OLDaily

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

Top 100 Tools for Learning 2023
Jane Hart, 2023/09/05

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Jane Hart's 'Top 100 tools for learning' for 2023 has been published. As usual, we're only interested in the top 10. What's changed? As expected, Twitter has disappeared, dropping to 22nd place. Zoom also has retreated, sinking five sports to number 10. ChatGPT makes its debut at number 4 (which I predict will also be its peak, not because AI is a fad, but because something better will come along). YouTube, Google Search and Microsoft Teams make up the 1-2-3 positions respectively. No surprise there. The top 'educational' tool is Google Classroom, up 17 places to land at 15th. The biggest climber, up 67 places, is TikTok, which lands at 27th. Interestingly, I didn't submit my choices this year - I just didn't see the call (which, I guess, like the announcement, was on LinkedIn (where useful content goes to die)). Image: 1 page PDF.

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Getting Started: OER Production Series Webinars
BCcampus, 2023/09/05

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"The post provides a list of webinar recordings from the OER Production Webinar Series (excerpted from) the Getting Started: OER Publishing at BCcampus." Topics covered include an introduction to Pressbooks, technical accessibility in OER, and applying Universal Design for Learning (UDL) to OER.

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Critical Thinking about AI Results
Miguel Guhlin, Around the Corner, 2023/09/05

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There's a really nice one-two punch in this post, making it dramatically worth sharing. Amid " new information about OpenAI releasing a guide for teachers," writes Miguel Guhlin, "Geetha Venugopal... advises students to remember that the answers that ChatGPT gives may not be credible and accurate all the time, and to think critically about whether they should trust the answer, and then confirm the information through other primary resources." Well, sure. But "one supposes that teaching critical thinking, problem solving, and creativity skills was essential WITHOUT a focus on AI or even needing to bring AI into the equation," writes Guhlin. And "shouldn't we have been critically evaluating the information being spoon fed to us in K-12 U.S. history books?" Education, after all, has long served the twin goals of enlightenment and propaganda... and not always in that order.

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The Ethics of Life as It Could Be: Do We Have Moral Obligations to Artificial Life?
Olaf Witkowski, Eric Schwitzgebel, Artificial Life Conference Proceedings, 2023/09/05

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Let's start simply: is it morally wrong to lie to an AI? Suppose we knew the AI would be used by governments to evaluate job applications and we knew it was scraping our website. Would it be wrong to post false information knowing it would mean the AI does not recommend your enemy for emplyment? This paper (9 page PDF) (also) doesn't consider this question, but it does speak in more general terms about the level of rights an AI may have, and our responsibilities toward them. On what basis do we assign rights: embodiment? Consciousness? Sentience? Consider how some people argue that animals have rights, and even some plants may have rights (for example: the right not to be made extinct). This is a good general level introduction to these issues, and would offer a good starting point for people new to ethics.

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Adoption of learning analytics in higher education institutions: A systematic literature review
Lucía Márquez, Valeria Henríquez, Henrique Chevreux, Eliana Scheihing, Julio Guerra, British Journal of Educational Technology, 2023/09/05

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The main contribution of this post is to describe "the 14 critical factors identified from the literature to address adoption of multiple dimensions that include stakeholders at different levels, institutional contexts and ethical considerations." The number 14 is a bit arbitrary, representing "factors that appear at least in a quarter of the selected studies," and includes such things as user support, communication and training, as well as requirements and standards, project management, and senior level support. In other words, the usual. While there is no doubt that these are genuine issues and concerns, I think the papers sampled start by considering these issues, and then unsurprisingly, find evidence for them. This is a prepublication version of record is open access, but could disappear from BJET's website at any time.

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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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