OLDaily

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

Generative AI and Education: Adopting a Critical Approach
Sopio Zhgenti, Wayne Holmes, Bot Populi, 2023/07/24

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So we've seen this argument before: "many GenAI tools are capable of mimicking human responses to a wide range of questions and, therefore, passing the Turing Test.... However, it remains incorrect to suggest that any GenAI tool is intelligent – as they lack any understanding of either the prompt or what they produce in response. In other words, GenAI cannot generate anything that it hasn't ingested; the production of text is solely based on statistical probability." It's true of everything and everyone that they "cannot generate anything that it hasn't ingested". Including students. The question is how they configure and reconfigure what they've experienced to be thought of as 'understanding' it. And here's the question: how do we know our students aren't simply mimicking human responses to a wide range of questions?

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Affirmative Action for rich kids: It's more than just legacy admissions
Greg Rosalsky, NPR, 2023/07/24

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This article reports on "a blockbuster new study finds that America's elite private colleges are systematically giving huge advantages to rich kids over their equally bright, yet less privileged peers." This advantage is not only conferred by legacy admissions, which account for about 46% of the benefit wealthy students enjoy, but also by athletics (24%), especially in nice (and expensive) sorts (like equestrian), and by higher non-academic ratings, like extracurricular activities and compelling letters of recommendation (30%). The article suggests college redress the imbalance by dropping non-academic factors and by selecting from lower-achievement zip codes, because students in those codes would have had to work that much hard to achieve the same SAT score. I would note that while this story focuses on the U.S., selective advantage is enjoyed by the wealthy worldwide, including in countries that profess to b much more egalitarian. And the answer isn't to change the balance, but to ensure access to all.

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Report Finds Microcredentials Poorly Understood or Utilized by American Workers But Critical for Professional Development -- Campus Technology
Kate Lucariello, Campus Technology, 2023/07/24

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D2L has released a report Enabling Learning for Life: New Realities for Work and Education (35 page PDF) that draws four major conclusions (paraphrased): continuous upskilling is not yet the norm; there is no clear preference for training providers; microcredentials are not widely understood; and financial assistance and learning about credentials are the most requested help. It recommends that colleges and business invest in continuous learning, and that governments put financial aid policies into place. I'm not going to disagree but I would also prefer to see governments and education providers work together to create an open and freely accessible lifelong learning infrastructure.

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The truth about ChatGPT's degrading capabilities
Ben Dickson, TechTalks, 2023/07/24

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This article describes new study that "provides evidence that the behaviors of these large language models have 'drifted substantially'" This is not necessarily a degradation of capabilities, though many users are interpreting it as such. No matter which interpretation you prefer, as Dickson warns, "the findings are a warning about the risks of building applications on top of black-box AI systems like ChatGPT that could produce inconsistent or unpredictable results over time." It's good advice: don't build your product on someone ese's platform! We could add: make sure you understand what your software is doing.

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Platform-independent and curriculum-oriented intelligent assistant for higher education - International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education
Ramteja Sajja, Yusuf Sermet, David Cwiertny, Ibrahim Demir, SpringerOpen, 2023/07/24

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In this article the authors "designed an automated system for answering logistical questions in online course discussion boards, third party applications or educational platforms and highlighted how it can aid in the development of virtual teaching assistants." What I like was that it described a set-up that accesses services outside the institutional LMS. "VirtualTA can be integrated with third-party applications to enable access from a variety of intermediaries, such as web-based systems, agent-based bots (such as Microsoft Skype and Facebook Messenger), smartphone applications (such as smart assistants), and automated web workflows (e.g., IFTTT, MS Flow)." That's the way to do it, though it's still complex.

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Citation and Attribution: How to Credit the Work of Others
2023/07/24

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This item is useful because it provides clear instructions on how to attribute sources. It also links to a useful Excel template to record your sources (I would have preferred Slides, so you can share; also, I would imagine there are ways to automatically convert from Excel to HTML or document text in various formats, though the post doesn't mention any). The post doesn't mention how to user and attribute sources under Fair Dealing (Fair Use in the U.S.) which seems to me to be a gap. Also, I don't agree that you need to do viral marketing for Creative Commons every time you link to a resource; the license is on the resource, so linking to the resource is sufficient (not everyone would agree with me here, though).

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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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