economics production. Nonetheless, the reviews are useful as provocations. Despite a Guardian Reviewer saying that John Rawls "had precisely zero impact on the real world", the idea of justice as fairness is a central concept in liberal democratic ethics, and stands as influential as John Stuart Mill's writings on liberty. Chandler challenges us to imagine what that concept would look like in a world where, as Rawls says, "citizens hold different views about personal morality and religion, there is no external standard that we can appeal to." We can imagine an egalitarian and just society, and it's not out of reach, but the question is how to get there when even western democracies "are plutocracies, based on government by the better-off for the better-off."

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.

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