OLDaily

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

The use of ePortfolio in health profession education to demonstrate competency and enhance employability: A scoping review
Anita Hamilton, Terry Downer, Belinda Flanagan, Laine Chilman, Journal of Teaching and Learning for Graduate Employability, 2023/07/05

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Are e-portfolios actually used to gain employment? This literature (13 page PDF) of studies focusing on health and social care disciplines (of which nine were identified) sort of answers the question with a 'no'. "We found that ePortfolios can contribute constructively to preparing students for future employment however, employer unfamiliarity with the concept of ePortfolio, and issues with compatibility with existing recruitment platforms help to explain the lack of use of ePortfolios in recruitment " I think there's currently no easy way to map an e-portfolio to employment criteria, but that this will change relatively soon.

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Probing the Value of Online Student-Student Interaction
Miriam Bowers-Abbott, Faculty Focus, 2023/07/05

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There's a lot more to the topic of online peer-to-peer student interaction than is offered in this post, but it does serve as a useful cautionary note. Miriam Bowers-Abbott points to three studies showing that students perceived peer-to-peer interaction is correlated with their satisfaction in the course (her italics). By contrast, a more recent study comparing two groups, one with interaction and one without, found that interaction did not increase satisfaction (though group projects elevated student achievement). We shouldn't conclude anything, really, from these studies. The flaws in the first three studies are evidence, but the fourth is also flawed, since you can't really control for student interaction, not in a world of email, messaging, and social media. And you can't draw conclusions from just one study. But yeah. We should interpret our studies cautiously, and not jump to easy conclusions about student interaction.

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How Much of What You See Is Actually a Hallucination?: An Animated TED-Ed Lesson
Colin Marshall, Open Culture, 2023/07/05

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I don't experience the world the way you do. This isn't some theory about learning styles, but rather, the result of research on perception and hallucination. This short article doesn't really capture the content of the video it references very well, but it's certainly worth the 6 minutes it will take to watch. As it concludes, "As we learn more, we'll likely come to appreciate just how subjective and individual each person's island universe of perception really is." Why is this important? Well, if e learn from experience, and everyone's experience is different, then everyone learns differently. And while learning styles literature may represent a mostly failed attempt to categorize the different ways we learn, the learning styles sceptic's conclusion, that we all learn the same way, simply doesn't follow.

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Transforming public sector hiring with data-enabled talent 'win rooms'
Anita Dutta, Nora Gardner, Megan McConnell, Angela Sinisterra-Woods, McKinsey & Company, 2023/07/05

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A few years ago we ran an internal project called 'Micro-Missions' with some other departments. The idea was to use AI to identify and select candidates for short-term cross departmental appointments. This report from McKinsey draws on the same sort of insight and fleshes it out into a comprehensive model called 'win rooms'. They say, "A data-enabled talent win room is a central, cross-functional team that uses internal and external data to address talent attraction needs and rapidly recruit in-demand talent." This to me represents another inevitable step from hiring based on academic credentials and toward hiring based on actual data on needs and performance.

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It's impossible to detect LLM-created text
Mark Liberman, Language Log, 2023/07/05

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Despite the claims of (mostly edtech) companies, the evidence suggests that it is impossible to detect text created by a large learning model (LLM). "There will no doubt be an on-going LLM generation/detection arms race," writes Mark Liberman, "though it seems that the detectors have been losing badly from the beginning." Image: AI Weirdness.

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SAIL: State of Research: AI & Education
George Siemens, SAIL, 2023/07/05

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In this weekès State of AI in Learning (SAIL) newsletter George Siemens lists "the current AI and Learning Labs" - five NSF funded from the U.S. and one in Europe. He also links to a Gizmodo article saying "If Google can read your words, assume they belong to the company now, and expect that they're nesting somewhere in the bowels of a chatbot." They don't, of course, 'belong' to Google. But just as I expect a person to (I hope) learn from my words, so also I would expect an AI to as well. The newsletter also links to a long British study of How do people feel about AI?

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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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