OLDaily

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

How Education Works: Teaching, Technology, and Technique
Jon Dron, AU Press, 2023/06/22

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By 'education' in this new and open access text Jon Dron means "the systematic transformation of people's skills, knowledge, and values", and as you may guess from that definition, it works by being a system. We (teachers) are "just one tiny part of a massively complex and only partially designed mechanism, a piece of a rich, entangled ecosystem filled with ways to support and engender learning."

But what lessons do we draw from that? We get a sense in the interesting chapter on elephants (as in 'in the room). Most of 'what works' in education doesn't work, and even though people are always learning, in educatoon we have to force them to learn. Why? Technologies are "complex entangled assemblies." And "it is too easy to focus on one part of this entangled assembly—a computer, say, or a pedagogical method—and to treat it as a synecdoche for the whole."

So much more to say about this work. I love the section on what technologies are. "To describe education as a technological system is anything but an attempt to reduce it to a set of mechanical rules." I think we could have conversations about how technology works, bantering about boundaries and path dependencies. I'm more interested in the patterns than the metaphor of soft and hard. That's enough to get us started, I think.

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What Are Foundation Models?
Rick Merritt, NVIDIA Blog, 2023/06/22

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As this article reports, "foundation models are AI neural networks trained on massive unlabeled datasets to handle a wide variety of jobs from translating text to analyzing medical images." Because the data is unlabled, foundation models are not steered in any particular direction by developers; they identify patterns in the data wherever they may appear. After training, these models can be applied to more specific and directed tasks, such as answering questions, object recognition, or sentiment analysis. Hence we see in the development of systems like chatGPT a two-part process: first, the development of a foundation model, and then second, the application of that model to a specific task. For more, see this, um, foundational paper from 2021: On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models (214 page PDF).

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Decentralized Web Primer
Matt Zumwalt, GitBooks, 2023/06/22

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This guide doesn't seem to have a proper home page, which I guess makes it hard to find and link to. It's also unfinished. But the content is essential reading for anyone thinking about the emchanic s of decentralized networks. Topics include content addressing, Merkle trees, directed acyclic graphs (DAG), IPFS, and more. Don't start at the beginning; start with The Power of Content Addressing, finish that section, and then work back to the start.

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Big Data and Education: A Massive Online Open Textbook (MOOT)
Ryan Baker, 2023/06/22

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This is the 7th edition for the 10th anniversary of this open textbook. It should be understood that the focus is on machine learning, which is what we would study before advancing to today's neural network algorithms, deep learning, and generative AI. The course is offered as a series of videos along with Power Point presentations.

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The virtual classroom
Kate Felton, Education Matters Magazine, 2023/06/22

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This article feels like it blends the technologies of the 21st century with the ideas of the 20th century. Admittedly, the images may be influencing my perception. But so does text that talks about "a diverse range of education-focused technologies centred around the idea of 'the virtual classroom' such as e-learning platforms that present learning materials in the form of smartboards, downloads, videos, virtual messaging and virtual reality, or online classroom environments."

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What direct support is available for open-access Diamond journals? Funding models and arrangements for implementation
Quentin Dufour, David Pontille, Didier Torny, HAL open science, 2023/06/22

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Ages ago I wrote an article for OECD called Models for Sustainable Open Educational Resources. This article has a similar feel, though it's a lot longer and more detailed. The core of it is in section 2, where four direct funding models are listed based on "a continuum ranging from predictability to uncertainty, with the model increasingly coupled to the published yields": a 'white list', a 'threshold' model, tranches, and a yield model. The article also considers publishing processes (resolved into a list of '26 acts' divided into certification, production and dissemination acts), monetization in general, and how funding would work in an ideal world.

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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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