OLDaily

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

Datafication is an equity issue. Everywhere.
Laura Czerniewicz, 2023/05/04

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I had no need to point to yet another article on datafication and educator unease, but this post about the response to the article is definitely worth mentioning. Specifically, Laura Czerniewicz argues that "when authors are affiliated to global South institutions, and use evidence from global South countries, the names of these countries are more likely to be part of the article's title." See the map. This wouldn't matter except that naming the country signals "that the issues were of local interest only, and less likely to be read." It does suggests that work done in North America and Europe is of universal interest, while everything else is of local interest only. This is not true, of course, and so this trend should be noted and resisted. Related: Whose Knowledge?

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

SAIL: AI is the only thing
George Siemens, Sensemaking, AI, and Learning, 2023/05/04

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"Universities are sleep walking," says George Siemens. "I'm surprised that AI is generally being treated as peripheral. Higher education should be in a panic...or a frantic race to adopt and deploy this fascinating technology." I think that's quite right. It's why I have spent a lifetime talking about networks and connections. But I don't agree that AI is the only thing. Yes, AI touches everything else. But the things it touches also matter in their own right. That's why I persist in this newsletter in covering a wide range of topics, everything from the fediverse to the study of consciousness to cryptography to community. Image: Tachyon. Related: cat-GPT and dog-GPT, via Alan Levine.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

AI: Education's Untapped Revolution
Philippa Hardman, The Learning Science Newsletter, 2023/05/04

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Philippa Hardman  discusses her recent TEDx talk, making the argument that we should "find new methods of scaling one-to-one mastery tutoring to transform both the quality and the equity of education for all learners." AI can help with this, but as she observes, most of the push "is in the opposite direction, using AI to automate and scale ineffective "chalk and talk" practices." She does, however, highlight a couple of items, Khan Academy's KhanMigo and Microsoft's Reading Coach.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Opportunities of artificial intelligence for supporting complex problem-solving: Findings from a scoping review
Computers and Education, 2023/05/04

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"Research findings support the assumption that (1) affective, (2) (meta-)cognitive, and (3) social processes support complex problem-solving," write the authors. How does AI help with these. According to this small (38 papers) scoping review (12 paper PDF), a lot of work has been done in the cognitive domain (naturally), with work in the other two domains improving. The paper (section 5) breaks down several dimensions for each of these, forming perhaps the beginnings of a taxonomy, though the authors point to an MIT Sloan framework describing "five human-AI interaction modes, namely: i) automator, ii) decider, iii) recommender, iv) illuminator, and v) evaluator" which they say "perfectly reflects the current state of AI." They then describe a model with four dimensions (illustrated), adding a a new 'metacognitive' dimension even though "we failed to identify studies that would explore human-AI interaction at the metacognitive level." They then reference a six-item taxonomy from Klein. Ah, nothing educational researchers love more than a taxonomy.

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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