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

Universities hit hard by Meta's block of Canadian news
Diane Peters, University Affairs, 2023/09/27

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This article looks at the impact of Meta's news blockade on student newspapers in Canada. Meta stopped running news content from Canada in response to a proposed law that would have required the company to pay news media for the stories. This hurt newspapers, which earned a large part of their traffic from social media and sites like Google News. Ironically, under the legislation, student newspapers would not have received any of the money anyway. "In the meantime, as student journalists continue to learn how to make the most of TikTok, the conflict continues on a wider scale regarding news, profit sharing and regulations. 'This is a proxy battle for who has control over the platform in which we communicate,' said Mr. Rooke. 'Is it government, or is it big business?'"

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It's Time for Chip Companies to Devote 1% Of Their GPU's to Social Good
Alex Sarlin, Ben Kornell, Sarah Morin, Edtech Insiders, 2023/09/27

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Here's the proposal: Since "AI in education can't compete with the ability / willingness to pay from large tech companies and trillion-dollar industries" then "we think this is a bold moment for tech companies, particularly NVIDIA and Google, to commit a portion of their compute capacity - starting at 1% - to fuel AI for non-governmental social impact organizations." It's an interesting idea, but I have a better one: have these giant tech companies (and all the rest of them) pay their taxes to the point where the public provision of vital social services such as education can stand on an equal footing with the profit motive in the marketplace.

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Exploring Large Language Models’ Cognitive Moral Development through Defining Issues Test
Kumar Tanmay, Aditi Khandelwal, Utkarsh Agarwal, Monojit Choudhury, arXiv, 2023/09/27

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How well do artificial intelligences (SAIs) reason morally? This article offers a test of their ethical decisions and reasoning offered using the Kohlberg model of moral development. "By bridging the connection between human psychology and AI," the authors write, "we are paving a way to understand how these models work." As a computing exercise the test is informative, but the psychology of morality is much more complex than described here. And it's worth noting that a criticism of the Kohlberg model is precisely what stimulated feminist philosopher Carol Gilligan to develop an alternative approach to ethics based on care and relationships. So there's work to be done here as well. Via Mike Young, who summarizes the paper.

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A jargon-free explanation of how AI large language models work
Timothy B. Lee, Ars Technica, 2023/09/27

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This is a 'gentle primer' describing how large language models (LLM) work. Once again, notice that the AI doesn't 'copy' content from articles, and doesn't 'plagiarize' material. It focuses on word order and associations between works, creating a graph that allows it to use a neural network (2018 neural network explainer) to predict which word will come next in a sequence of words. And it is at least arguable that this is what humans do as well; "prediction may be foundational to biological intelligence as well as artificial intelligence. In the view of philosophers like Andy Clark, the human brain can be thought of as a "prediction machine" whose primary job is to make predictions about our environment that can then be used to navigate that environment successfully."

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Top 50 EdTech Companies in India
Ved Prakash, Newsblare, 2023/09/27

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I have no idea how reliable this list is but it's worth a share. I'm really disappointed it doesn't come with links to the 50 companies. It just list the names and then in a second section offers brief descriptions.

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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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