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

Welcome to AI.JSX
Fixie.ai, 2023/06/21

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Pretty soon AI will be deeply integrated into applications, so much so you won't be able to tell where the application code ends and the AI begins. This is a case in point. "AI.JSX is a framework for building AI applications using JSX (a syntax extension for JavaScript that lets you write HTML-like markup inside a JavaScript file)... designed to look and feel very similar while also integrating seamlessly with React-based projects. You don't just use JSX to describe what your UI should look like, you also use it to describe how Large Language Models, such as ChatGPT, should integrate into the rest of your application." This is a full library available on GitHub, along with a tutorial, that you can download and work with on your own computer or on a website.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Why news subscriptions feel like a burden to young people
Mark Coddington, Seth Lewis, Nieman Lab, 2023/06/21

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I have a saying to the effect that "democracy dies behind a paywall". It's obviously a play on the Washington Post's "democracy dies in darkness", and the implication, of course, is that paywalls are a form of darkness, and as such, are deeply anti-democratic. This article examines (in too small a survey) attitudes toward paywalls, and reports three findings explaining why people oppose paywalls (not one of which is "I expect to get all my news for free"): first, a "lack of exclusivity, including the feeling that similar content could be found elsewhere for free"; second, "subscriptions are too time-consuming... subscriptions feel like "a draining chore"; third, "reluctance to commit to a single news source in the wider context of subscription fatigue of so many choices and requirements across sites." All three, taken together, reflect to my mind a media environment (and content environment generally, including education) where providers are far more concerned about their own interests than those of the readers or of wider society in general.

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Emerging Architectures for LLM Applications | Andreessen Horowitz
Matt Bornstein, Rajko Radovanovic, Andreessen Horowitz, 2023/06/21

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This is, according to the website, "a reference architecture for the LLM app stack. It shows the most common systems, tools, and design patterns used by AI startups and tech companies." Basically it breaks down into a four-part structure: data, prompt/examples, query, and output. I think this is just an early stack, and I expect a lot more to be added over time at the top and the bottom. A note about process: this item came into my inbox as part of a larger item from Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). I hesitated to link to it, because of comments I've read critical of the venture capitalist company. But then I saw an Alan Levine post linking to the item, and I changed my mind. It's a lesson to me about the need to be aware of the different factors swaying whether or not I include an item in this newsletter. My initial instinct, I think, was wrong, and I need to be careful about who influences me and why.

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The Education-Training-Work Continuums: Pathways to Socio-Professional Inclusion for Youth and Adults
Michel Carton, Christine Hofmann, NORRAG, 2023/06/21

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I don't know whether there's a way to access articles individually (I couldn't find one) in this special issue on The Education-Training-Work Continuums, but I think people would like to at least give the table of contents in this journal (125 page PDF) a look and maybe pick and choose from among the articles. Certainly the introductory article is worth reading, as the authors propose to "explore the possibilities of challenging and undermining these discontinuities between education, training and work by implementing different contextualized types of continuums." Part of the motivation for this is that "existing discontinuities between these three fields create and reinforce exclusions and inequalities for already marginalised groups." The articles are global in their perspective, draw from historical and present trends, and look at topics ranging from credentials to governance to sustainability. Image: Connected community career services approach, p. 81.

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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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