OLDaily

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

Feature Article
Better Sharing
Stephen Downes, Half an Hour, 2023/05/01

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Last November Creative Commons posed a question to 12 prominent global open advocates: "What does better sharing for a brighter future look like to you?" I was not one of the advocates in question, but I do have opinions. So I thought I'd comment on each of the 12 visions articulated.

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On Labour, OERs, and Thievery
Ann, All Things Pedagogical, 2023/05/01

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Ann (no last name) argues, "The fact that only a few of the same folk get the grants and full-time positions and book deals and publications is because instead of acknowledging the labour you have learned from, you extract and run... We need more people who want to use their space and positions to support and highlight the work already out there, the work that is hiding in grey literature space and other open education spaces." My own observations support Ann's arguments; I've seen any number of academic papers credited with 'inventing' or 'discovering' things long evident in the community.

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How to customize LLMs like ChatGPT with your own data and documents
Ben Dickson, TechTalks - Technology solving problems... and creating new ones, 2023/05/01

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As Ben Dickson writes, ChatGPT and other LLMs are limited to their training data. That's why they make factual errors; they simply don't have the facts in the first place! The solution to this is 'embeddings' (and we'll see a lot more about this in the future). The idea is that you supplement chatGPT with your own resource library, and when a request comes in, it retrieves the appropriate document (or documents) from your library in order to form a response. I haven't tried it yet, but this article provides complete instructions, meaning that a trial is in my near future.

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May: The Future Is Open
Creative Commons, 2023/05/01

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According to this post, Creative Commons "gathered insights from 12 prominent open advocates around the world and tasked 2 renowned artists who embrace openness with transforming these perspectives into captivating visual pieces." Included among the insights is this one from Ebenezar Wikina, "as we continue to find better ways to share ideas, products and solutions on the internet, we'd directly be working towards a brighter future for ourselves and generations to come." The images, which are located on an activist website called the Greats, are available for reuse under the non-commercial license.

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How Much Can Duolingo Teach Us?
2023/05/01

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It's easier to read the Steve Dodson's excerpts in LanguageHat. He links right away and quotes at length Carina Chocano's New Yorker article (archived) about Luis von Ahn, the founder of Duolingo. For the last few weeks I've been using Duolingo to actually apply myself and learn Spanish (I mean, really, it's about time I did). What pushed me to take the leap was the announcement of a conversational interface with GPT-4 to immerse myself in different scenarios; I haven't actually used that yet, but there will come a time when it pushes me from basic knowledge to something like fluency (I should probably use it in French as well to refresh my knowledge of that language). Anyhow, I'm making progress. ¡Hasta la vista!

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

A new Opera
Doug Peterson, doug -- off the record, 2023/05/01

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Thanks to this post from Doug Peterson I have spent the last hour putting the new Opera One browser through its paces. This is a developer pre-Alpha version, so not everything works. But most of it does. How much do I like it? A lot. The buzz about Opera One is the way it integrates AI functionality into the browsing experience. On the left you'll see a couple of tabs to open interfaces with ChatSonic and ChatGPT, but the real magic is behind the 'AI prompts' button on the upper right, which will do a bunch of different things with the web page you're viewing, depending on the web page, such as 'write a summary', 'compose a tweet', or 'write a rap song about it'. It also sharpens videos and photos on the fly. Opera also integrates social media and chat, audio streaming, a 'flow' interface with your devices and phone, and a crypto wallet. The only think missing is the web server functionality from the old Opera Unite browser, but I'm sure there could be a way to build that in.

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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