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

Personalised tutors - a dumb rich kid is more likely to graduate from college than a smart poor one
Donald Clark, Donald Clark Plan B, 2023/06/20

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"A dumb rich kid is more likely to graduate from college than a smart poor one and traditional teaching has not solved the problem of gaps in attainment," writes Donald Clark. However, he says, "we now have a solution that has been around for some time," albeit one that is firmly resisted by just about every human educator out there. It is, of course, AI-based learning support. "It will enable every student in the United States, and eventually on the planet, to effectively have a world-class personal tutor" says Salman Khan, thus effective solving what Benjamin Bloom called the two-sigma problem. Clark is not wrong, and while there is certainly potential for misuse and mis-application, we can nonetheless see (through the detailed list provided in this article) the many ways AI can be applied to improve learning, and more importantly, access to learning. Sure, it's not a scarce credential, like a Harvard diploma, and thus doesn't confer an immediate social advantage on everyone who gets an AI-assisted education. But if we're lucky, it will render the scarcity and prestige of a Harvard education meaningless. That's a problem for dumb rich kids, but for the rest of us, it's the future. If we want it. Image: Scientific American.

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What should CoSocial do about Meta?
Boris Mann, CoSocial News, 2023/06/20

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This is a discussion thread on CoSocial News (running on Lemmy, which can be thought of as a federated version of Reddit). The topic concerns what Facebook (ie., Meta) is planning to do to join the network of federated sites on ActivityPub (the decentralized network Mastodon and Lemmy are a part of). I would say the effect will be similar to what happened when users of the closed America Online (AOL) service joined the internet for the first time - a flood of new users with no real understand on what they've joined, why it's different from AOL, and what strange terms like 'website' mean. It's trick. Do existing instances (like, say CoSocial News) federate wit Meta - that is, do they allow interoperability between their site and Facebook's? Will other federated sites (like, say, Mastodon.social) block them if they do? What happens when WordPress and Tumblr and most other sites (but not sites like Reddit and Twitter) join the fediverse? Mastodon.social would go from being the largest instance in the fediverse to a tiny fraction of a percent of the fediverse. But wouldn't it be nice to finally have open social networks?

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How and when are topological explanations complete mechanistic explanations? The case of multilayer network models
Beate Krickel, Leon de Bruin, Linda Douw, PhilPapers, 2023/06/20

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"In recent years," begins this article (28 page PDF), "the idea that neuroscientists give mechanistic explanations has become increasingly popular." These explanations contrast with the sort of taxonomies and systems analyses offered by educators and psychologists. "Contrary to mechanistic explanation, network analysis seems to abstract away from concrete parts and activities to instead focus on the topological properties of connectivity patterns, with the aim of explaining how they determine the behavioral dynamics of the systems exhibiting those patterns." Obviously both have a role to play in 'explaining' what exactly a neural network or AI is doing (I put 'explaining' in quotes because it's the definition of this term that's in question here). The argument considered in this paper considers "under which conditions topological explanations are indeed mechanistic explanations." This becomes the case in multilayer networks when a pattern in one layer becomes an activation in the next, a phenomenon I have classified under the heading 'recognition'. Anyhow, tons of detailed argument here, for purists who want to know exactly what we mean when we ask for, say, 'explainability' (and are not satisfied with counterfactual or dispositional accounts).

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From "Ban It Till We Understand It" to "Resistance is Futile": How University Programming Instructors Plan to Adapt as More Students Use AI Code Generation and Explanation Tools such as ChatGPT and GitHub Copilot
Sam Lau, Philip J. Guo, UC San Diego, 2023/06/20

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The title of this paper - one of the longest in the history of OLDaily - pretty much summarizes the contents (16 page PDF). As Philip Guo reports, "Our study findings capture a rare snapshot in time in early 2023 as computing instructors are just starting to form opinions about this fast-growing phenomenon but have not yet converged to any consensus about best practices." So the jury is still out on whether computer science instructors want to embrace, extinguish or extend the use of AI in their students' work. The paper has a nice section describing exactly what AI can do to help students, and this, rather more than the findings from the interviews, represents its greater value.

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AI's Opaque Box Is Actually a Supply Chain
Karen Kilroy, O'Reilly, 2023/06/20

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I was just talking about this with a colleague here, and it relates directly to some of what I've said about AI and the blockchain, but with a nice twist. The twist (to me, at least) is in the use of the phrase 'supply chain' to describe the mechanism or process through which an AI such as a large language model (LLM) gets its input. This input, at its core, is data. To date, the data used by LLMs to produce such services as chatGPT has been very low quality. But at a certain point, the quality of the input data will matter, which means there will need to be a way of establishing the provenance of that data, which involvs the technologies found in blockchain networks. Calling it a 'supply chain' for AI is a nice way of making the concept more intuitive. This article cites a book co-authored by the author, O'Reilly book I co-authored, Blockchain Tethered AI, describing four blockchain controls for AI: pre-establishing identity and workflow criteria; distributing tamper-evident verification; governing, instructing, and inhibiting intelligent agents; and showing authenticity through user-viewable provenance. That's a nice well-thought out list.

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The company teaching influencers how to get rich without going viral
Daniela Dib, Rest of World, 2023/06/20

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Interesting article about Hotmart, a company that  gives creators the tools to sell courses on their own site. Unlike social media sites like YouTube, "Hotmart's goal is to grow your sales, not your number of followers." It does this by helping authors create low-effort videos that channel people toward their courses, and by providing ways to monetize courses not available on social media sites. This includes accepting payments from a wide range of services, not just a few selected options often not available everywhere in the world.

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Technologies for Data-Driven Interventions in Smart Learning Environments
Davinia Hernández-Leo, et al., IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies, 2023/06/20

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Today we look at the term 'Smart Learning Environments' (SLE). These are defined as "learning ecologies where students engage in learning activities, or where teachers facilitate such activities with the support of tools and technology." This editorial (4 page PDF) provides a quick overview; unfortunately, most of the articles in Transactions on Learning Technologies are paywalled (IEEE is still living in the dark ages), though two are available.Readers wanting more on the topic might look at Smart Learning Environments, a fully open access journal from Springer. There's also an International Association of Smart Learning Environments. Image: UDLEAR course on smart learning environments.

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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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