OLDaily

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

Updating an OER Textbook via AI and ChatGPT
Adam Croom, 2023/07/19

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So what if you asked an AI to do this? "You are going to use the open educational resource textbook as a base but rewrite it to make it more up to date with changes to the industry." Would ti even work. Perhaps surprisingly, yes it does. Adam Croom describes his experience updating an Introduction to Advertising textbook using chatGPT. "While it's not perfect, I am still deeply impressed with its ability. It took me only a couple hours." Never mind questions about whether this is appropriate and what the right licensing is. This is the future. Via Alan Levine.

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Domain-specific architectures and the future of compute
McKinsey & Company, 2023/07/19

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This article is more complex than it needs to be, but in a nutshell, it's this: because the development of computer chips is reaching the limits of physics, we can't make them faster and cheaper any more, so to continue to improve companies are developing specialized 'domain-specific' computing architectures.

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Generative AI - Ethics all the way down
Lorna M Campbell, Open World, 2023/07/19

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These are "some short, sketchy notes about the different ethical layers that we need to consider when engaging with AI." As Casey Fiesler writes, "What's accruing here is not just technical debt, but ethical debt." What follows are short items on the 'ethics of' this and that: large language models and Common Crawl data sets; content moderation and data filtering; anthropomorphising AI; etc. "This doesn't mean that there is no place for AI in education, far from it," writes Lorna Campbell. "Many AI tools are already being used in education, often with beneficial results, captioning systems are just one example."

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Maybe showing off an AI-generated fake TV episode during a writers' strike is a bad idea
Brian Heater, TechCrunch, 2023/07/19

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"The company behind it, Fable Studios, announced via tweet that it had made public a paper on 'Generative TV & Showrunner Agents.' They embedded a full, fake 'South Park' episode where Cartman tries to apply deepfake technology to the media industry." Maybe it's a bad idea. Or maybe it's a sign of things to come. I don't think you can put this technology back into the bottle, so the question is, how do we make use of it while respecting the rights and well-being or those involved? I know that's not how business usually works, but maybe it's time to rethink that as well. Related, sort of: Metric, Synthetica; Cyndi Lauper at the Budokan, 1986, remastered.

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What we learned at ISTELive23
Alyssa Moore, Remake Learning, 2023/07/19

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There isn't a lot to this post, though one attendee talks about learning how to use AI in the classroom, which leads to the most fascinating question I've seen in a while : "As I look at AI today, knowing that it could be used in many ways, I can't help but to ask myself 'How can I do with AI what Fred Rogers did with television?'" I'm wondering, what would that even look like? A beautiful day in the neighbourbot?

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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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