OLDaily

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

CORE-GPT: Combining Open Access research and large language models for credible, trustworthy question answering
David Pride, Matteo Cancellieri, Petr Knoth, arXiv.org, 2023/07/14

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It was only a matter of time. "We present (13 page PDF) CORE-GPT, a novel question-answering platform that combines GPT-based language models and more than 32 million full-text open access scientific articles from CORE.... CORE-GPT which delivers evidence-based answers to questions, along with citations and links to the cited papers, greatly increasing the trustworthiness of the answers and reducing the risk of hallucinations." There's still a way to go (you'll see the results aren't perfect), but it gets the idea across. Bryan Alexander today posed the question, "What would it take for academics to start protecting their digital content from AI scraping?" (Here, Also) My response is essentially that this is the wrong way to think about content and attribution. But we need to discuss this.

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Sources of Cognitive Load
Althea Need Kaminske, The Learning Scientists, 2023/07/14

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I'm just going to come out and say it: there's no such thing as cognitive load. The concept of 'cognitive load' is at least as mythical as 'learning styles'. You can read about cognitive load theory here and talked about it here and here, if you wish (links provided by the author), but unless you believe the brain-as-computer metaphor is literally true (and who does, really?) then cognitive load theory is essentially undefined. "According to Sweller (2010), cognitive load describes the allocation of working memory resources... Intrinsic load describes working memory allocation that deals with the task itself and is influenced by the complexity of the task itself ... extraneous load describes working memory allocation that is not intrinsic to the task itself, but how it is designed or the environment it takes place in." This tells us about the content, but nothing about how the brain is, um, 'processing' it. If you push cognitive load theory at all, what you get is essentially a theory that says "complex content is hard, so make things simple if you want people to remember them."

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Friday Flash Fun Forever
Metafilter, 2023/07/14

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I can't resist passing this along. " Still mourning the death of Flash, and with it an entire era of online gaming? Enter ooooooooo.ooo (9o3o), the new searchable (and playable!) web frontend for the incredible Flashpoint preservation project." The post linked here lists a bunch of the Flash games known and loved by denizens of the original web, in the era before social media. Enjoy.

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AI literacy and Schrodinger's ethics
Helen Beetham, 2023/07/14

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Helen Beetham reviews the Russell Group of university;s Principles for the Use of AI in Education.  She finds that while it is good at defining harms, it lacks in recommending appropriate practice. "Like other AI policies, the Principles rely on 'ethical use' to do the moral work... But while it is summoned everywhere, 'ethical' is nowhere defined. Harms are indicated, but it is up to the 'AI literate' individual to decide when these harms matter enough for use to become 'unethical' or 'inappropriate'."

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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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