OLDaily

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Student’s Choice: In-Person, Online, or on Demand? A Comparison of Instructional Modality Preference and Effectiveness
Melissa Larson, Randall Davies, Anna Steadman, Wai Man Cheng, Education Sciences, 2023/08/29

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Some good stuff here, including this cautionary tale about surveying student preferences: "Results show that while most students preferred in-person instruction (74%), only 47% of those who indicated they preferred in-person instruction attended class only in-person." Moreover, "a preference for in-person instruction diminished as the course proceeded from 74% to 54%. In practice and for various reasons, most students (56%) attend class utilizing a variety of learning modalities." So what happens when you do give students a choice between various options? Unsurprisingly, not much. "Regardless of the dominant instructional modality students chose, a large majority of students successfully completed this course. The average group achievement for students in this study and the distribution of letter grades was fairly similar." And overall, students appreciate having the choice. The study involved 3564 students over three years, which is larger than most, but results should be generalized only with caution.

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Meet Lilli, our generative AI tool that's a researcher, a time saver, and an inspiration
McKinsey, 2023/08/29

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Meet Lilli, "our generative AI tool that's a researcher, a time saver, and an inspiration." It has been trained on the McKinsey library, "delivering the best of our firm's knowledge to our clients. QUOTE: our generative AI tool that's a researcher, a time saver, and an inspiration." It's mostly a new way to search and access existing content. "Lilli has unleashed the creative potential in our people: they are helping clients in ways we never anticipated."

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The Hidden Brain Connections Between Our Hands and Tongues
R. Douglas Fields, Quanta Magazine, 2023/08/29

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This is a great line: "I have too much respect for our brains to buy that "limited brain bandwidth" explanation." I wish more people would subscribe to this. I also like the way R. Douglas Fields tracks down the answer to the question. "(The) connection is borne out by research showing that hand and mouth movements are tightly coordinated. In fact, that interplay often improves performance." In such a case, words literally mirror hand gestures, and vice versa. It seems to me this would make the semantics of such words quite interesting - what does an utterance 'mean' when it's an unconscious reflection of an effort to turn a screwdriver?

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Danswer Documentation
Danswer, 2023/08/29

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This application is introduced on Reddit: "The idea is simple: give an LLM your organizational context and plop it in Slack to answer things for you. DanswerBot is free to use and open source (MIT). You can connect it to Slack, Google Drive, GitHub, Confluence, Jira, local files, websites, and much more." According to the instructions, to give it the institutional context, you give it a website to read through, and it uses this as the basis for the answers it provides. Does it work? Is it any good? I don't know. But I do know that the concept is powerful; I can foresee a host of initiatives being launched to create open knowledge bases to feed AI answering services like this. Quick Demo Vid. Short demo. Code. Related: What if you could have a conversation with your notes?

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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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