OLDaily

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

All the AI announcements from Google I/O 2023
Matt Binder, Mashable, 2023/05/11

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This article wraps up all the major announcements from Google's I/O conference this week. Most of them have to do with introducing AI into most of their products - it will write emails for you, help in the search engine, create immersive route maps, and its "AI chatbot Bard, which is now powered by Google's newest large language model: PaLM 2(opens in a new tab)."

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Algorithmic Colonization of Africa
Abeba Birhane, SCRIPTed, 2023/05/11

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This is an intelligent and relevant response to the phenomenon of colonization by AI. Colonization, writes Abeba Birhane, "declares control of the social, economic, and political sphere by reordering and reinventing social order in a manner that benefits it." In particular, "Algorithmic colonialism, driven by profit maximization at any cost, assumes that human personality, behaviour, and action is raw material free for the taking." In response, "supporting African youth in the AI field means creating programs and databases that serve various local communities and not blindly importing Western AI systems founded upon individualistic and capitalist drives." This article is the first 13 pages of a 37 page PDF; it's an OUP preprint found by Google and I don't know how long it will be available, but here's copy from a few years ago. and here it is on the author's blog in 2019. Image: ETC group.

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Lessons from debiasing data for fair and accurate predictive modeling in education
Lele Sha, Dragan Gasevic, Guanliang Chen, Expert Systems With Applications, 2023/05/11

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This is quite a good paper (15 page PDF) that looks in detail about addressing bias in data used in learning analytics. Bias, we should be clear, refers here to only a property of the data set (the term 'bias' in AI also refers to the sensitivity setting in neural networks). The authors study two types of data biases, distribution bias and the less well-known hardness bias, in data from students of different sexes and first-language backgrounds. 'Hardness bias' refers to how easy or hard it is for the algorithm to label data (the paper offers a technical definition in terms of k-NN). It's addressed by resampling a less hard subset of the data from the particular demographic group.

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Education Freedom: State Funding Is Only Half The Battle
Jeff Yass, Center for Education Reform, Forbes, 2023/05/11

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There's a thing out there called the Yass Prize and Jeff Yass has written a paean in Forbes, reprinted here (so we avoid the paywall) by the Center for Education Reform, touting the benefits of 'education freedom', the idea that education funding follows the student rather than being assigned to learning institutions. In practice, the idea is "to allow public funds to be used to help low-income families enroll in private schools." This article is an example of the sort of deceptive marketing we see supporting private education providers, just as the Yass Prize is intended to promote a specific agenda. I am in favour of choice and freedom in education, but the problem with this approach, to my mind, is clear: for private providers, success is defined by revenue, which invariably leads to misleading advertising, lower quality services, less qualified staff, questionable content and sometimes outright fraud. Overall, the public ends up paying a lot more for lower quality results. And privatization is not the only option; choice can be provided in a public system, as Edmonton's school board so clearly demonstrates. With online support and services, public education providers can offer free and accessible learning resources to support all needs at a fraction of the cost commercial providers would charge, while ensuring quality standards and the public interest are served. Related: As science denial grows, science museums fight back by teaching scientific literacy.

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AI machines aren’t ‘hallucinating’
Catherine Cronin, et al., social.fossdle.org, 2023/05/11

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This is Mastodon doing what Mastodon does best, hosting a small and engaged conversation on a specific topic. Notice it includes people from a number of different servers (or 'instances') and isn't filled with marketing, spam or offensive content. Will Mastodon always be this way? I don't know. Anyhow, the topic is also pretty interesting, prompted by Catherine Cronin quoting Naomi Klein saying "AI machines aren't 'hallucinating'. Their makers are" and Alan Levine responding "I refuse to use any verbs for AI beyond "generating" It does not think, hallucinate, lie, imagine, create, write, tease, sing, feel, dance, joke, smile, empathize, ache, wonder." See also: Alan Levine's blog post emerging from the conversation.

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49th edition of Professional Development Opportunities in Educational Technology and Education
Clayton R. Wright, Stephen's Web, 2023/05/11

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It is that time of year again! The 49th edition of Professional Development Opportunities in Educational Technology and Education contains a potpourri of online, in-person, and hybrid events that focus on the use of technology in educational settings and on teaching, learning, and educational administration. While compiling this version of the list, the following topics frequently appeared in professional learning agendas:

• Artificial intelligence
• Equity, diversity, inclusion, and quality
• Microcredentialling
• Student and faculty wellbeing or mental health

Don't wait until the semester or summer break to review this FREE list. There are 251 events in May and 558 events in June - many are accessible online. Ask yourself, which ones could help you achieve your goals or bring you new insights or encourage you to hold a similar event closer to home? Even if you are unable to travel, you can learn a great deal by examining the event program and returning to the website once the event is over to view summaries and/or highlights.

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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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