OLDaily

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

A Simple Way to Create 360° Interactions in E-Learning
Tom Kuhlmann, The Rapid E-Learning Blog, 2023/05/18

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One of the advantages of using AI to generate content is that it suddenly becomes possible to create content that was difficult and expensive - or even impossible - to create manually. This article offers a good example: it helps you create an immersive 360° environment from a photo or drawing. The link to the tool is missing from the article but I did some searching and found a commercial product here, a scene generator here, some more options here. Check this out. Tom Kuhlmann links to some examples inserted into Articulate Storyline 360.

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Do we need a new type of Higher Education institution? | Tony Bates
Tony Bates, Online learning and distance education resources, 2023/05/18

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The answer to the question posed in the title is a very qualified 'yes' with a lean toward institutions that would move beyond traditional curricula - Nottingham University's Cancer Sciences programs are cited as an example. We've also seen the sustainable development goals (SDG) suggested. Tony Bates adds, "Some form of distributed institution then is likely to work best, combining a mix of in-person and online learning. This would provide an opportunity to re-think the campus and its role, its design, and its technology platform." I'm in agreement with the general tenor of the argument, and I would add that finding some way to integrate the learning function with the make-society-work function would be ideal (but not using the public-private partnership (PPP) model; that's just a way of converting a public investment that provides services to 100 people into one that provides services to 80, as we've seen in privatized health care).

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Google Unveils Plan to Demolish the Journalism Industry Using AI
Maggie Harrison, Futurism, 2023/05/18

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The way this article presents it, "Google's AI is going to mulch up original work and provide a distilled version of it to users at scale, without ever connecting them to the original work." This "involves cutting digital publishers off at the knees." The risk, writes Maggie Harrison, is that without financial support, the original work will disappear. "If the company doesn't figure out a way to compensate publishers for the labor it'll be gleaning from the journalists, the effects on the public's actual access to information could be catastrophic." But the publishers aren't exactly saints here either, having fought a decades-long rearguard campaign to inhibit open access to information. Yes, we need to link back to the source. Yes, sources should be compensated (real sources, not churn journalists who rewrite press releases and expect to be paid for it). There's a lot to work out here.

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A Generative AI Primer - National centre for AI
Michael Webb, National centre for AI, JISC, 2023/05/18

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This is a first draft (and reads like it) of a generative AI (GAI) primer for educators offered by Jisc. It's OK. I don't get a sense that it's written from a position of deep knowledge in the field. A sentence like "both Google Bard and Claude feel a long way behind ChatGPT in terms of capabilities" doesn't fill me with confidence. There's no real summary of what GAI is actually being used to do. It doesn't explain the source of bias (ie., bias in the input data) as the cause of prejudicial output. It states GAI should not be used to evaluate student work (true) but does not mention that different types of AI (classifiers, rather than generators) perform much better. Etc.

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Caddy 2 - The Ultimate Server with Automatic HTTPS
Caddy, 2023/05/18

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I've been using nginx for my web server front-end needs because it provides a way to use Let's Encrypt for secure socket later (SSL) support and to do load balancing (not that I've ever needed load balancing). Caddy is an upgrade over that. You can read what it does on the web page - and even if you're not setting up web servers, you may want to read what it does so you have a sense of what modern web servers need to have done, whether by Caddy or otherwise. It's by ZeroSSL (who make Let's Encrypt) and is open source.

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Pathlight Unveils the First Generative AI Manager | Pathlight
Alexander Kvamme, Pathlight, 2023/05/18

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No, it's not April Fools. "Pathlight today unveiled 'AI Manager', the industry's first autonomous manager for customer-facing teams powered by large language models (LLMs). AI Manager is a state-of-the art intelligence solution that analyzes millions of points of performance data - from customer interactions to employee KPIs, goals, and benchmarks - to provide objective and helpful data-driven coaching in real time." Computer games have been doing this sort of interaction with players for a while now, so it's no real surprise to see a similar approach applied to the workplace. Anyhow, here's the waitlist.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Heal the Cycle
Jack, TikTok, 2023/05/18

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This is a TikTok video; I don't know how original it is nor how accurate it is. But it's a good story and will get you to reflect on how scientific 'evidence' is created. My main criticism, though, is that while the observation may be sound, any number of explanations would fit the result. It's a long walk to get to the very specific story offered by the author (I'm being deliberately vague not to engage in clickbait but to allow viewers to draw their own conclusions while still trying to make my point). See also: Heal the Cycle.

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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