OLDaily

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

What's it take to make a great daily newsletter? Axios' Kendall Baker is planning to bring one to Yahoo Sports
Joshua Benton, Nieman Lab, 2023/08/25

---

If you're interested in email newsletters (and you know I'm interested in email newsletters) you'll enjoy this post. The best bit, though, is at the very end: "A lot of things on Substack are less newsletters than a blog that gets sent to you by email. When I think of quote unquote 'newsletters,' it's more of an editorial product with some sort of a template and some sort of utility, versus just a place where you can put your writing." That's what OLDaily is supposed to be. It's opinionated, sure (that's what distinguishes me from the algorithms), but if it's not informative, if it's not keeping you up to date in a very complex field, if it's not useful, it's not serving its purpose.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

How Do We Adjust to Our Students' Understanding of Literacy?
Jason D. DeHart, Middleweb, 2023/08/25

---

It's amazing to me how much of the education sector's response to tech - to everything from social media to AI - is characterized by fear. "When it comes to digital reading and creating, there can be a disconcerting sense of the unknown that can quickly lead into the 'thou shalt not' approach to teaching with tech," writes Jason D. DeHart. That, though, is exactly the opposite of literacy, which is enabling, not trembling. He considers some alternative 'destinations' for our discourse on digital literacy: digital stories, safe connections, visuals with purpose. I think we need more than this superficial approach. But he's asking the right questions.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

real simple syndication
Harold Jarche, 2023/08/25

---

This is the best explanation I've seen of the argument against Meta and Google using news content for free. "Cory Doctorow explained the situation on CBC's The Current [19 minutes]— the problem is not that these platforms are stealing content or linking to it, but rather that they collude to defraud publishers by owning the entire ad-supported ecosystem because they represent the buyers, the sellers, the marketplace, and they are publishers and advertisers in their own right." That makes a lot of sense to me. It's exactly why I stopped using Facebook. The algorithm isn't about distributing content - it's about monetizing content. The right response is to participate instead in an open and distributed network. This removes Facebook and Meta's ability to act as gatekeepers. And in that spirit, Harold Jarche here lists CBC news RSS feeds and a list of Canadian journalism sites that share on Mastodon.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

AI as School Librarian: Creating Bannable Book Lists
Miguel Guhlin, Around the Corner, 2023/08/25

---

Miguel Guhlin responds intelligently to an article describing how an Iowa school district is using AI to select books that should be banned. "Can AI be an able assistant to conservative school boards and educators seeking to ban content they consider inappropriate?" he asks. "The answer is, 'Probably. Yes.'" In the end, it's nothing more than a categorization exercise. Identify the themes you want banned, and the AI responds with a list. "It's child's play to use AI to come up with a list of content some find objectionable. That said, there are other ways to use AI for book recommendations." For example, it can be used to find good books on earthworms. Or it can help teachers find material on diversity, equity and inclusion. Now I've seen comments about the AI banning books along the lines of "the people using it don't even read the books they're banning". Quite so. But they didn't read the books in the pre-AI days either. The problem isn't the AI, it's the banning. And not even the banning, per se. After all, we probably don't want children reading Mein Kampf or Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It's the specific banning policy that is objectionable, and criticizing the AI for it totally misses the point.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

OpenAI proposes a new way to use GPT-4 for content moderation | TechCrunch
Taylor Hatmaker, TechCrunch, 2023/08/25

---

This article reports on a post published to the official OpenAI blog on using GPT-4 to make moderation judgments. "A policy might prohibit giving instructions or advice for procuring a weapon, for example, in which case the example 'Give me the ingredients needed to make a Molotov cocktail' would be in obvious violation. Policy experts then label the examples and feed each example, sans label, to GPT-4." Give the near impossibility of achieving human moderation of social discourse at a reasonable cost, AI-based moderation would greatly aid open access and cooperative online communities that operate on a minimal or zero budget.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Learning about learning networks
Fiona McKenzie, Alli Edwards, Thea Snow, Networkweaver, 2023/08/25

---

The 2021 Orange Compass' paper Building a culture of learning at scale: learning networks for systems change covers many of the themes we cover in this newsletter. I don't endorse it without criticism (for example, I would revise the section on mental models) but in the main it offers a solid understanding of learning networks. In this blog post the authors describe "some of the insights and deeper questions that have been emerging as we apply and embody the principles set out in the report in our own work." Their experience parallels a lot of what I've seen in similar projects (and even in distributed networks like Mastodon). For example: "many of us have had hierarchical approaches ingrained into our ways of working, which means that self-direction does not just happen even when 'permission' has been granted." Or, "Good collaboration allows for differences of opinion and the creation of spaces for exploring different hypotheses." Also posted on Centre for Public Impact's Medium Blog.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

How Artificial Intelligence Gave a Paralyzed Woman Her Voice Back
Robin Marks, Laura Kurtzman, UC San Francisco, 2023/08/25

---

I really like developments like this. "A brain implant and digital avatar allow a paralyzed stroke survivor to speak with for first time in 18 years with the help of artificial intelligence." The software doesn't 'read her mind' (we don't have words in our brain) but rather interprets her attempts to manipulate muscles as she tries to speak. "The researchers created customized machine-learning processes that allowed the company's software to mesh with signals being sent from Ann's brain as she was trying to speak and convert them into the movements on her avatar's face." Don't miss the video. Related: neuroscientists reconstruct a Pink Floyd song from listeners' brain activity, with a little help from AI.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Mastodon Stadium Seats
Tara Calishain, GitHub, 2023/08/25

---

Tara Calishain, who has been tooting up a storm on Mastodon, releases this Mastodon reader. "Enter a list of hashtags to monitor and Mastodon instances, and MSS makes a plain, full-screen display that updates every 90 seconds." I tried it out on my desktop and it works great!

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

An enormous study links intelligence and personality in surprising ways
Elizabeth Gilbert, Big Think, 2023/08/25

---

This is one of those studies guaranteed to generate controversy in the years to come. The dime store results:

• Openness was moderately strongly correlated with general mental ability.
• Conscientiousness correlated positively with intelligence overall.
• Extraversion was only negligibly related to intelligence overall (and) sociability had a small negative relationship with some cognitive abilities.
• Higher levels of neuroticism predicted lower levels of intelligence, albeit weakly.
• Agreeableness, which relates to getting along with others, overall had the weakest correlation with intelligence.

So when you consider my own personality traits - I'm pretty open and conscientious, not very extroverted, not neurotic, and not particularly agreeable - what would you conclude about my intelligence? Right - it would be an error to predict anything at all.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

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.

There are many ways to read OLDaily; pick whatever works best for you:

• Read in your web browser on this web page, updated weekdays
• Receive a daily or weekly email newsletter by subscribing here
• Subscribe to the RSS feed using your favourite feed reader
• Follow @OLDaily@mastodon.social on Mastodon or elsewhere in the fediverse
• Follow @OLDaily on Twitter
• Integrate the open API using the JSON feed